In spite of extraordinary support programs initiated by the European Union and other national authorities, the percentage of overall freight tra c moved by train is in steady decline. This development is driven by the fact that macro-economic bene ts of rail tra c, such as relief of overloaded road networks and reduced environmental impacts, are countervailed by severe disadvantages from the pe...

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The locomotive assignment and the freight train scheduling are important problems in railway transportation. Freight cars are coupled to form a freight rake. The freight rake becomes a train when a locomotive is coupled to it. The locomotive assignment problem assigns locomotives to a set of freight rakes in a way that, with minimum locomotive deadheading time, rake coupling delay and locomotiv...

Charges related to rail infrastructure capacity in the European rail network show great diversity and are not sufficiently transparent. This paper develops a simple and transparent methodology that takes the main aspects related to rail infrastructure capacity into consideration to give an approximated value of the maximum capacity charge (initial mark-up). The method can be used (as a basic ca...

The type and magnitude of loads passing through the track superstructure have a great impact on both the design and the performance of concrete sleepers and fastening systems. To date, the majority of North American research focusing on quantifying rail infrastructure loading conditions has been conducted on heavy-haul freight railroads. However, the results and recommendations from these studi...

rail operations from infrastructure ownership and management, the government-owned national railways still maintain a symbiotic relationship with infrastructure providers. New entrants to rail business face considerable hurdles in terms of access to infrastructure and operations at border crossings. Moreover, passenger traffic has precedence over freight traffic. Thus, train timetables are crea...

With the energy consumption rising in rail transport, the railway sector is showing increasing interest in the energy-efficient operation of freight trains. Freight trains require more complicated driving strategies than ordinary passenger trains do due to their heavy loads, especially in the long-distance steep downhill (LDSD) sections that are very common in freight rail lines in China. This ...

Considerably less research has been done on modeling freight demand with disaggregate discrete models than on modeling passenger demand. The principal reason for this imbalance is the lack of freight demand data. Freight demand characteristics are expensive to obtain and are sometimes confidential. This paper analyzes the freight demand characteristics that drive modal choice by means of a larg...