An environmental analysis of rehabilitation options for an open track section of railway in Slovenia

The demand for rail based transport is increasing and this trend is set to continue into the foreseeable future. Since new railways and routes have high lead-in times and very high capital outlay, much of the new capacity to match demand is likely to come from existing railways being used more effectively, potentially with more services running and higher capacity trains. This full scale upgrade of rail networks presents a unique opportunity to rehabilitate railways in a cost effective and environmentally sound manner, with benefits that will last long into the future. This paper presents results from the environmental study for the EU FP7 SMART RAIL project. The goals of the SMART RAIL project are to reduce replacement costs, associated delays, and provide cost and environmentally optimised maintenance solutions for ageing infrastructure networks, each from a life-cycle perspective. In this paper a LCA was conducted on test fields in Slovenia. The goal of the LCA was to compare remediation work with and without the use of geosynthetic membranes and to calculate the resultant environmental impacts. The results of the LCA indicate that structures incorporating geosynthetics have a lower Global Warming Potential (GWP) and a lower environmental impact overall.