Evaluation of mixed traffic performance on Croatian railways

Abstract

In many countries, including Croatia, the fundamental daily activities on the railway network are predetermined by a conflict-free schedule that combines passenger and freight routes of various railway undertakings of a particular railway market. When scheduling railway traffic on a given network, the aim is to offer a suitable quality of service to the growing demand volume in a capacity-optimized manner. However, capacity-relevant operating conditions in a market with multiple undertaking competition are not the same for all conventional railway systems mostly due to different sources of heterogeneity. Heterogeneity in railways is hard to unambiguously define due to its complex multidimensional properties. Mostly it is assessed in the context of traffic conditions, which is not completely accurate. In this article, we demarcate different layers of traffic-related heterogeneity, which are present in the literature and attach the most important related research to each. There is an evident lack of practical measures for decreasing the negative impacts of heterogeneity on timetable performance and capacity utilization. Therefore, we performed a detailed analysis of mixed rail traffic on selected main corridor routes in Croatia to depict more clearly the importance of this network-specific operational problem and influencing factors and get insights into the dynamic effect of real interactions between mixed trains on a typical conventional railway line in the deregulated railway market.