1 October 2004 is the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Tokaido Shinkansen, the world’s first high-speed railway that marked the start of the era of high-speed rail travel. Ten years ago, the October issue of JRTR 3 published a special feature entitled 30 Years of High Speed Railways. This article summarizes the events in highspeed railways in the last 10 years and discusses their future p...

The main objective of this study is to present a framework developed for assisting Railways to monitor and control the quality of services provided to passengers. The study evaluated the passenger Rail Service quality of Indian Railways by developing SQM (Service Quality Management) model on the basis of SERVQUAL and Rail Transport quality. Three new dimensions (Service Product, Social Responsi...

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...

In Japan, a liberalization policy was implemented over railways and buses in 2000 and 2002 respectively. Under that policy, quantity regulations for railways and buses were abolished, withdrawal regulations were eased, although fare regulations were maintained. However, even after this liberalization, institutional design remains considerably different between Japan and EU countries. An argumen...

1.1 Highlights Railways did not set out clear milestones or targets for the switch over from BSNL channels to their own OFC network. Even where the zonal railways had chalked out action plans, these were not adhered to and the progress of switch over was very slow. Railways continued to largely rely on hired BSNL channels with recurring expenditure towards hiring of the channels even though the...

GSM-Railways (GSM-R) is a communication mobile network designed to fulfill specific communication needs of railways. GSM-R is being widely deployed across Europe and other countries around the world for providing railway voice and train control services (ETCS). Despite that, GSM-R already shows various shortcomings in terms of capacity and support for additional data services. This triggers the...

Suicide on railways (either by being run over by or jumping in front of a train) is one of the "hardest' suicide methods. In Austria, 617 suicides or attempted suicides on railways were registered between 1990 and 1994. This amounts to 5.73% of all suicides committed in this period with women showing a higher percentage than men. In both men and women there was a predominance of younger age gro...

The performance of Indian railways in the nineteenth century provides a great context to study the effects of state ownership on productivity and other aspects of operations. We rely on a key feature of the institutional background whereby the Government of India purchased a majority ownership stake in private railways at predetermined dates set by contracts negotiated decades before the compan...

India’s population has skyrocketed to about 122 crores .In such a scenario a high speed train technology for a swift transportation of the ever-increasing population is required .Not only speed is the sole aim but passenger safety, comfort and punctuality in railways is the need of the hour. Indian railways are subjected to regular delays in their railway setup. This comparative study focuses o...

This teaching case examines the implementation of a new technology for tracking individual freight railcars (wagons) by Indian Railways. After exploring multiple ‘technological options,’ the Indian Railways decided to undertake a pilot project based on timetested Automatic Equipment Identification system using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. However, a number of other technolo...