Is Freight Really Flexible in the Timetabling Process for a Mixed‐Use Rail Network? Some Considerations Based on French Experience

Abstract

Several demands, such as passenger traffic, freight and maintenance works, are competing for a portion of shared and scarce resource: rail infrastructure capacity. In Western Europe, recent decades have been marked by a tendency to favour the scheduling of train paths based on a regular-interval timetable. France has recently adopted this scheduling approach. The paper focuses on the position of freight in this peculiar timetabling context and addresses the specific issue of freight flexibility, based on current French experience. The analysis is above all carried out from the infrastructure manager's perspective. It is mainly supported by the results of a series of about thirty interviews, carried out in 2012 and 2013 with the parties involved in the French timetabling process. The paper highlights that rail freight flexibility in the process has limitations and supports the thesis that anticipation is an essential issue for the infrastructure manager. Fitting freight train paths into the timetable is essentially a delicate balance of interests.

Challenges raised by freight for the operations planning of a shared-use rail network. A French perspective

“…Each . 6 For further details about the diversity of freight convoys (locomotives, weight and length) on the French rail network and its impacts on the graph, see (Morvant, 2014). applicant is provided with a direct contact at RFF to facilitate the resolution of any capacity issues.…”

“…This issue affects a large number of rail networks, worldwide, and raises specific problems since it requires the infrastructure manager to deal with heterogeneous and possibly conflicting demands for capacity. A considerable literature, based on international experience, deals with the various challenges related to the operation of mixed-use rail infrastructures: the impacts of train characteristics (Pyrgidis and Christogiannis, 2012), infrastructure use charges (Calvo et al, 2007), capacity determination (Pouryousef et al, 2013), train performance and delays (Martland, 2008;Krier et al, 2014), maintenance planning (Saat and Barkan, 2013) and ''operating strategies'' (train scheduling and dispatching) (Nash, 2003). This paper addresses the issue of train scheduling and is concerned with timetable-based operations (as opposed to ''improvised operations'') (Pouryousef et al, 2013).…”