Investigation of infrastructure maintenance cost of intercity railway in Thailand

Abstract

Infrastructure in the rail system requires considerable investment in construction and maintenance. In many countries, railway operators have been able to share the capacity of the railroad to achieve efficient infrastructure usage. For the development of Thailand's railway network system in the future, it is possible for separating management between infrastructure and the rolling stock operations. Therefore, it is necessary to know the costs and factors that affects the cost of infrastructure, including government budget subsidies, to be the basis for track utilization charges. In this study, the costs of infrastructure construction and maintenance on 5 route sections representing different traffic characteristics were studied by using records from 5 years. It was found that the maintenance cost of the telecommunication and signalling system ranges from 1.3 to 1.7 million baht per year per station. The average annual maintenance cost of the railway track was 280,000 to 310,000 baht per track per kilometre. The traffic density was found to be the main factor that influenced the maintenance cost.