A Game-based Analysis of Freight Paths Allocation with a Case Study on Great Britain Brighton Main Line

In recent years the rail sector has experienced significant demand growth that leads to increased competition for the scarce resource of railway capacity. In Great Britain, the current policy tends to favour passenger trains to freight operators. This study explores how existing railway capacity allocation process can be improved in order to strengthen the competitiveness of freight train operators. A decision that is faced by the Infrastructure Manager herein is to determine how the scarce resource should be allocated among the different operators such that the overall social welfare can be maximised. In particular, we are interested to look at the implications on social welfare, system efficiency, and (re-)distribution of benefits among operators should more capacity be allocated for freight trains. The research questions were investigated through a set of simulation games based on a real world scenario collected from the Brighton Main Line (BML) in Southeast England. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to model and analyse impacts of the hypothesised preferential treatment of freight operators under several sets of regulations and bidding frameworks on efficiency, equity, and social welfare. Our findings reveal improvements in social welfare and equity among different operators, but loss of rail system efficiency due to the increased level of heterogeneity seen in the train mix. From the perspective of infrastructure utilisation, on heavily congested mixed traffic lines, investments for freight train services should be prioritised in order to reduce the speed differentials between slower freight and faster passenger trains and increase flexibility of scheduling and reduce capacity loss. It is also found that infrastructure managers’ expertise has an important impact on the quality of the initially proposed timetabling solution. We conclude with a list of suggested improvements to the current Great Britain policy so that the needs of freight operators and hence their customers are better represented.