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Sustainable & efficient tram depots in the 21st century Virgil Grot, Tr am co-ordinator Store21 project for RET
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A unique publication about sustainable and efficient tram depots was presented in Brussels at the TramStore21 event on the 21st of March. VIRGIL GROT describes the project
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www.railwaystrategies.co.uk
uilding sustainable and efficient tram depots for cities in the 21st century’ is the result of a five-year co-operation between public transport operators RET (Rotterdam, Netherlands), STIB (Brussels, Belgium), local authorities Grand Dijon (Dijon, France) and Blackpool Council (United Kingdom) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics (IML) (Dortmund, Germany). Virgil Grot, project co-ordinator for RET says: “RET, the partners and I personally can look back at a valuable and unique experience of which hopefully many others will benefit from as well. I’m very happy to be able to share the story of our modern, sustainable and multimodal Beverwaard depot in this publication.” About six years ago the five partners started with the TramStore21 project. The project had three main goals: l Collecting existing good practices in North-
West Europe for the construction of sustainable tram depots and efficient infrastructure l Constructing four benchmark tram depots l Creating a favourable local and overall context for the realisation of high-quality publictransport infrastructure. TramStore21 was funded by the European Union through the INTERREG IVB programme. Additional funding helped the partners improve the environmental performance of their depots. Other reasons for co-operation were that cities have little experience in the construction of tram depots. These buildings are built once every 50 or more years. Combining know-how helps prevent errors. The construction of new depots in Brussels (Be), Dijon (Fr), Blackpool (UK) and Rotterdam (Nl) gave the partners a good opportunity to learn from each other. They shared their experiences and knowledge about sustainable tram vehicle housing, maintenance and services. An important aspect of the project was to explore how