TIMETABLE BASED DESIGN OF RAILWAY INFRASTRUCTURE

Summary: The design of new railway infrastructure is a complex planning process today in most European countries due to several requirements. From an operational point of view new infrastructure basically has to fulfil the requirements defined by the later customers who are the railway undertakings. Hereby passenger traffic is often organised in a periodic timetable with well defined arrival and departure times in the hubs. These time constraints allow designing the graphical timetable which is indicating the minimum design speed. As a rule, the number of required tracks in a section or station can be also taken out of the graphical timetable. A further optimisation can be carried out between available running time reserves or additional infrastructure. The design of railway infrastructure is strongly related with the demand of expected traffic which is defined by a timetable. Therefore the timetable is predicting the layout of the infrastructure. Typically the timetable can be displayed in a graphical way which is also used in daily operation. In the graphical timetable all running trains are displayed with their time slots including the blocking time stairway. The time slots are designed by calculation of the technical running times including some supplements. Based upon the graphical timetable it is possible to estimate the demand of infrastructure. So at every location where time slots are crossing each other, there will be the necessity to have at least a second track. Following this rule, the number of required tracks is dedicated by the number of crossing time slots in a certain area. Additionally the arrival and departure times can be taken into consideration as a boundary condition which have to be respected especially when an integrated timetable shall be realised. This paper starts with the basic principles of an integrated timetable and shows then how a methodology can be developed to estimate the demand for the infrastructure.