Noise reduction is one of the most important issues that freight traffic shall face by now in order to anticipate and to meet future legislation requirements in this matter. Barriers or insulation measures of houses near the tracks are not fully satisfactory as they are quite expensive and allow only a local treatment of the noise nuisances. Therefore measures at the sources are required. In EUROSABOT, focus is placed on rolling noise of freight trains and locomotives. While braking, the interaction between brake block and the wheel tread generates roughness patterns which become a major source of excitation for rolling noise. Reducing wheel roughness results in a decisive contribution to a global reduction of noise annoyance of railways. The global objective of EUROSABOT is to find a suitable brake block (material and design) which keeps the advantages of cast iron (efficiency and low cost), which makes it so widely applicable to freight vehicles, but would have a much better behaviour in terms of roughness generation and would not have the drawbacks of other families of brake blocks. In practice, to reach this global objective, it has been established that the mechanisms of wheel-block interaction should be better understood, models of roughness generation should be built and validated, prototypes of improved blocks should be designed, produced and tested and appropriate exploitation measures should be taken to facilitate a rapid implementation of those solutions.