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European railway policy stands for an open accessinfrastructure and competitive train services. Access charges for the use ofthe infrastructure are the remaining link between the infra-structure managerand the railway undertaking, between infrastructure and vehicles. When accesscharges are only seen as a simple financial transfer between railwayundertakings and infrastructure manager, based upon train-kilometres orgross-tonne-kilometres only, the optimisation of sub-systems is incentivisedand overall costs rise. This book presents a detailed engineering approach tocalculate charges on direct cost level, considering infrastructure andsuperstructure properties, vehicle properties, and the diverse demands ofdifferent users. A discussion of different track deterioration models as wellas a superstructure based infrastructure model show by far better modelaccuracies in terms of cost recovery than current models do. The result is detailedenough to guarantee best knowledge concerning cost causation on one hand, andsimple enough to be ready for implementation on the other hand: InnovativeTrack Access Charges should be levied in a way to achieve the lowest systemcosts possible.

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