Practical use of the UIC 406 capacity leaflet by including timetable tools in the investigations

This paper describes the relatively new UIC 406 method for calculating capacity consumption on railway lines. The UIC 406 method is an easy and effective way of calculating the capacity consumption, but it is possible to expound the UIC 406 method in different ways which can lead to different capacity consumptions. This paper describes how the UIC 406 method is expounded in Denmark. The paper describes the importance of choosing the right length of the line sections examined and how line sections with multiple track sections are examined. Furthermore, the possibility of using idle capacity to run more trains is examined. At the end of the paper a method to examine the expected capacity utilization of future timetables is presented. The method is based on the plan of operation instead of the exact (known) timetable.