FREIGHT RAILWAY TRANSPORT COSTS EVALUATION

The structure, extension and quality of transport infrastructures and services are factors that can decisively influence the development models of a territory. Rail freight transport can play a primary role because it allows cost-effectiveness and environmental sustainability; however, the promotion of investment projects in the rail freight sector is not easy and transport operators are not always able to tackle expenditure and policy issues. The paper proposes an articulated methodological approach for the estimation of freight railways investment and operating costs in relation with existing and/or planned contexts, giving some example of reference points and the magnitude, in railway company point of view. The proposed methodology allows to overcome many weakness points of the approaches in technical sector literature. On the basis of the formulated approach, having identified the relations of the individual cost items on the inputs, a computational algorithm has been defined, it can be used as a decision support tool by railway operators or expert/ planners. The proposed methodological approach has been tested with reference to a case study.