Scheduling Railway Motive Power

Abstract

In comparison with street public transport, railway operations (be they metropolitan passenger services or country freight services) appear not to have received very much theoretical attention in the matter of efficient motive power and manpower utilisation. However, railway operations in Australia, the context in which this paper has been written, can be complex and difficult to efficiently resource and are in need of theoretical and practical planning assistance.

Railway operations in Australia, be they metropolitan passenger services or country freight services, can be complex and difficult to efficiently cover with motive power. For example, the scheduling effort to compose metropolitan timetables within a train fleet constraint still takes 3–6 months. Freight operations pose a different but more immediate problem of finding sufficient motive power to cover trains with restricted departure and arrival time slots, often with long transit times and distances. The day-to-day, hour-by-hour nature of freight operations leads to allocation of motive power on demand.

Recently afresh look has been taken at computer-aided scheduling of multiple unit trains and locomotives. In one instance, the Melbourne Metropolitan Railways are being fundamentally reshaped by the dispersal of their central train stabling yard and maintenance depot. Computer aided scheduling has been used to explore fleet sizes for these revised operations. In another instance, the North Coast Railway in NSW was chosen as a locomotive scheduling testbed because of its long distance, constrained line capacity and high, but unbalanced, general freight flows against adverse grades. Significant theoretical reductions (over 12%) in the operational fleet (of two distinct classes of diesel-electric locomotives) were indicated even when locomotive positioning movements were largely constrained to being attached to revenue trains.