Berlin – Amsterdam in less than five hours – Solutions for the acceleration of rail passenger traffic

Since the 1970s and 1980 important links in the European rail network have gradually been upgraded or made ideal for high speed trains. The reasons why these kinds of links were improved are to boost the link capacity, to increase speed in slow areas and to improve long distance accessibility. Some 40 years later the European rail network offers fast medium distance passenger transport within distinct nations, but also on international links. One of these foreign links is the Amsterdam Berlin railway corridor which joins these two major European conglomerate areas. Various other transport modes including car and air traffic are also offered on this corridor. Travel times of these tree transport modes vary from 255 minutes for air traffic to 420 minutes for both car and train. Air traffic carries the majority of people that use this corridor, because travel time plays a major role in mode choice. In order to make the railway corridor more competitive with other transport modes travel time should be minimized to approximately 300 minutes. This study concentrates on the questions of what reasons the high travel time for railway traffic and which alternatives are available to reduce the travel time and make the railway corridor more competitive. In order to answer these questions essential concepts in international railway traffic are explained, the present situation is analyzed and the problems that induce a loss of travel time identified. For each of these problems solutions are then made and advantages and disadvantages described. Finally solutions are compiled into thee options, low, intermediate and high-end, to obtain the desired outcome and a preferable solution is chosen. Currently the Amsterdam – Berlin corridor is operated in a two hour…

Contents: Berlin – Amsterdam in less than five hours – Solutions for the acceleration of rail passenger traffic

1. Introduction
1.1 Theme introduction
1.2 Scope
1.3 Objective
1.4 Research questions.
1.5 Research approach
2. Theoretical framework
2.1 Current situation
2.2 Introduction to interoperability
3. Analysis current issues
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Power supply
3.3 Railway guidance and safety system
3.4 Speed limits
3.5 Operational constraints
4. Generating solution variants
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Track based technical solution variants
4.3 Train based technical solution variants
4.4 Operational solution variants
4.5 Solution scenarios
4.6 Effects
5. Conclusions and recommendations
5.1 Conclusions
5.2 Recommendations
Literature index
Appendix…

Source: University of Twente

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