Past the static deadlines: NeTEx on five European access points, checked against open schemas

The deadlines. Under the MMTIS regulation (2017/1926 as amended by 2024/490):

• every static-data deadline, where NeTEx applies, has passed (2019–2025);
• the public-transport real-time deadline on the comprehensive TEN-T passed on 1 December 2025;
• the 1 December 2026 date covers parking and vehicle sharing.

The TEL TSI, Regulation (EU) 2026/253, makes CEN/TS 16614-4:2025 (EPIP) mandatory for rail passenger timetables, with NeTEx milestones in 2027 and 2028.

What we measured. On 2026-10-02 we censused 284 NeTEx feeds (639 files) on five national access points (France, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg) and validated 41 of 44 sampled datasets.

XSD results for the 34 timetable datasets:

• 8 are fully valid, all French;
• 6 are valid on the part checked, which ranges from 2.4 % to 66 % of their bytes;
• 16 are invalid and 4 were not checked.

Two schema details explain much of this:

• NeTEx 2.0.0 rejects 11 French timetables, 9 of which pass 1.3.2. The reason is that passing times now need an id and a stop-point reference.
• Ten of eleven Dutch datasets fail 2.0.0 only on references to objects outside the document.

EPIP. No dataset passes the archived 2021 EPIP XSD (0 of 36). That XSD predates the 2025 standard, so this says little about conformance to it.

Consistency checks.

• One feed is stale (Dutch AVV, 2018).
• Six strings are double-encoded and one character was lost.
• In 11 of 14 French datasets, at least 99 % of ids follow the codification the French profile proposes.
• 248,286 internal references lack the version the French profile requires, 81 % of them in one dataset.

Our own instrument. Our linter produced two false positives, now fixed.

We release netex-lint as a prototype.