• Experiences from other industries (defence, aerospace, off-shore) can help the railway industry 
• The TSI can function as a future guideline for cost-reduction 
• It is necessary for life-cycle management to understand the effects of deregulation and the need for reregulation.
• Current rail designs are insufficiently developed from the long-term behaviour perspective.
• Design and maintenance of track and rolling stock should be increasingly integrated in order to lower LCC of the complete system.
• The initial quality and the impairment rate of rail infra are mainly by the condition of the subsoil and the drainage.
• Measuring and interpreting state quantities of the rail system with fixed time intervals should be replaced by continuous monitoring and interpreting.
• Corrective maintenance should increasingly be replaced by preventive and condition-based maintenance. This offers many advantages, but requires that measured data are efficiently converted into information about the system’s condition and -development.
• The rail market has a huge potential for performance based contracting. Both contractors are still in the learning process in order to maximise advantages.
• New contract types only work if the outsourcing organisation is willing to change too.
• Performance based contracting is a strong incentive for creativity and thus innovation in rail.
• Long-term partnerships allow lower costs with performance based contracting.
• Pricing of access and utilization charges of infrastructure should be differentiated based on the actual degradation of the rail system caused by operators. In this way maintenance costs can be recharged and reduced.
• More attention and budget (long and short term) should be given to systematic and specialist research into the interaction of infrastructure and rolling stock as function of both their design characteristics and condition in the life cycle. This is required in order to guarantee the quality of rail as essential transport mode in the Netherlands for the long term.

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