Bergen and Dovre lines: 2027

The Norwegian Rail Administration JBV manages about 4100 km of lines, mostly single track. It is pursuing an ambitious improvement plan that will gradually improve the capacity of the network. The Bergen and Dovre lines connect Bergen and Trondheim, the second and third largest city in Norway with the capital Oslo. They breathtaking landscape they cross is admired by tourists from all over the world, while the line also pays a vital role for freight transport.

JBV started a project, called R2027, to select and define the key requirements of the investments effectively required to reach the target capacity and robustness of the operations avoiding unnecessary expenses. This is exactly one of the aims of the so-called “Planning Loop approach” used by trenolab. trenolab was asked to jointly develop a set of timetable alternatives and infrastructure improvements to operate the expected services with minimum investment. Once the timetables were defined, microscopic simulation was used to test the timetable and the proposed investments, identifying their weaknesses. The results of the study allowed classifying the improvements by their relevance to the proposed timetables, considering the measures without which the timetable would be impossible, and those who contribute, at different degrees, to the robustness of operations. This classification appears as a key output, since it allows choosing the most important interventions, should a limited budget be available, or should it be allocated over a longer period of time.