Impact of timetable structure on the performance of rail corridors

Railway timetabling in Europe is shifting towards passenger-centered, connection-optimized network timetables with synchronized stops at major nodes. This changes structural properties, affecting capacity utilization and corridor robustness. This paper analyzes the effects resulting from this new timetabling paradigm by assessing the relationship between timetable structure and corridor capacity. It establishes an approach to systematically relate structural tendencies of timetable concepts to their implications for performance by examining distributions of timetable ensembles for specific concepts in a structural feature space. Using a heuristic ensemble generation method, we study timetables with varying structural properties. Features quantifying service characteristics are defined and evaluated for their impact on stability using Kendall’s correlation and regression. Two subclasses — periodic timetables with regular patterns and integrated (timed-transfer) timetables — are compared through their ensemble distributions in the feature space. For 3106 timetables, running time margins emerge as the dominant factor in corridor stability, especially when converting to timed-transfer timetables on existing, non-travel-time-optimized infrastructure. Results suggest that, with more structured timetables, running time supplements rather than tightly constrained buffer times deserve greater attention in capacity assessment and the dimensioning of service concepts on rail corridors. • The impact of structural properties of timetables on the performance of rail corridors is studied. • Ensembles of periodic and integrated timetables are compared with respect to stability. • A versatile timetable-ensemble generation approach to analyze key features for traffic stability is presented. • A sensitivity analysis of operational stability with respect to structural features of timetables is performed. • New insights on the working of timetable supplements in ensuring robustness are obtained.