Issues and Perspectives in Railway Management from a Sustainability Standpoint

In this paper a method is set up for assessing the best strategy for the management of a railway infrastructure over time. A model to evaluate the total costs of competing track alternatives in a long-term perspective is proposed. Tangible and intangible costs, as well as internal (e.g., agency and user costs) and external costs (CO2- related, etc.) are considered. Life cycle costs are estimated based on agency, environmental, and user present values. The detailed analysis of the costs over the entire life of the track allows assessing the trend of agency (AC, e.g., construction, maintenance and renewal), user (UC, e.g., delays, etc.), and externality (EC, e.g., related to CO2e emissions, etc.) costs of the alternatives. An application of the proposed method is carried out comparing two track alternatives (ballasted vs. ballast-less). The trend of total present values (TPV) shows that solutions more affordable in the short time can yield maintenance and renewal processes which are economically unfavourable. Furthermore, not only the breakeven point (ballast-less versus ballasted present values) is very far from the construction time but also the “distance” between the TPV of the two solutions becomes too small to yield sound conclusions in favour of one solution.