Life Cycle Cost of a Railroad Switch

The article deals with setting out the optimum project design of railroad switches with the aim of finding an economical, effective and purposeful solution for a project. The Life Cycle Costs method (LCC) presents the best approach for this mentioned optimization. LCC does not take into account only the acquisition costs of a building, but summarizes all costs for the examined period. The very need to optimize costs for the construction and operation is ever more in demand in the context of increasing energy prices and relentless pressure to find new saving opportunities. The article also provides a comparison of individual stages of the life cycle of a project (investment- operation- maintenance) among the separate individual branches of construction and the railroad switch structure itself. With railroad switches as opposed to other structures appearing in the transport infrastructure there results almost an equality between investment and operational costs. The specific calculation of the LCC railroad switch is carried out within the framework of a case study for the modernization of the section of the railway in the town of Ceska Lipa (northern region of the Czech Republic), where the total costs for 27 pieces of railroad switches within a 30 year evaluation period reached 6 million €. On the basis of the research undertaken there were summarized the particular steps leading to the choice of an economical, effective and purposeful variant of a railway line design with its own impact on the design of railroad switches which significantly influence the price of the construction and thus the whole LCC.