Conference article

Thomas Graffagnino
Timetable and Network Design, Infrastructure, Swiss Federal Railways, Bern, Switzerland

Roland Schäfer
Energy, Infrastructure, Swiss Federal Railways, Zollikofen, Switzerland

Matthias Tuchschmid
Energy, Infrastructure, Swiss Federal Railways, Zollikofen, Switzerland

Marco Weibel
Energy, Infrastructure, Swiss Federal Railways, Zollikofen, Switzerland

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Published in: RailNorrköping 2019. 8th International Conference on Railway Operations Modelling and Analysis (ICROMA), Norrköping, Sweden, June 17th – 20th, 2019

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 69:23, p. 340-349

Published: 2019-09-13

ISBN: 978-91-7929-992-7

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

On the network of the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) there is huge variability in the energy consumption for comparable train runs. Consequently, there is a significant potential to achieve energy savings in the context of improved driving strategy, which can be influenced by providing useful information to the train driver. As part of the smartrail programme operated by the Swiss railway industry, several energy savings measures are due to be implemented. As a first step in the smartrail energy measures, SBB conducted a pilot test in summer 2018. This pilot involved 473 test runs on two important passenger trains in Switzerland: the long-distance train IC5 and the local train S12. For each train run, based on effective routing, train composition, speed restrictions and timetable fixed points, a speed profile and new service times for each station were calculated early each morning for all the train runs of the day.

A survey among the test train drivers showed that more than 80% of them would welcome the rollout of the additional information in the near future. A comparison of the accompanied journeys against the ‘baseline’, i.e. same trains in the same period without additional information, shows a significant reduction in energy consumption without affecting punctuality: depending on the train journey, the accompanied runs consumed between 1.4% and 13.3% less energy per gross tonne-kilometre. The high levels of acceptance by the train drivers combined with the significant energy savings achieved without affecting punctuality is very promising. For this reason, a systemwide rollout is currently being investigated and could be started by late 2019.

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