European Union Agency for Railways (ERA)
The European Union Agency for Railways (ERA) is the EU agency that drafts the common technical and safety framework for European rail and issues the cross-border authorisations that make it work in practice. Since June 2019 it has issued vehicle authorisations and single safety certificates for operations covering more than one member state, and it approves ERTMS trackside technical solutions regardless of how many states a project spans.
The European Union Agency for Railways was established in 2004 by Regulation (EC) 881/2004 as the European Railway Agency. Its current mandate rests on Regulation (EU) 2016/796 of 11 May 2016, which turned the agency from an advisory body into an issuing authority. ERA is headquartered in Valenciennes, France, with meeting facilities in Lille.
Oana Gherghinescu has served as Executive Director since 1 June 2025. The European Commission has announced that it will propose a revised ERA Regulation in 2026 to strengthen safety, digitalisation and cost-effectiveness across the agency’s work.
From advisory body to issuing authority
The technical pillar of the 4th Railway Package redefined ERA’s role. Before June 2019, a manufacturer or railway undertaking needed separate approvals from each national safety authority along a route — each with its own rules, timelines and interpretations.
ERA’s One-Stop Shop consolidates vehicle authorisation and safety certification for multi-country operations into a single application and a single decision. For operations limited to one member state, applicants choose between ERA and the national safety authority.
The agency also drafts the Technical Specifications for Interoperability and the common safety methods on mandate from the European Commission, which adopts them as implementing regulations. ERA thus writes the rules it later applies in its own authorisation decisions — a deliberate concentration of technical competence in one body, balanced by its monitoring of national safety authorities and notified bodies.
ERTMS system authority
ERA is the system authority for ERTMS, the EU’s standardised traffic management and train control framework. It approves trackside ERTMS tenders before contracts are signed, ensuring that new deployments conform to the common specifications rather than national variants.
Without this gatekeeping role, ERTMS deployment would drift back into incompatible national implementations — the exact fragmentation the system was created to remove.
In February 2026 the Commission extended the same logic to rail’s data layer: the new Telematics Applications TSI designates ERA as system authority for the digitalisation of rail communications.