Evaluation of changes in corridor railway traffic in the Czech Republic during the pandemic year 2020

Abstract

Railway traffic was significantly affected by the global Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The article's main objective is to evaluate the changes in rail transport on rail corridors in the Czech Republic in 2020. The traffic from that year was compared with the values from previous years. The Czech Statistical Office provided the data base for general infor-mation about railway transport. This contains details of freight and passenger transport and the performance of that transport for the whole country, as reported by the Ministry of Transport. The presented evaluation of changes in rail traffic is based on traffic param-eters obtained from the railway infrastructure administrator of the Railway Infrastructure Administration. The changes were evaluated from three hundred points located on the cor-ridor railways. The first part of the article describes the evaluation of changes in each traffic parameter. In 2020 passenger traffic was characterised by a significant decrease in the total number of trains on most corridors. Cargo trains took up the railway traffic capacity released by the drop in demand for passenger trains, and the number of cargo trains increased as a result. Passenger trains were shortened due to the low demand for transport during the pandemic. This fact was reported in the parameter of average train length. The second part contains a comprehensive assessment based on clustering methods. The clustering enabled the detection of those sections of the rail corridors that had similar changes in rail traffic in all the monitored parameters in 2020. URL: https://www.gcass.science.upjs.sk/