Effects on capacity of european railway traffic management system level 3

The increasing demand for transport and the shift from road to rail cause the congestion in railway infrastructure, with low quality of service. To reduce congestion and enhance the infrastructure capacity some solution, such as planning and constructing of new infrastructure or upgrading the existing infrastructure, are costly and time consuming. Therefore, it is necessary to manage capacity of infrastructure in efficient way by enabling trains to run with shorter distance from each other. In this context, the importance of Control Command and Signalling systems (CCSs) and their role to provide a service with short headway is clear. This thesis studies the effectiveness of the European Railway Traffic Management System/European Train Control System Level 3 Full Moving Block (ERTMS/ETCS L3 FMB). The combination of two methods allows achieving this goal: 1) analytical method provided by International Union of Railways (UIC) in leaflet Code 406, that is called compression method to evaluate infrastructure occupation, considering blocking time sequences and related variables (to calculate minimum headway) for each CCS configuration. 2) Data extracted from RailSys simulation tool (minimum headway) for each CCS configuration to calculate Capacity Consumption (CC) applying the compression method. In this way, it is possible to compare the effectives of different CCSs against and discuss about results of the two different methods. To perform this evaluation, the selected case study was the Northbound of city line in Stockholm (Citybanan) in peak period. The line is a double track line dedicated to commuter trains with homogeneous traffic. The results confirm that: • ERTMS/ETCS Level 3 Full Moving Block provide shorter headway and capacity consumption compared to other signalling systems based on fixed block technology; • In ERTMS/ETCS Level 2, the location of indication points and braking curves significantly affect the infrastructure’s capacity. ETCS L2 offers shorter headway and lower capacity consumption comparing to legacy system.