Assessment of railway infrastructure improvements: valuation of costs, energy consumption and emissions

The efficiency of rail freight transport has significant impact on climate change compared to other modes. However, railways still struggle to take larger shares of the growing total transport volumes especially in developing countries, where priority tends to be given to doubling tracks parallel to the existing infrastructure instead of building entirely new optimized alignments. In this context, this paper discusses the lifespan impacts of these two strategies on a real case study in Brazil. We compared the doubling costs of tracks parallel to an existing route and the respective construction costs of 100 new optimized alignments, and the fuel and CO₂-equivalent costs of four pollutants of trains running in 20 services over a timespan. Results show that the CO₂-equivalent costs are significantly lower in the optimized alignments. Scenarios varying the yearly Brazilian economic growth and different monetary CO₂-equivalent values show that 111 and 16 years are required to fuel and emissions compensate for the greater construction costs of the optimized alignments in the respective scenarios of average 1.2% and 4.6% economic growth over the years and CO₂-equivalent values of USD21.9/tonCO₂ and USD944.5/tonCO₂.