Quantitative Analysis of the Possible Sites of a New Danube Bridge to Bypass Budapest on Rail (Part 1)

Abstract

Since 1920, almost all the traffic on rail crossing the Danube in Hungary, crosses it in Budapest via the Southern Railway Bridge which makes it heavily overloaded. This is a very disadvantageous situation not only for commercial shipping but also for military uses as there is certain heavy military equipment that can only be transported via rail.In our two-part article, we examine the locations of new bridges that could be alternatives to bypass Budapest and thus to reduce the traffic load on the railway lines of the capital. In this first part of our paper, we present the effect of a new Danube bridge as an alternative to the V0 railway line. We examine the possible sites of the bridge with several different route alternatives connecting it to the existing railway lines by using traffic simulation.