Thorsten Dieter has served as a member of Forum Train Europe’s executive board since 2017 and will be moving on from that role in June of 2023. While on the Executive Board, Thorsten also served as Head of Service Design and as a board member at Deutsche Bahn Cargo DE. To commemorate Thorsten’s time at FTE, we sat down with him for a talk about his experience on the board, the state of FTE and the industry, and the future.
How did you end up on the executive board of Forum Train Europe and what positions/duties did you also hold at DB while you were on the executive board of FTE?
I was responsible for many years at DB Cargo for all service design, and timetable planning issues. My career at DB Cargo started already 2004, in the end ending up on the board of DB Cargo. At the time I started at Forum Train Europe I was the head of service design, just below the board level. I was strongly interested to widen my horizon in the European perspective on one hand, and on the other hand I was strongly interested to bring forward all the topics of time tabling and the timetable redesign in Europe. Therefore, I decided to join the Executive Board of FTE.
What has the working culture been like on the executive board and is there anything notable that has distinguished your time at FTE compared to other positions you've held?
It was different from other positions I’ve held in my professional career! It was a kind of a friendship on the executive board level. We were driven by the same vision and the same ideas. Also, we were all driven by the same cultural topic of being a European organization and working together on the European level. Thus, we were on the same level when discussing our topics. There was not a hierarchical situation, it was never that someone was overwhelming the other ones, working together was always a good culture. In the executive board meetings all the topics we had were solved in a quite efficient way and I can say we were all well prepared especially by Edi and by the FTE office. All the discussions we had were fair and we would look together for solutions not just for one company's sake, but for the sake of all European railway companies, that was different to all the other positions I had before.
What are some of the major accomplishments that you will look back on from your time on the executive Board?
I think first the widening of the network in the direction of Eastern Europe and including members into FTE which were not the classical state-owned railway companies. The second one was that we survived the COVID pandemic situation and that we secured during COVID online all the conferences, discussions, and maintained all tools we had developed before in an offline world. We had transformed to an online world, and it was working nearly in the same way as before, that was a big accomplishment of the FTE office in the last years. The third accomplishment from the last years is the timetable redesign project (TTR). We really drove the project forward such that I now believe that we will be able to implement TTR principles in the European timetable in a way that was not that clear five years ago. So, I really hope that the timetable redesign will come to fruition after a lot of discussions and the more than 10 years of project work that we have done.
What are some of the qualities and qualifications that are important for a prospective new board member to have?
I think it's important that you really know about timetabling topics and about these services and topics within in your own company and in Europe as a whole. Being familiar with timetabling is really helpful in the role of Executive Board member of FTE. The second one is that you should be open for the European perspective and not just be thinking within the borders of your own country, you always should think borderless, and you should think on a European level.
What are your hopes for the future of European rail, and how do you see FTE’s role in shaping that future moving forward?
I always have the hope that in the end we'll have a European railway market which has no borders. Both on the mental side thinking about borders should not be the case, and on the physical side that we will cross borders in a seamless way, and if we don't have a seamless way to cross borders that we then have good coordination to make it as easy as possible. So, for me the goal is always having a European market which goes from, say, from Spain to Ukraine, where you pass all the borders without thinking about all the paperwork, different rules, different topics, or all the different safety systems, and instead you can just go. That's my hope for the future, and I think FTE has a big role especially in shaping the timetabling part of this of this future. Timetabling means much more than just writing times on the paper, for me timetabling is just as much about the coordination of construction work, coordinating different philosophies, harmonizing border times, etc. The border issues that are covered by FTE are so important because it's the only organization from my perspective in Europe which really comes from the railway undertaking’s side, and this is something which takes a lot of work. All the other organizations are more in lobbying and not in the day-to-day work like FTE is. FTE is doing the day-to-day work, so we have a lot of experts on the FTE level to support the idea of an open European railway system without any borders.
What job will you be moving on to after you finish your time at FTE in June?
I already quit my job on the board of DB Cargo at the end of last year and started my new role on the 1st of February at DB Netz, the German rail infrastructure company. At DB Netz I’m responsible for the overall coordination of rail freight topics within the German network. What does that mean? I am working as a kind of an advocate for the freight railway undertakings in Germany and in Europe. I also bring together the perspectives of the IM and the RU to find a way to grow rail freight traffic within all the limitations that we have in the network. These limitations concern capacity, quality, and pressure from growth on the passenger side. A lot of those topics which we would get angry about on the RU side and that we always said - oh, it's the infrastructure manager, they should do it better - now I'm in the role to explain how to do it better, and to show ways for both parties to improve the system and to improve their way of working together.
Created by Thomas Raney