Analytical Possibilities of Doing Capacity Research in Rail Station Areas

Railway specialists expect that the demand for rail-bound passenger and freight traffic in the US will increase enormously in the coming years. Implementing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, new high-speed lines will be created throughout the nation. This will lead to an additional increase of passenger traffic demand. Experiences from Western Europe have shown that new high-speed passenger lines will cause changes in user demand behavior as well as an augmentation of the importance of regional lines featuring connections to the high-speed network. The existing stations will not only be greater utilized by the new high-speed lines, but a growth in demand for regional lines could also require an increasing number of trains. That could lead to greater infrastructure utilization as well. Both aspects lead to the question of whether the already existing large stations of the future high-speed network possess enough capacity for handling such a large number of trains. It is comprehensible that station capacity will play a very important role for planning new corridors. While UIC Code 406 contains first steps of defining a standardized method for doing line capacity research, it does not include any information about station capacity evaluations. A few analytical methods for doing such evaluations are described in this paper. Most of these methods are easy to apply but offer important values for evaluating existing station infrastructure as well as timetables. It is also shown that the compression method presented in UIC Code 406 cannot be used for doing station capacity research.