As some of you probably already know, since August last year Rotterdam Rail Feeding B.V. (RRF) was involved in the renewal process of its Belgium License (part B) which we had since 2010. We issued towards DVIS our revised safety management system, on which we drive for many years with great success and high safety levels in The Netherlands and Germany. Unfortunately, DVIS in the last 8 months kept on coming back to us with all kind of national administrative system issues for which we had to comply. Despite intense contact and several revised versions being send over, DVIS decided otherwise and only issued under conditions a temporarily license. To avoid that we have to spend further unnecessary valuable time and energy in this frustrating administrative process, RRF decided itself to stop completely with the license renewal process. For the record, as most of you know we already since 2019 did not have any actual operation on the Belgium rail network (besides some spot transports) so also this contributed to our decision to stop with this time consuming administrative process.
As a result, effectively today ends our Belgium presence (May 15 ,expiration date of our current license).
To be fully clear this decision has nothing to do with the current challenging conditions due to COVID-19. RRF is still a successful and ambitious company with solid financial performance. Together with our strong shareholder Genesee & Wyoming we continue expanding our current footprint in The Netherlands and Germany and jointly we will pursue any other interesting opportunity else in Europe.
Needless to say, although RRF will not be active Belgium license holder anymore we still support the BRFF`s goals and ambitions so please keep up all the good work!
