Shunting operations at flat yards: retrieving freight railcars from storage tracks

Scheduling Freight Trains in Rail-Rail Transshipment Yards

Transshipment yards, where gantry cranes allow for an e cient transshipment of containers between di erent freight trains, are important entities in modern railway systems and facilitate the general shift from point-to-point transport to hub-and-spoke railway systems. Modern rail-rail transshipment yards accelerate container handling, so that multiple smaller trains with equal destination can b...

Hump Yard Track Allocation with Temporary Car Storage∗

In rail freight operation, freight cars need to be separated and reformed into new trains at hump yards. The classification procedure is complex and hump yards constitute bottlenecks in the rail freight network, often causing outbound trains to be delayed. One of the problems is that planning for the allocation of tracks at hump yards is difficult, given that the planner has limited resources (...

Planning Robust Freight Transportation Operations

Determining fixed Crane Areas in Rail-Rail Transshipment Yards

Rail-rail transshipment yards are an emerging and more e cient alternative to traditional shunting yards. Instead of a time-consuming reshu ing of railcars via shunting hills, in these modern yards, huge gantry cranes tranship containers between di erent freight trains. As multiple cranes process the trains in parallel, it is an important operational task to avoid interferences among cranes. To...

Tracking Freight Railcars in Indian Railways: Technology Options and Stakeholder Interests

This teaching case discusses the challenges faced by the Indian Railways in contemplating the implementation of a new technology for tracking individual freight railcars (wagons). After exploring multiple ‘technological options’, the Indian Railways decided to undertake a pilot project based on time-tested Automatic Equipment Identification system using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tec...