An Ineffective Transport-Focused, Causality-Based Approach to Station-to-Station Railway Freight Network Design

Rail ineffective transport refers to meaningless and unvalued transportation in the rail freight system, which including convective transportation, roundabout transportation, and unprocessed transportation. Ineffective transport does not only result in a strain on transportation capacity and increase costs but also imposes significant external pollution on low-carbon development. This paper attempts to study ineffective transport among rail stations. Base on defining the concept of ineffective transportation, it analyzes the ineffective transport volume and ineffective transport propagation on each station, which helps to seek more efficiently the core ineffective transport stations in the rail freight network. To better understand the mechanism of ineffective transport propagation effect at the rail freight transport system-level, an ineffective transport causality network (ITCN) was built based on the Granger causality test. Through the topology model of ineffective transport at 50 stations in China from 2013 to 2016, the results show that the ineffective transport of each station affects approximately 12 stations and also affected by 12 stations on average. Large-sized stations are affected by more stations than downstream. Small-sized and medium-sized stations are opposed. There are four core stations in this ITCN, and optimization of the ineffective transport at these four stations will save nearly fifty million kilogram of transport volume per year.