A general model of railway transportation capacity has been developed, which models mass transportation capacity and volume transportation capacity per unit time. It can also be adapted to passenger transportation. The model is easy to use and can handle trade-offs between conflicting effects. It is a suitable tool in capacity planning for preliminary assessment of the capacity effects of candidate investment and operating scenarios, and can point to areas where detailed analysis with other methods should be applied. Application of the capacity model to cases of higher axle loads and higher speeds in freight transportation showed significant and mixed capacity effects that would not have been obvious otherwise.

In this paper, we analyse how railway maintenance costs are affected by different levels of railway line capacity utilisation. Previous studies have focused on the wear and tear of the infrastructure, while this paper shows that it is important to also acknowledge the heterogeneity of the maintenance production environment. Specifically, we estimate marginal costs for traffic using econometric methods on a panel dataset from Sweden and show that these costs increase with line capacity utilisation. The results are significant considering that current EU regulation (2015/909) states that track access charges can be based on marginal costs, with the aim of creating an effective use of available infrastructure capacity.

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