"The Event Is Simply the Best Environment We’ve Found" — Jules Omura on IRS, Digitalisation, and the Industry’s Biggest Challenges

When Jules Omura launched the International Railway Summit in 2013, Europe’s rail sector was entering a period of upheaval. More than a decade later, Omura believes the industry faces an even bigger challenge — not technology itself, but the ability to coordinate, integrate and move as one European system. In this interview with RAILTARGET, the Head of Mobility Sector at Data Edge Media reflects on the future of European rail, the rise of military mobility, the limits of digitalisation, and why the sector can no longer afford to work in silos.

The International Railway Summit was built around the idea of bringing key players in the rail sector into direct dialogue. Could you take us back to that moment and explain what convinced you that the industry needed a completely new format for dialogue?

Before founding the International Railway Summit, I spent several years organising business summits across 12 sectors, from semiconductors and banking to architecture and hospitality. What struck me, event after event, was the value created when the right buyers and suppliers were brought into direct, structured conversation: genuine connections formed, real problems shared, solutions discovered that neither party might have found through conventional channels. That experience — and the matchmaking format that made it possible — was what I wanted to build my own business around.

When I set out to launch a new event in 2013, rail stood out among the sectors I considered. Partly, I suspect, because of something much closer to heart than any market analysis. I grew up in Japan until I was 15, and rail was simply part of life in Tokyo — fast, safe, reliable, and liberating in a way that is difficult to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it. I remember the excitement of automatic ticket gates arriving at my local station, taking the Shinkansen on my own to visit my grandparents, the anticipation of a night train to Hokkaido. Rail gave me the freedom of a city long before I was old enough to do anything else independently. You carry that with you.

But the research told its own story. In January 2013, the European Commission proposed the Fourth Railway Package, the most significant legislative shake-up the sector had seen in a generation. For the first time, it proposed opening domestic passenger markets to full competition. Every major national operator was scrambling to understand what it meant for their home market while eyeing opportunities abroad. The Italian model was proving that liberalisation worked in practice: NTV's Italo had launched on the Milan–Rome corridor in 2012, prices were falling and passenger numbers were rising. The supply industry — a global market worth roughly €146 billion at the time — was transitioning from building trains to providing digital systems, with ERTMS deployment accelerating across Europe.

The rules of the game were changing. The technology was going digital. Private capital was entering high-speed rail for the first time. And yet there was no dedicated international platform where the people writing the laws, running the networks, operating the trains and driving the innovation could actually sit down together and talk. That gap was the opportunity — and in hindsight, 2013 was precisely the right moment to fill it.

From that initial idea to today’s 14th edition, the Summit has evolved into a highly targeted, meeting-driven platform. Looking back, what would you consider the most successful outcome or moment that truly validated this concept?

There have been moments over 13 years where the concept has validated itself quietly: a partnership formed in a one-to-one meeting that went on to become a significant contract, or a speaker appearing on our stage who shaped the debate in their sector for years afterwards. But the moment that validated the format most decisively was one nobody would have chosen: COVID-19.

When the pandemic hit, we did what the sector needed us to do. Railways were facing unprecedented uncertainty and needed information, debate and access to solutions quickly. We pivoted to a digital webinar series — 24 webinars over two years, all but the first two fully sponsored — and discovered that our community trusted us to host real, unscripted debate rather than the sales-oriented, pre-produced content that filled the internet at the time. Our most popular webinar attracted over 400 registrations, with 260 people tuning in live.

But the more telling moment came when we surveyed our regular sponsors ahead of IRS10, asking whether they still wanted an event if a physical gathering was impossible. The results were unambiguous: 74% said they were likely or very likely to sponsor a digital edition. And when we asked what they would value most in a digital IRS10, pre-arranged and guaranteed one-to-one meetings came out as the single top priority, above speaking opportunities, above lead generation, above everything else. Exactly the same was true when we asked the same question about a physical event. The meeting format was what they valued most in either case.

So in February 2021, we ran IRS10 entirely online, with 359 delegates from 36 countries participating, spanning Europe, the Middle East, North America and Asia. Without a venue, without a dinner, without the informal relationship-building that physical events make possible, the event proved that its two core ingredients — the conference programme and the one-to-one meetings — could stand entirely on their own. That told us something important: the value of IRS is not the event. It’s the quality of the debates it hosts and the precision of the connections it creates. The event is simply the best environment we have found for making both happen.

And on the other side of that journey — were there ideas, formats, or ambitions for the Summit that didn’t quite work out as expected, or proved more difficult to implement than you initially thought?

The element that has taken the longest to get right — and that has evolved most significantly over 13 years — is the matchmaking itself. For an event built around connecting the right people, getting that mechanism right is everything. In the early editions, our matchmaking model was relatively basic. We relied heavily on participants selecting their own counterparts, which meant the quality of meetings was uneven — some were excellent, others less so, and the serendipitous connections we were trying to engineer didn't always materialise. That was a problem, because the meeting is only as good as the match.

Over time we invested heavily in solving it. We built our own proprietary matchmaking platform, which gave us much greater control over the logic behind the pairings. More recently we moved to an integrated third-party platform that combines matchmaking with meeting scheduling: a better experience for participants and a more efficient process for us. And we are now developing an AI-based matchmaking system that we expect will take the precision of the pairings to a new level entirely. Parts of it are already working in the background for IRS14, but we expect the full system to come into its own for IRS15. It is, in a sense, the culmination of 13 years of iteration on the most important part of what we do.

On geography, we made two attempts to take IRS beyond Europe: to Kuala Lumpur and to New Delhi. Kuala Lumpur was commercially one of our most successful editions, with speakers and delegates attending from throughout Southeast Asia, China, Japan, Australia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa: a genuinely global gathering that reflected the region's growing rail ambitions. New Delhi was a different story commercially, though politically and substantively it was a genuine achievement.

EU Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc travelled to India for IRS8, able to demonstrate the strengths of the European rail system directly to Indian government and sector decision-makers. The Chairman of the Indian Railway Board also spoke, and Indian buyers were able to share their challenges candidly with European suppliers in a way that a domestic event rarely allows.

The commercial lesson we took was counterintuitive: Europe, for all its national borders and linguistic diversity, functions as a remarkably coherent home for an international railway summit. Speakers, buyers and sponsors travel readily within it. Organising in markets that are vast enough to be self-contained tends to pull the event toward a domestic rather than international scope — which makes the international mix harder to achieve. London for IRS14 feels like a fitting next chapter, with the added significance of the GBR story unfolding on our doorstep.

Over the years, the railway sector itself has changed significantly, from policy priorities to market pressures. How has the role of the Summit evolved in response to these shifts, particularly in terms of bridging the gap between policymakers, operators, and the supply chain?

The summit has always tried to reflect the sector as it actually is, rather than as it was when we last met. Over 13 editions, that has meant revisiting our format, our topics and our speaker mix continuously, because the forces shaping rail have themselves been anything but gradual.

At the heart of that process is our Advisory Board, a group of senior figures from across the sector whose collective intelligence shapes the programme far more than any single perspective could. Among those who have contributed most to the IRS14 programme are Alberto Mazzola, Enno Wiebe, Monika Heiming, Nick Brooks, Libor Lochman, Marc Guigon and Simon Fletcher. Simon chairs IRS14 and has played a mentoring role since the earliest days of the summit. Carlo Borghini, former Assistant Secretary General of NATO, has also provided valuable advice on the IRS14 programme, particularly in shaping the military mobility sessions. Our ambition, developed together over many years, has been to create a true leaders’ meeting place for rail and its key partners — policymakers, governments, other mobility sectors, innovators and the supply chain — on a single stage.

That ambition has also shaped our format. The first edition of IRS was predominantly a series of presentations. Today, the programme is built almost entirely around structured panel debates, reserving presentation slots for high-level voices and those with something truly original to say. Not many railway events count airlines as regular contributors, but that reflects our belief that rail’s future cannot be understood in isolation from the broader mobility landscape.

Looking back over 13 years, the topics have tracked the sector’s fault lines almost precisely: the Fourth Railway Package and market liberalisation; ERTMS deployment; the flygskam moment and the revival of night trains; the China-Europe freight corridor; Hyperloop and alternative traction; cross-border frictions and multimodal integration. The pace of change used to be gradual enough that an annual summit could absorb it comfortably. That is no longer true. Technology is now accelerating exponentially, driven as much by external forces — geopolitics, climate, AI — as by the sector itself. 

The geopolitical dimension in particular has reshaped what IRS needs to do. In 2019, EU Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc joined IRS8 in New Delhi, as I mentioned earlier, to make the case for rail as the backbone of an integrated multimodal system. In May 2022, three months into the Russian invasion, Oleksandr Pertsovskyi — then Passenger CEO of Ukrainian Railways, now CEO of the entire group — joined IRS11 by video link to give a deeply moving account of what his organisation had done since the invasion began: evacuating civilians, moving soldiers and vital supplies, and restoring infrastructure almost as quickly as it was destroyed.

And in February 2023, just four months into his tenure, Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini joined IRS12 in Rome to deliver a keynote on rail investment — using our stage, in front of an international audience of rail experts and EU officials, to present the Messina Strait Bridge as the missing link of the Scandinavian-Mediterranean Corridor that would finally connect Berlin to Palermo by rail. The announcement was met with some scepticism at the time, but as of 2026, the bridge has been included in the TEN-T Core Network, preparatory construction is underway, and the first crossing is targeted for 2032.

IRS14 responds to the current moment in the same spirit. One of our closing Leaders’ Debates asks whether rail can step up under pressure, drawing on the lessons of the Icelandic ash cloud, Ukraine's wartime operations, Middle Eastern airspace closures, and fuel price surges that are already shifting passengers from air to rail. With known oil reserves projected to be exhausted by the 2070s, rail's structural competitive advantage over aviation and road will only grow, but only if the sector is ready to scale.

This year’s theme goes beyond infrastructure and touches on integration, competitiveness, and even resilience. When you were shaping this year’s agenda, what were the key tensions or challenges you felt the industry can no longer ignore?

This year, our Advisory Board kept returning to a question that cuts across almost every topic on the agenda: are European railways financially sustainable in their current form, and what fundamental structural changes does the sector need to secure its future?

The most striking expression of that question is the creation of Great British Railways, and it's the reason IRS is in London for the first time this year. It's easy to forget how significant this moment is. The UK was, for 30 years, the standard-bearer for the privatised, vertically separated model — the very model that EU rail liberalisation policy has been built around. And then, almost without warning, a Conservative government — not Labour — announced the creation of what is effectively a nationalised, vertically integrated monopoly. That is a profound ideological reversal, and it didn't happen because of ideology. It happened because the economics stopped working. With ticket revenues regulated and operating costs spiralling, private operators were no longer able to make the numbers add up. The market, in effect, voted against itself.

What makes this genuinely interesting for our audience is the question of contagion. Is GBR a uniquely British solution to a uniquely British problem? Or are we watching the first crack in a model that other European governments are quietly reconsidering? We're putting that question to a panel that includes Richard George, Chair of Network Rail, and Nick Brooks, Secretary General of ALLRAIL, alongside a UK government representative and a senior European railway figure.

That question leads directly into a second panel debate on the cost crisis facing European rail more broadly. Kristian Schmidt, Director of Land Transport at DG MOVE, will set the frame, joined by Alberto Mazzola of CER, Enno Wiebe of UNIFE, and senior representatives from RFI and FlixTrain. Across the continent, infrastructure managers need sustained investment, but operators face rising track access charges that threaten their commercial survival. The Copenhagen summit last year put this on the political agenda, but the fundamental tension remains unresolved. And there is a further dimension: are manufacturers willing to standardise their products in the face of growing competition from China? If that shift happens, it would itself be a significant moment for the economics of the entire sector.

That funding tension may however be about to shift in a way nobody anticipated. Cutting across the cost debate is the question of military mobility, and the EU's military mobility budget has the potential to change the entire calculus of how rail infrastructure gets paid for.

As of today, military mobility feels much more present in the conversation than before. Do you see rail taking on a new strategic role here, and is the industry actually ready for it?

Military mobility has moved from a niche topic to a strategic imperative remarkably quickly, and as I touched on, the significance goes beyond defence spending. The reason it changes the infrastructure funding calculus is striking: 85-90% of European TEN-T corridors overlap with NATO corridors. Military mobility requirements are not a parallel agenda: they are an accelerated, hardened version of what the rail sector already needs. And the defence budget that comes with them may represent the biggest infrastructure stimulus European rail has seen in a generation.

But the readiness question is a serious one. Europe's rail networks were not designed with military deployment in mind. Incompatible gauges, restricted cross-border permissions, limited heavy-load rolling stock. A Leopard 2 tank weighs 70 tonnes, which immediately rules out road and places enormous demands on rail infrastructure and wagon design. Against NATO's requirement to deploy 100,000 troops within ten days, these are not minor technical details.

Carlo Borghini said at IRS13 in Vienna last year, while still serving as Assistant Secretary General at NATO: ‘We need to be prepared to deter, and be ready in case we need to defend ourselves. The cost of not being prepared is exponential. Rail plays a key role in defence and we must continue to invest in rail infrastructure, in operational and communication systems and in people — as rail is a system that is by design capable to protect.’

That framing is exactly why we've built this into the heart of the IRS14 programme. Carlo will moderate the plenary panel, where Ukrainian Railways will deliver a keynote on wartime operational lessons, joined by Eglė Šimė of LTG Cargo, General Philippe Guéguen of SNCF, and Emilien Dang of Rail Baltica. A separate session, supported by Stadler and Touax Rail among others, goes deeper into the heavy haulage engineering challenge: the technical reality of what meeting NATO's requirements actually demands from wagon design, infrastructure and cross-border interoperability.

When we talk about AI and digitalisation, there’s no shortage of ambition across the industry. From your perspective, where is the real gap today: in technology itself, or in the industry’s ability to implement and scale it effectively?

The technology gap closed faster than anyone expected. The implementation gap has barely moved. That asymmetry is one of the most consistent threads running through the IRS14 programme, and it shows up in almost every technical topic we're covering.

Take FRMCS. The technology is ready. The sunset dates are approaching. Yet deployment progress varies dramatically across the continent, and the bottlenecks are not technical. They are about alignment between infrastructure managers, operators and technology vendors who are all moving at different speeds.

The ticketing debate tells the same story. Two years after a headline political commitment to a single European booking platform, passengers still cannot buy every journey in one place with guaranteed rights protection. The technical barriers have largely been solved. What remains are questions of commercial incentive, data sharing and who controls access to the customer relationship.

DAC is perhaps the most striking example. Digital Automatic Coupling has moved beyond the technology debate entirely. The engineering case is made. The session we're running at IRS14 asks a harder question: who funds the transition, and who captures the value? Wagon keepers, operators, infrastructure managers and governments all face fundamentally different commercial exposures. The technology arrived; the business model hasn't.

And with AI, the picture is similar in one sense but different in another. The implementation gap is real — operators like Trenitalia and DB Cargo are deploying AI with genuine results, but the gap between the leading edge and the rest of the industry remains wide, driven by data quality, legacy systems, and organisational culture. But AI has also captured the imagination of the sector in a way that few technologies have before it. Sessions with 'AI' in the title have consistently drawn the largest audiences over the last few years — and I think we are approaching an inflection point where AI stops being a topic in its own right and simply becomes embedded in every aspect of railway operations, from timetabling to maintenance to customer experience. When that happens, we'll stop talking about AI and start talking about what it makes possible.

Cybersecurity has followed a similar trajectory. It has moved rapidly from a technical concern for IT teams to a board-level strategic issue, and rightly so, given how deeply connected railway systems are becoming and the threat the sector faces every day.

If we step back from technology for a moment, a lot of challenges in rail — whether it’s pricing, ticketing, or coordination — seem to come from how the system is organised. Where do you think this fragmentation really comes from?

I like your leading question! It is true that rail, which was the defining technology of the First Industrial Revolution and drove socioeconomic transformation across the world, has become in some ways a large, complex machine with many stakeholders who often don't talk to each other.

Some of that complexity is a necessary evil — and genuinely necessary. Many of the regulations, processes, and institutional structures that exist in rail are there because of tragic accidents, hard-won safety lessons, or legitimate social and environmental priorities. You cannot simply sweep them away in the name of efficiency.

But a significant portion of the fragmentation exists for a much simpler reason: because that is how it has always been done. National systems built by national governments for national purposes, with cross-border coordination added as an afterthought. Incumbents protecting data access. Infrastructure managers optimising for their own network rather than the system as a whole. Commercial incentives that frequently pull in the opposite direction to integration. And in some cases, the protectionism is entirely deliberate. The drive towards a Single European Railway Area has, paradoxically, seen national ministries dig in harder to defend their home markets. The difficulty new open-access operators face entering the French market is just one well-known example.

The EU liberalisation project was designed to address this, and it has achieved real things — but it has also added layers of regulatory complexity in some areas, and the ticketing debate is a good illustration of that. Technically solvable, politically unresolved.

What I find fascinating — and what we explore at IRS14 — is the question of what railways would look like if you could start again. We have a session where senior figures from ADIF and SNCF Réseau reflect on what they would build differently if they were designing high-speed rail infrastructure today, drawing on fifty years of experience since France committed to the TGV in 1976. Just as those original high-speed networks were built from scratch but have since accumulated layers of new systems on top of legacy ones — a patchwork held together partly by genuine necessity and partly by inertia — rail's institutional architecture has developed in exactly the same way. The question is whether the sector is now ready for the structural equivalent of a clean sheet of paper. That is precisely what the UK is attempting with GBR, and whether it works or not, it may prove to be the most important institutional experiment in European rail for a generation.

Given that the Summit is built around one-to-one meetings and direct exchanges, do you see it as more of a platform for discussion or as a place where concrete decisions, partnerships, and even future projects actually begin to take shape?

Both — but the one-to-one meetings are where the real magic happens, and they are what makes IRS genuinely different from a standard conference or trade show.

Railways tend to work with the same suppliers, often domestic ones, year after year — partly by inertia, and partly because they simply don't know what else is available. That is changing. A growing number of forward-thinking operators are actively looking beyond their domestic supply base — seeking international solutions, best practice from other markets, technologies they haven't encountered before. The challenge is knowing where to look.

IRS is designed to be precisely that place. VIP buyers — operators, infrastructure managers, transport authorities — are matched not just with suppliers offering solutions they have actively requested, but with companies that can help them achieve broader strategic goals. We ask buyers to select from 25 objectives spanning everything from improving punctuality and growing revenue to decarbonising operations, strengthening cybersecurity, and securing project financing. This means a supplier specialising in predictive maintenance might find themselves in a meeting with a buyer whose primary goal is reducing whole-life asset costs, a conversation that might never have happened through conventional channels.

The one-to-one format then allows buyers to share their specific pain points directly, and suppliers to respond with propositions tailored to those needs rather than a generic pitch. It is hyper-personalised in a way that a panel session or an exhibition stand simply cannot be.

Buyers consistently tell us after the event that the meetings were the highlight of their experience, precisely because of that concreteness. These are not conversations that might possibly lead somewhere. They are structured interactions between two parties who have already been identified as having a genuine reason to do business together.

And then the networking lunches and dinners do something different but equally important: they allow relationships and trust to develop informally, and it is often in those conversations that new ideas begin to take shape between people who only met that morning. That combination of structured matchmaking and unstructured relationship-building is very difficult to replicate at a traditional conference, and it is why we see partnerships, projects, and commercial conversations that genuinely begin at IRS and carry on long after the summit concludes.

Finally, looking beyond this year’s edition — when you think about the future of rail over the next decade, what is the one shift or breakthrough you believe will define whether the industry starts working more as one system, or keeps pulling in different directions?

The one shift I believe will define the next decade for rail is simple: the industry needs to stop thinking of itself as being in the railway business, and start thinking of itself as being in the business of moving people and goods.

Theodore Levitt made this argument in his landmark 1960 Harvard Business Review essay 'Marketing Myopia', writing about the decline of the American railroad sector. His diagnosis was precise: the railroads did not decline because the need for transportation fell away: it grew. They declined because that need was filled by others: cars, trucks, airplanes. Not because those alternatives were inherently superior, but because the railroads had defined themselves as railroad companies rather than transportation companies. They were product-oriented when they needed to be customer-oriented.

The observation is 66 years old. It remains largely unresolved.

People and goods travel door to door, not station to station or terminal to terminal. The deeper challenge is not multimodal integration alone. It is about railways talking to each other, sharing problems and solutions, engaging honestly with customers, and stepping out of institutional silos that have built up over generations. That is what 'The Power of Being Connected' means for IRS14. In the next decade, there will be real opportunities to do exactly that on issues the sector cannot resolve alone, whether that is the cost challenge, military mobility, ticketing, cybersecurity or AI deployment.

Rail was born out of the simplest of human wishes: to see someone who lived far away, to send something to them, to be connected. Those wishes have not changed. Perhaps when the rail sector has truly embraced that idea, the word ‘railway’ will no longer be quite the right word for this event. We may find that a summit about mobility or sustainable transport, with rail at the heart of a competitive yet collaborative landscape, becomes more fitting, because we too need to be connected to the sector that we serve. Until that day, I look forward to welcoming you and your readers to the 14th International Railway Summit in London this June.

 

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