Worldwide the transport sector faces several issues related to the rising of traffic demand such as congestion, energy consumption, noise, pollution, safety, etc. Trying to stem the problem, the European Commission is encouraging a modal shift towards railway, considered as one of the key factors for the development of a more sustainable European transport system. The coveted increase in railway share of transport demand for the next decades and the attempt to open up the rail market (for freight, international and recently also local services) strengthen the attention to capacity usage of the system. This contribution proposes a synthetic methodology for the capacity and utilisation analysis of complex interconnected rail networks; the procedure has a dual scope since it allows both a theoretically robust examination of suburban rail systems and a solid approach to be applied, with few additional and consistent assumptions, for feasibility or strategic analysis of wide networks (by efficiently exploiting the use of Big Data and/or available Open Databases). In particular the approach proposes a schematization of typical elements of a rail network (stations and line segments) to be applied in case of lack of more detailed data; in the authors’ opinion the strength points of the presented procedure stem from the flexibility of the applied synthetic methods and from the joint analysis of nodes and lines. The article, after building a quasi-automatic model to carry out several analyses by changing the border conditions or assumptions, even presents some general abacuses showing the variability of capacity/utilization of the network’s elements in function of basic parameters. This has helped in both the presented case studies: one focuses on a detailed analysis of the Naples’ suburban node, while the other tries to broaden the horizon by examining the whole European rail network with a more specific zoom on the Belgium area. The first application shows how the procedure can be applied in case of availability of fine-grained data and for metropolitan/regional analysis, allowing a precise detection of possible bottlenecks in the system and the individuation of possible interventions to relieve the high usage rate of these elements. The second application represents an on-going attempt to provide a broad analysis of capacity and related parameters for the entire European railway system. It explores the potentiality of the approach and the possible exploitation of different ‘Open and Big Data’ sources, but the outcomes underline the necessity to rely on proper and adequate information; the accuracy of the results significantly depend on the design and precision of the input database. In conclusion, the proposed methodology aims to evaluate capacity and utilisation rates of rail systems at different geographical scales and according to data availability; the outcomes might provide valuable information to allow efficient exploitation and deployment of railway infrastructure, better supporting policy (e.g. investment prioritization, rail infrastructure access charges) and helping to minimize costs for users. The presented case studies show that the method allows indicative evaluations on the use of the system and comparative analysis between different elementary components, providing a first identification of ‘weak’ links or nodes for which, then, specific and detailed analyses should be carried out, taking into account more in depth their actual configuration, the technical characteristics and the real composition of the traffic (i.e. other elements influencing the rail capacity, such as: the adopted operating systems, the station traffic/route control & safety system, the elastic release of routes, the overlap of block sections, etc.).

The aim of this paper is to describe the postgraduate course in “Railway Infrastructure and Systems Engineering” at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, funded by rail companies operating in Italy. It represents a successful example of cooperation between academia and industry in the field of railway transport. The success of the program is attested by its placement (the 90% of the graduates find an employment within six months in the companies which support the course; this percentage reached the 98% in the last three editions) and by the fact that every year it receives many more applications (almost 400 last year) than the maximum number of students that can attend the course (30). The main factors that make this course successful are its multidisciplinary training and the very close collaboration between the University and partner companies. In fact, the program of each module is designed both by academics and by managers of the companies in order to ensure an up-to-date teaching, which provides both the academic and the industrial point of view of any rail subject; this enables students to obtain a complete vision of the railway system, so to be able to work in any of the partner companies.