Work undertaken on the socio-economic assessment of the installation of under-sleeper pads (USPs) on a busy commuter railway route in Britain, as part of the Track to the Future (T2F) project, was presented at COMPRAIL 2018. This was followed by an expanded, comparative analysis of the same route, comparing the noise-reduction and other costs and benefits of USPs, rail dampers and noise barriers, published in the International Journal of Transport Development and Integration. Such analyses provide useful information and decision-making assistance to infrastructure managers, funders and other stakeholders, but typically require the repeated development of bespoke models of study locations, interventions and effects. The "one-off" nature of these models increases the time and costs required for such studies, and makes it more difficult to compare similar schemes in different locations, or different types of intervention in a single location. There is, therefore, a need for an improved, more generalised and standardised, transferable, replicable and comparison-enabling approach to the socioeconomic assessment of such interventions. Ongoing work on the T2F project entails the development and use of standardised templates to describe the input costs and expected impacts of different infrastructure, rolling stock or operational interventions. These form the inputs to, and part of the development for, T2F of an improved, generalised, ontology-based assessment framework, which is being developed using the West Coastway railway line between Portsmouth and Brighton on England's south coast as an initial case study. This paper describes the context and rationale for the development of the assessment framework, its components and the methodology being adopted.
The environmental impacts of noise and vibration are becoming increasingly important in the assessment of new and upgraded railway routes. Vibration from railways propagates through the ground to nearby buildings where it may cause annoyance as feelable vibration or as re-radiated noise. To tackle the adverse effects of ground-borne noise a range of possible interventions are available, including softer rail pads, under-sleeper pads and under-ballast mats. The installation costs of such interventions are generally higher for the higher-performing track types. Additionally, there are potential effects on track maintenance costs which may be positive or negative, for example by reducing sleeper damage or increasing the need for ballast tamping. This study presents a socio-economic analysis of the effects of several interventions to reduce ground-borne noise. By selecting a whole route, the installation and whole-life costs are assessed using Network Rail’s Vehicle-Track Interaction Strategic Model (VTISM) and these are offset against benefits in terms of reduced social costs. Ground-borne noise is predicted at various distances from the alignment using the Modelling of Train Induced Vibration (MOTIV) model and the effect of track interventions is determined as insertion loss spectra. The re-radiated noise within a typical domestic building is then estimated using generic building transfer functions. Geographic Information System tools are used to estimate the population affected by ground-borne noise and their expected level of exposure. The methodology is illustrated using a case study route between Brighton and Portsmouth in the South of England.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.