Una valutazione della capacità delle linee ferroviarie per i porti di Savona e Vado: soluzioni per effettuare servizi merci efficaci / A capacity assessment of the railways serving the ports of Savona and Vado: solutions for setting up effective freight services

The European Union “White paper on transports 2010-2020” claims for a modal shift in transportation of goods from road to railway. To reach this result, Italy needs both an improvement in railway systems and the use of long freight trains, in order to reduce the shipping costs. This paper presents an assessment of the railways connecting the ports of Savona and Vado with Piedmont. A renovated interest regards these linkages since the joint-venture (composed by Port Authority and APM Terminals – a division of Maersk Group) which is building a new intermodal platform in Vado, foresees that about 40% of its freights flows will be transferred inland by train. The aim of the study is therefore to define some operative solutions able to improve the capacity of these lines, providing a sufficient number of available train-paths for ensuring to the railway terminals at the ports of Savona and Vado a steady operation during the 24 hours. Several scenarios are analysed starting from a baseline, evaluating the benefits of innovative solutions like the use of relatively long freight trains (slighter shorter than 600 metres), the improvement of the signalling systems and the setting up of new crossing arrangements between long freight trains and passenger ones. The sum of these solutions gives an improvement in capacity near to 100%. This study has been carried out making use of the simulation package OpenTrack. Numerical data generated by this tool have been then post-processed with a Microsoft Excel algorithm (internally developed) in order to obtain the trains headways and, then, to produce some feasible timetables. The latter are therefore discussed and commented, thus finally drawing some figures for the capacity of each scenario.