Rail Cargo on the Lisbon-Madrid High-Speed Rail Line: an assessment of feasibility

摘要

This thesis presents an application to deal with the introduction of containerized cargo on the high-speed rail line operations between Lisbon and Madrid. The future rail line is a large, rigid and complex system with a long cycle of operation. Therefore, initial design needs to be carefully planned since once it’s installed it is very difficult and expensive to modify. In order to plan the infrastructure, its life cycle performance needs to be considered, given that the performance of the infrastructure depends not only on the initial project preparation and design but also on the maintenance and renewal decisions taken during the life cycle. In addition, in order to guarantee an optimal long-term result for the railway system, the effects of decisions taken should be methodically evaluated. Therefore, it is mandatory that all options (pre and post-operation) are evaluated in order to better serve demand and improve cargo investment efficiency. For different reasons until now, cargo was never a target revenue segment considered for high-speed rail lines development. The main reasons for this are the serious maintenance and operational constraints that occur when conventional freight-rail trains are ridded in a high-speed rail line, namely in terms of the track maintenance rehabilitation and safety for passengers. The current research aims to study the inclusion of ‘light rail-freight’ service on the Lisbon-Madrid high-speed rail connection in the investment evaluation through the use of dedicated rolling stock to deliver cargo. The expectation is to handle the extra capacity of the line derived from the passenger’s demand for introducing cargo services, aiming at a better efficiency for the investment. The analysis takes the passenger and cargo operations into consideration as well as all the impacts on the several potential stakeholders such as government, infrastructure manager, operator, other transport modes operators and society. This brings a multi-dimension into the decision process turning the analysis more complex but also more comprehensive. Stakeholders typically have different objectives and concerns. Their perspective and commitment to project varies according to these objectives and concerns. Thus, solutions need to find a compromising platform between those stakeholders in order to become implementable. As a result, a more comprehensive multi-stakeholder method is preferably used, instead a traditional cost-benefit approach. The feasibility of this method, called MATE – Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration, for dealing with this complex transportation issues and associated constraints is discussed and the result is positive, not only for the problem addressed but also for the recognition of its potential to be applicable to other transportation domains. If one takes into consideration that rail-cargo activity should integrate a rail-road facility in order to turn the service commercially viable, results show the ability of the investment to integrate cargo trains in the daily routine of the line evaluated.