Simulation of new proposed urban passenger transport railway line in Bratislava connected with the TEN-T European corridor.

Description:

Planned connection of European railway corridors TEN-T (Trans European Network for Transport) is the biggest transportation infrastructure project in Slovak capital city Bratislava. The planned railway line (crossing the Danube river underground) is supposed to connect several city districts and should be used by international as well as regional and urban trains.

problems and study goals:

The objective of the study was to examine designed transportation concept of the rail connection between Bratislava Predmestie and Bratislava Petržalka (including 4 stations and 3 stops) in order to address following problems:

• Verification of feasibility of the proposed railway line operation timetable with 3 and 5 minutes interval.
• Evaluation of consequences of train delays.
• Evaluation of consequences of prolonged stay duration of train sets at Bratislava Nivy train stop.
• Identification of possible operational conflicts and proposal of countermeasures.

study results:

Detailed simulation model of the investigated railway line operation has been developed within the frame of the study and multiple simulation experiments were conducted. Simulation results clearly indicated that both proposed train timetables are feasible. With the help of simulation experiments that considered possible delays of randomly chosen trains, it was possible to verify that specified train delays have no significant influence on the traffic. Simulation study also revealed several problem areas on the railway infrastructure and employed detailed continuous simulation of train running dynamics contributed to the corrections of proposed train running times.