GRE’s main goal is to keep its customer transports flowing – even in challenging times. To increase transparency for our customers, we have teamed up with European railcar lessors organizing themselves in the VPI Germany (Verband der Güterwagenhalter in Deutschland e.V.) and created a dashboard to display the status of all VPI authorized railcar maintenance and repair workshops throughout Europe.

Hosted at http://vpi-covid19.unitygroup.com/ for everyone to access, the map and database display the status of the workshops. All workshops update their status independently and regularly; the tag shows when the most recent status update took place.

“We are incredibly proud to be part of a massive industry effort. The VPI association coming together in a time of crisis exemplifies how all railcar lessors and workshops believe in the importance of rail transport,” says Jakob Kudlinski, Maintenance Systems Manager Europe at GATX and Head of the Technical Commission at VPI Germany. “We acted quickly to our customer requests and made railcar leasing easier for them.”

Maintenance is an important part in guaranteeing that railcars remain operational, hence open workshops are necessary to provide great service. This is particularly true in 2020 when rail transport has become even more important during the COVID-19 pandemic. As travel restrictions and social distancing rules were introduced, transport has seen a shift from the road to rail.

At GRE, we are doing our part to keep goods flowing throughout Europe so that our customers have a reliable partner to support with modal shifts to rail and bolster their growth.