Capacity utilisation and performance at railway stations

As traffic levels increase on railways in Britain and elsewhere, improved understanding of the trade-offs between capacity provision/utilisation and service quality is increasingly important, as Infrastructure Managers and Railway Undertakings seek to maximise capacity provision without an unacceptable loss of service reliability and punctuality. This is particularly true of the stations and junctions forming the nodes of railway networks, as they tend to be the capacity bottlenecks, and the relationships between capacity utilisation and performance are less well understood for nodes than for their intermediate links. Following on from initial work undertaken for the OCCASION project on the calculation of nodal Capacity Utilisation Indices, and on the application of the techniques developed for OCCASION to the recalibration of the Capacity Charge element of the Track Access Charges on Britain’s railways, one of the objectives of the DITTO Rail Systems project is the further investigation of the relationship(s) between capacity utilisation and performance, as indicated by levels of congestion-related reactionary delay, at railway stations and junctions. Historic timetable and delay data for selected stations have been used to investigate these relationships, which take the expected form and tend to suggest lower maximum capacity utilisation levels for stations than for the links between them. Work is ongoing to develop these datasets and relationships further, and to identify suitable capacity utilisation upper limit values.