Abstract

The railway sector in the European Union is changing. The goal of EU transport policy is to liberalize the market for rail transport services, dismantle national transport monopolies, and open competitive public tenders to other train operators. For the optimal utilization of the railway infrastructure capacity, it is necessary to calculate it properly in terms of open access to the infrastructure. At present, many important corridors are at full capacity. Therefore, in order to increase the number of freight trains, it is necessary to implement certain measures to increase the track line capacity. Infrastructure capacity research is part of the complexity of the capacity management processes. A progressive approach to define it means to describe the estimating process of railway infrastructure capacity including progressive capacity allocation approaches as a key part of capacity management. The aim is to define the processes of the infrastructure capacity management on which depends the quality level of operational traffic management as well the efficiency of the traffic flow on the infrastructure. The partial objective is to investigate the impact of systematic train paths in periodic timetables on rail infrastructure capacity. The proposals fully respect the EU transport policy.

Keywords: transport policy, rail transport market, infrastructure capacity, train path, open access, capacity measurement
