Hack4Rail 2026: Advancing Rail Innovation Through Open Collaboration
29 June 2026
Hack4Rail 2026: Advancing Rail Innovation Through Open Collaboration
For its seventh edition, Hack4Rail brought the European railway community together at the ÖBB Open Innovation Factory in Vienna under the theme “Connected Railways for Open Solutions”. Originally launched as Dreiländerhack, Hack4Rail has evolved into a European hackathon format in which railway companies collaborate on shared challenges and future-oriented solutions. Around 160 participants from ÖBB, Deutsche Bahn, SBB CFF FFS, Infrabel, Groupe SNCF, NS and the OpenRail Association joined Hack4Rail 2026 to work on real business challenges from within the participating partner railways and develop concepts and prototypes for the future of rail.
The OpenRail Association played an active role as a partner and co-organizer of Hack4Rail 2026, helping to create the framework for open collaboration throughout the event. Through welcoming words, interviews conducted by Cornelius Schumacher with Frederik Schäfer, Louis Greiner and Adrian Egli, and hands-on involvement, the association underlined the value of sharing expertise, combining railway and IT knowledge, and using open source principles to turn common challenges into common solutions. Challenges such as Build an Open Model of Cross-Border Mobility, Infrastructure Congestion, PopUpSim Optimizer, Robust Auto-Layout Algorithms for the Netzgrafik Editor and Rolling Stock Software Configuration Management were brought in by business units and experts from within the participating partner railways. OpenRail supported the teams across all challenges by providing infrastructure, direct support and a platform for making results available beyond the hackathon. This collaborative approach was reflected in the results: 16 teams produced open source code, which is available in OpenRail’s collaborative space on GitHub.
Accelerating Innovation for the Future of Rail
Following one and a half days of focused collaboration and development, 22 teams presented solutions for some of the rail sector’s most pressing challenges. The pitches showed how quickly strong ideas can become tangible prototypes when operational expertise, data, technology and a shared passion for rail come together. The teams addressed topics ranging from infrastructure planning and freight congestion to disruption management, station navigation, energy forecasting and passenger support. Across the presentations, a clear focus emerged on reducing complexity, increasing transparency and improving decision-making.
From Shared Challenges to Open Source Collaboration
Hack4Rail’s “Rolling Stock Software Configuration Management” challenge highlighted a strategic opportunity for the railway sector: turning shared software challenges into structured collaboration. Bringing together peers from SNCF, DB, ÖBB and NS, the challenge created a common understanding that operators are facing the same issues in train software management. According to insights shared by Julien Spanneut from SNCF, the combination of rolling stock expertise and IT capabilities proved especially powerful, showing that existing open-source solutions can offer a viable path forward. In less than one day, participants designed a minimum valuable product. “The next meaningful step would be to convince decision makers to officially start a common open source project among railway operators,” Julien Spanneut said, pointing to the potential for deeper collaboration across the railway sector and to the value of establishing a network of train software experts to exchange regularly and jointly advance the topic.
From Hackathon Energy to Business Impact
In his closing words, Jochen Decker, Chair of the Board of the OpenRail Association and CIO at SBB, emphasized that Hack4Rail has become a truly international event and a powerful example of collaboration across the rail sector. He underlined that railways should not compete with each other, but work together to improve the attractiveness, reliability, and customer value of rail as a whole. He praised the teams for turning highly relevant business challenges into mature, working prototypes within only a few days. AI played a key role in accelerating development and analysis, but Jochen Decker also stressed the need to use it responsibly, without compromising quality, security, or personal well-being. His main message was that real impact starts after the hackathon: promising concepts need to be followed up and brought into production. He encouraged business owners and technology teams to overcome silos, continue the collaboration, and take the Hack4Rail spirit back into their own organizations: “Try this at home.”
Netzgrafik Editor Improvement Wins Second Place
Team “Click Magic” was awarded second place for its contribution to the OpenRail Association challenge on robust auto-layout algorithms for the Netzgrafik Editor. Congratulations to the team on this well-deserved achievement. Their work directly contributed to improving the Netzgrafik Editor and showed how open source collaboration can accelerate the path to production-ready code.
The progress was driven by a structured and highly iterative working mode. According to the interview, the team quickly moved from exploring the problem space to developing and refining a solution through short iterations of demos, joint discussions and immediate improvements. Intensive collaboration between experts from Infrabel, SBB, DB and SBB Cargo combined algorithmic expertise with practical railway planning knowledge and helped broaden the perspective on the challenge. The resulting algorithm preserves network topology while improving visual clarity and reducing manual adjustments for complex network graphs. “The solution is very close to production ready and has the potential to significantly improve the Netzgrafik Editor in a sustainable way,” said Adrian Egli from SBB.
Open Collaboration as a Catalyst for Rail Innovation
Hack4Rail 2026 once again demonstrated that open collaboration is an effective way to tackle shared challenges across the rail sector. By working across organizational borders, teams combined operational knowledge, digital expertise and open source practices to develop solutions with real implementation potential. This collaborative approach helped teams move quickly from complex problem statements to tangible outcomes that can be taken forward beyond the hackathon. With the most promising results now moving toward follow-up and implementation, Hack4Rail continues to act as a catalyst for a more connected, innovative and customer-focused railway future.
