01333002

Component

Railways around the world are experiencing growth in traffic demand and need to expand their network and line capacity. The commuter railway operator in Taiwan, the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA), is no exception. To accommodate the substantial future demand, the TRA is interested in understanding the potential benefit of adopting various advanced signaling systems, such as hybrid or moving-block systems. Appropriate evaluation tools are needed for this purpose; therefore, in this study, the authors developed a set of analytical capacity models for commuter rail operations with advanced signaling systems. These models were implemented in the busiest corridor in the TRA system. The empirical results show that advanced signaling systems generally have positive capacity effects; however, the benefit of adopting hybrid systems may not be substantially higher than that of adopting a conventional signaling system designed with ideal block lengths. In addition, certain sections’ capacities remain unchanged with upgraded signaling systems due to constraints from the station track layouts. For these sections, improving track layouts would be the most beneficial approach to increase the capacities. Therefore, all possible capacity improvement alternatives should be considered together to determine the optimal capacity improvement plan. The use of these proposed capacity models can help railway agencies with similar operational environments on their capacity management and resource planning.

01329018

11-3424

English

24p

2011

Transportation Research Board 90th Annual Meeting

DVD

Figures; Maps; References (26) ; Tables (6)

Railroad commuter service; Railroad signaling; Railroad tracks; Railroad traffic; Railroad transportation

Capacity models; Rail line capacity

Taiwan

Operations and Traffic Management; Passenger Transportation; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2011 Paper #11-3424

TRIS, TRB

Feb 17 2011 6:30PM