Dimensioning windows for railway infrastructure maintenance: Cost efficiency versus traffic impact

•Studies conflicting capacity requests from rail maintenance and traffic.•Presents methods for quantifying net effects of varying maintenance slot sizes.•Detailed equations for maintenance costs are developed.•Reports a cost benefit analysis for a real life case study.

The Swedish Transport Administration is introducing a new regime, called maintenance windows, for allocating train free slots reserved for maintenance tasks on the railway infrastructure. In this paper, a model for the assessment and the dimensioning of such maintenance windows is presented, which considers marginal effects on both the maintenance cost and the expected train traffic demand. The aim is to establish quantitative measures that can be used for comparing conflicting capacity requests from infrastructure maintenance and traffic operations on railway networks. The model is demonstrated in a cost benefit analysis for a real life case study on the Swedish Northern Main Line.