Strategic planning of new rail network routes needs to consider many factors. These may be related to the physical environment the network will be delivered in, such as land use, slope, drainage, connectivity with road networks, and environmental constraints. They may also be related to demand considerations such as what’s the demand for rail services in a location, how many people could access the service in a 15-minute walk or drive, what opportunities could it create for businesses in the area. Rail providers also need to minimise disruption during maintenance works, ensuring works are well planned and co-ordinated, so that possessions and closures are for as short a duration as possible.
Esri’s ArcGIS provides a geospatial data analytics platform to bring together physical environment data with demand data to help evaluate routes based on a variety of criteria. This platform can be linked with other data analytics and data science toolkits to model scenarios and inform future timetables.