South Africa’s freight rail reform: A demand-driven perspective

Scheduling Freight Trains in Rail-Rail Transshipment Yards

Transshipment yards, where gantry cranes allow for an e cient transshipment of containers between di erent freight trains, are important entities in modern railway systems and facilitate the general shift from point-to-point transport to hub-and-spoke railway systems. Modern rail-rail transshipment yards accelerate container handling, so that multiple smaller trains with equal destination can b...

Single-Car Routing in Rail Freight Transport

Cars in rail freight service follow prescribed routes from their origin via intermediate shunting yards to their destination. The goal in designing such routes is to reduce the number of trains and their travel distances. Various real-world hard constraints make the problem difficult to formulate and also to solve. We present integer programming formulations for this car routing problem arising...

Routing Cars in Rail Freight Service

Integration of Passenger and Freight Rail Scheduling

In the United States, the freight railway industry is already running without much excess capacity. Hence, better planning and scheduling tools are needed to effectively manage the scarce resources, to cope with the rapidly increasing demand for railway transportation. The integration of freight train and passenger train scheduling and dispatching is an important railroad management task since ...

Perspectives on Freight Movement by Road and Rail in South Africa

For a developing country, South Africa has a relatively extensive road and rail network. The approximately 264 000 km of roads and 20 000 km of rail network (30 600 km of tracks) have largely been built and paid for by previous generations and represent assets of enormous value for Southern Africa. The optimum use, management, maintenance and expansion of these networks are crucial for economic...