From 1 February 2022 the President of the Office of Rail Transport only processes applications for creation of user accounts (rolling stock owners, keepers and entities in charge of maintenance) and for reservation and assignment of EVNs. Applications for vehicle registration are submitted electronically by the interested parties themselves. Information on whether a vehicle has been successfully registered is visible directly in the register. The President of the Office of Rail Transport no longer issues confirmation of EVN assignment or changes to railway vehicle data.
The Office of Rail Transport has been actively involved in the implementation of the European Vehicle Register. We helped Polish railway companies to introduce new rules for booking and allocation of EVRs. We trained more than 400 people at the Railway Safety Academy and prepared a Polish translation of a guide for applicants. The migration from the national to the European base was also a success. We were the first in Europe to fully implement the EVR and the first to process applications for data changes and reservations and EVNs in the new European database. The European Union Agency for Railways appreciates our efforts and we received many congratulations for a job well done. – states Ignacy Góra, President of the Office of Rail Transport.
One of the important changes is access to data for all EVR users: dispatchers, owners, ECMs, railway operators, etc. ERA plans to increase data accessibility by making the register publicly available and enabling data to be read in a machine-readable way. The user accounts will no longer be created in the system just for reading data. In the previous National Vehicle Register (NVR) access to data was limited.
The migration from the NVR and the implementation of the EVR was preceded by many months of testing of different versions of the register. After a successful migration done by the Office of Rail Transport staff, ERA asked other countries to implement EVR. So far, including Poland, eleven countries implemented the EVR: Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Slovenia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Italy and Greece.
ERA continues to improve the system. At the beginning of 2023 they introduced a new function in the EVR system – applications can be generated to PDF and printed. ERA is currently working on updating the EVR functions:
- automatic email notifications,
- data correctness (date of request creation, date of request, user who sent the request),
- exporting vehicle registration data to Excel files,
- changing the data of several vehicles in one application.