The restructuring and future of the British Rail system

The paper focuses mainly on reviewing and analysing the restructuring of Britain’s railways, including the re-cently published proposals for its future. The objective is to investigate the current market structure, the market behaviour and the overall performance of the British rail system over time. In order to learn what other people think about the problems of the industry and their solutions, interviews with key people associated with the in-dustry and several submissions of some key interest parties to the 2004 railway structure review are used in this paper. The results are that all major characteristics of the rail reform in Britain are seen as workable and empiri-cal data reveal that they have worked comparatively successfully, before Hatfield. Because of bad implementa-tion some of the features, and in particular the private infrastructure manager, have not worked well. Most of the problems have arisen because of indecision over refranchising and the disruption following Hatfield. Further-more the policy of the Government after Hatfield created an extremely risk averse culture within the industry, at a time when Railtrack had not enough insights about the state of the rail network. Although empirically unjustified, safety improvement became the main issue, costs escalated and reliability and productivity experienced a huge fall. The current White Paper “The Future of Rail” is seen as partially misleading and not at all detailed. At present it is only clear that the proposals will result in further increase of political interference. Much will depend on the precise implementation of the proposed measures and therefore the future of British rail remains unclear

Approximation of Periodic PDE Solutions with Anisotropic Translation Invariant Spaces

We approximate the quasi-static equation of linear elasticity in translation invariant spaces on the torus. This unifies different FFT-based discretisation methods into a common framework and extends them to anisotropic lattices. We analyse the connection between the discrete solution spaces and demonstrate the numerical benefits. Finite element methods arise as a special case of periodised Box spline translates

Optimal Scheduling of Combined Heat and Power Generation Considering Heating Grid Dynamics

As the share of renewable generation increases in electric grids, the traditionally heat driven operation of combined heat and power plants (CHPs) reaches its limits. Thermal storage is required for a flexible operation of CHPs. This work proposes three novel methods to use a heating grid as thermal storage by exploiting its thermal dynamics. These include the first approach proving global optimality, a novel linear formulation of grid dynamics and an easily real world applicable approach

Combating Gender Norms with a Lipstick Gun: Lady Gaga’s Judas.

"Judas" is a track on Lady Gaga's album Born this way which was released in 2011. Given that it attracted a lot of attention not only in popular media but also in several academic works, this might indicate the potential for discussion within this specific religious theme. Many questions, including whether the message of the song intends to criticize religion or whether Judas could potentially be blasphemous, were raised

The impact of terminal re-organisation on belly-hold freight operation chains at airports

While it is widely acknowledged that airport re-organisation from destination to dedicated airline group terminals makes passenger travel more seamless, more efficient and also more profitable for both airlines and airports, there is little known about the impacts of such change on freight and in particular belly-hold cargo and luggage chains. Our analysis includes data from all airports in Australia and discusses cases from around the world but focuses primarily on the proposed re-organisation of Sydney Kingsford Smith airport. This paper reveals a significant relationship between international freight volumes, terminal organisation and aircraft type usage, indicating potential problems related to airport design and freight value chains at the airport. However, our interviews of relevant stakeholders don’t support these findings and show, beside some drawbacks, a number of benefits for belly-hold freight operations that can result from airline group terminal organisation

Efficient procurement of public air services - Lessons learned from European transport authorities' perspectives

This paper aims to derive lessons and best practices from the different European experiences by viewing issues from a public transport authority perspective. The heart of this paper is a survey of European air service procurement authorities. We discuss the authorities’ perspectives on why they fund a PSO including likely future funding trends and investigate various aspects of the procedures connected with the PSO process (transparency of the subsidy amount, risk sharing with the operator, incentives for operator, vetting of the operator and use of specialist advice). This paper also explores various aspects of the obligations authorities impose upon routes and operator (e.g. maximum fare, social discounts, ticketing, timetabling, size of aircraft, air cargo requirements). A particular interest of the paper is connected with the authorities’ interest in marketing the PSO as well as with the authorities’ perspective on promoting and enjoying sufficient competition in their PSO tendering exercises. The derived lessons from the EU experience are discussed in the light of their use in assisting policy makers in promoting and drafting their own regional air transport programs (e.g., Russia) or in further developing existing schemes such as the Remote Air Services Subsidy Scheme in Australia

Strategic Management of Integrated Public Transport and its Value in the Air Bus Service Context

While there is a well-developed body of academic literature on how to procure ground transport services and how to integrate those services, there is virtually no literature on how to do this in the context of air services (in combination with ground services). This paper aims to substantially contribute to the area of strategic management of integrated transport based on the concept of mobility as a service including revenue management, marketing operations management and also policy making. All these areas relate to improving efficiency, acceptability and profitability of air services to regional and remote areas (but also air services more generally) that can benefit significantly from any form of integration (integrated fares, timetables, customer information, marketing etc.). We show that customer-centric public transport integration with aviation as the highest priority can create competitive advantage of the air bus transport value chain as particularly in the regional aviation context the total trip travel experience is of high importance given the potential competition from private car travel, except for island air services. The public ground transport experience will therefore not only impact on the perceived flight product quality but also on other products along the aviation value chain. In terms of the demand analysis and travel choice literature, we reveal that integrated planning and management efforts such as joint timetabling and joint pricing are most likely to have an impact on competitive advantage, demand (passenger numbers plus yields, measured in the customers’ willingness to pay) and hence the profitability of regional air services. We use stated choice experiments for flights from Sydney to regional NSW, Australia to establish the willingness to pay for integrated add-ons to scheduled regional air services