Estimating the relative cost of track damage mechanisms: combining economic and engineering approaches.

This paper proposes a new, two-stage methodology to estimate the relative marginal cost of different types of vehicles running on the rail infrastructure. This information is important particularly where the infrastructure managers wish to differentiate the track access charges by vehicle type for the purpose of incentivizing the development and use of more track-friendly vehicles. EU legislation requires that the European infrastructure managers set the access charges based on the incremental (marginal) cost of the running trains on their networks.