NB-Rail — Recommendations for Use (RFUs) and Official Documents

Scope

NB-Rail's Recommendations for Use (RFUs) are the coordination group of railway Notified Bodies' agreed clarifications on applying the TSIs and Directive (EU) 2016/797 — administrative decisions, binding on all NB-Rail members, that resolve ambiguities in TSI conformity-assessment practice without altering the TSIs' mandatory content. This entry is the NB-Rail Association's official portal listing current RFUs, superseded/previous-version RFUs, the RFU/TSI cross-reference matrix and the NANDO parent/child-TSI relationship table.

Prepared under the principles of Regulation (EU) 2016/797 Art. 44, Regulation (EC) 765/2008 Arts. R17(11)/R30 and the Blue Guide 2016 (5.2.2 and 5.2.4), each RFU passes a three-level screening — technical-expert drafting, process-expert review, and endorsement by all Notified Bodies at an NB-Rail Coordination Group plenary — before being adopted as an 'administrative decision' under Art. 30.6 of the Interoperability Directive, applicable across all NB-Rail members. Primary publication is on the European Commission's CIRCABC platform; because that resource is hard to navigate, the NB-Rail Association additionally republishes the same RFUs, by subsystem (rolling stock, infrastructure, all subsystems, etc.), on this portal, together with an RFU/QC-TSI matrix and a table linking amending 'child' TSIs to their 'parent' TSIs, coordinated with DG-MOVE. RFUs are where the TSI conformity-assessment system's day-to-day ambiguities actually get resolved — a specific test method, a documentation format, a certificate-validity edge case — and are consulted constantly by Notified Bodies, manufacturers and railway undertakings preparing or reviewing technical files. ERA representatives are kept informed at every screening level and the Railway Interoperability and Safety Committee (RISC) may comment under Art. 51 of Directive (EU) 2016/797, but RFUs themselves are issued by the Notified Body community rather than by ERA or the Commission, which is why this entry sits in the era-guidance domain as sector guidance rather than as a TSI or binding legal instrument.