Railways were the most important infrastructure development in India from 1850 to 1947. They were inter-connected with all aspects of Indian society. In terms of the economy, railways played a major role in integrating markets and increasing trade. Domestic and international economic trends shaped the pace of railway construction and the demand for the important traffic flows to the ports. In t...

When the railways were nationalized between 1906 and 1907, the skeleton of the nationwide trunk rail network was nearly completed, as mandated in the Railway Construction Act of 1892. At the end of 1907, nationalized railway lines in operation totalled 7,165 km. Construction continued and 2,677 km of line were added by the end of 1919. In addition to active line expansion, the first decade afte...

Railways were integral to the development of the Indian economy before World War I. In this paper, we present new estimates of total factor productivity (TFP) for railways from 1874 to 1912, which highlight the strong performance of this key industrial sector. We find railway-industry TFP growth to be substantial, averaging 2.5 percent per year and generating a 3 percent social savings for the ...

With the large-scale construction of city subways, the down traversing formed by subway running tunnels through the existing railways or railway yards are increasing day by day. Down traversing in shield method becomes common; however, the engineering cases which can be referable in the down traversing formed by the shallow-buried excavation of double-arch tunnels through the existing railways ...

Ballast as a part of the railway system plays an important role in the operation of the railways and also has a great impact on repair and maintenance activities. Hence most of the repair and maintenance activities in traditional railway systems are due to the defections in the ballast layer and therefore most of the maintenance budget is spent on repairing these defects. These repair and maint...

In the present paper, challenges and prospects of the European railways, along with a proposal for a new strategy policy and specific measures are presented. The declining course of European railways concerning traffic and revenues is first analyzed. Conditions to introduce intra - modal competition are surveyed, among them separation of infrastructure fro...