No abstract

Several demands, such as passenger traffic, freight and maintenance works, are competing for a portion of shared and scarce resource: rail infrastructure capacity. In Western Europe, recent decades have been marked by a tendency to favour the scheduling of train paths based on a regular-interval timetable. France has recently adopted this scheduling approach. The paper focuses on the position of freight in this peculiar timetabling context and addresses the specific issue of freight flexibility, based on current French experience. The analysis is above all carried out from the infrastructure manager's perspective. It is mainly supported by the results of a series of about thirty interviews, carried out in 2012 and 2013 with the parties involved in the French timetabling process. The paper highlights that rail freight flexibility in the process has limitations and supports the thesis that anticipation is an essential issue for the infrastructure manager. Fitting freight train paths into the timetable is essentially a delicate balance of interests.