Scientific paper ID 350 : 2009/2

The yards are facilities that reassemble freight cars into freight trains. These facilities play an essential role for providing the freight transportation service by rail. However, they are non-revenue producing elements for the railway freight companies and therefore keeping them unutilized is not acceptable. In this paper, a double-ended flat-shunted yard is studied by a two step approach employing G/G/m queues and discrete-event-based simulations. The results obtained demonstrate significantly low utilisation levels of the subsystems of this yard. Therefore, possible improvements through changes in traffic rules and yard work technology are investigated and discussed.