Track Maintenance Between Trains Simulation

Infrastructure managers (IMs) need to plan their maintenance work about 1½–2 years before a new train time table (TTT) comes into force to minimise the effect on traffic. Maintenance work that is planned in less than 1 year ahead of the TTT has to compete with, or need to be fitted into, operators’ applications for capacity. However, maintenance work is at times planned only a few weeks before execution, and depending on the railway line in question, a few hours during night can be available for maintenance. In addition, sudden failures in track normally require repair immediately or within a day. If rail transportation increases, it also becomes harder to find time in track for maintenance. Therefore, it is of interest to simulate maintenance tasks between trains to minimise track maintenance possession time. Such simulation can be used to: study maintenance work in TTTs with random and regular train departures; study the effect of exceeding allocated maintenance windows; and to study the effect of increase in train frequency. In this paper, Monte Carlo method is applied to simulate track maintenance between trains as a function of train frequency.