the main design criteria of ballasted railway tracks include rail deflections, rail bending stresses, rail wheel contact stresses, sleeper bending moments and ballast sleeper contact pressures. numerous criteria have been defined for the design of ballasted railway tracks owing to the various mechanical properties of track components and their complex interaction. therefore, railway track desig...

This paper gives a brief overview of subsidy arrangements in the privatised passenger rail industry in Britain before focusing on productivity performance across the first four years under the new privatised structure. Subsidy reductions are analysed in terms of the average annual percentage increases required in passenger revenues to offset these reductions for each train operating company. Th...

This paper deals with an investigation of combinatorial and robust optimization models to solve rolling-stock planning problems for passenger trains. Here robustness means that rolling-stock can better deal with some disruptions of the railway system. The proposed method is based on optimization and simulation techniques to handle the problem with imperfect information on data. The goal of the ...

This paper studies the disruption management problem of rapid transit rail networks. Besides optimizing the timetable and the rolling stock schedules, we explicitly deal with the effects of the disruption on the passenger demand. We propose a two-step approach that combines an integrated optimization model (for the timetable and rolling stock) with a model for the passengers' behavior. We repor...

The main design criteria of ballasted railway tracks include rail deflections, rail bending stresses, rail wheel contact stresses, sleeper bending moments and ballast sleeper contact pressures. Numerous criteria have been defined for the design of ballasted railway tracks owing to the various mechanical properties of track components and their complex interaction. Therefore, railway track desig...