Enhancing Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation of Railway Switches and Crossings Through 6D BIM

Climate change accelerates the degradation of railway switches and crossings (S&C), forcing network operators to deploy localized adaptation interventions. The secondary environmental and economic penalties of these proactive measures remain unquantified, creating a severe resilience-versus-emissions paradox. This study integrates a 3D building information model (BIM) with an ISO-compliant, cradle-to-gate life-cycle assessment (LCA) and life-cycle costing (LCC) framework. The digital model extracts deterministic volumetric data to evaluate the embodied emissions, embodied energy, and capital material costs of 15 climate adaptation strategies targeting extreme heat, landslides, snow, and flooding. Results indicate that permanent structural interventions, such as subgrade grouting, increase baseline embodied greenhouse gas emissions by up to 114% and capital material costs by 74%. Temporary interventions, including chemical de-icing and thermal coatings, yield initial embodied energy reductions exceeding 50% relative to permanent structural counterparts. However, these reactive measures generate cumulative carbon penalties through rapid material degradation and the secondary galvanic corrosion of primary steel assets. Because low embodied emissions do not inherently correlate with superior geomechanical resilience, this framework operates exclusively as a deterministic screening tool. Final infrastructure deployment decisions require integrating these primary environmental and capital matrices with concurrent structural finite element modelling to comprehensively evaluate adaptation efficacy.