The CIT’s objectives

The CIT helps railways implement international rail transport law. To achieve that, it draws up and maintains legal publications and boilerplate documents for international traffic by rail, standardises the contractual relationships between customers, carriers and infrastructure managers and represents the interests of carriers by rail vis-à-vis legislators and authorities. In addition, it provides regular briefings on legal issues and provides members with training courses and legal advice.

Members of the CIT pay subscriptions to support the costs of the association in proportion to the volume of international passenger traffic (around € 24 per million passenger kilometres) and/or freight traffic (around € 7 per million net tonne kilometres) they move. The minimum annual subscription is approximately € 1 700. Each full member has one vote, independent of the level of his subscription.

The annual General Assembly decides the strategic objectives, approves the budget and the annual accounts and elects the committees. The Executive Committee is the body which directs the operations and administration and oversees the Secretary General. The General Secretariat employs three in-house lawyers, three railway experts and three secretaries. The main working bodies of the CIT are the CIV Committee (passenger traffic), CIM Committee (freight traffic) and the CUI Committee (use of infrastructure). Working groups prepare recommendations for approval by the committees.

Shortly after the Convention concerning the International Carriage of Goods by Rail came into force at the beginning of 1893, the railway companies of the majority of the Member States thought it necessary to co-operate more closely to facilitate the practical implementation of the convention. The International Rail Transport Committee was founded in 1902.
The overriding objective of the association was to help railways apply the convention concerning the carriage of goods consistently and then subsequently likewise for the parallel convention on the carriage of passengers and luggage (which entered into force in 1928).

To achieve this, the CIT drew up standard instructions to augment and explain the legal texts, set up various agreements to define the legal relationships between the railways and produced practical instructions for the use of staff in the field.

The CIT also contributed significantly to the work of revising the conventions as that from time to time became necessary.

The management of the CIT, undertaken by the Austrian State Railways until 1914, was taken over by the Swiss Federal Railways in 1921.

The two world wars and the other political events which shook Europe during the twentieth century seriously disrupted the application of international rail transport law. Nevertheless each time, once circumstances permitted, the CIT worked together with other international organisations to re-establish legal certainty.

Over the last few decades, political, economic, technical and legal evolution has required the activities of the organisation to become even more diversified. These developments culminated at the end of the last century with the most significant reform ever made to international railway law - to make COTIF compatible with Directive 91/440/EEC on the development of the European Union's railways.

The CIT was set up as a legal entity in its own right in 2004; it is now an association under Swiss law and is based in Bern.