North SEA - Baltic Express : Travel time, costs and benefits of a direct train connection on the Amsterdam - Berlin - Warsaw Corridor in relation to national and European plans

The North Sea - Baltic Express is a direct railway connection between Amsterdam, Berlin and Warsaw that is proposed by this thesis with scenarios of different time scopes and infrastructure. The aim of this research is to assess and compare the main impacts of the scenarios, which are based on creating the proposed direct connection and existing plans and proposals (national and Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) plans, the Metropolitan Network proposal), on railway travel time, costs and travel time benefits. Although the scenarios are compared with benefit-cost ratios, a full cost-benefit analysis is outside the scope of this work. The research questions consist of one main question and three sub-questions, namely: RQ1: How do the NSBE scenarios (S1: direct train on current infrastructure; S2: plans until 2050 finished; S3: the Metropolitan Network proposal finished) compare, based on benefit-cost ratios, on the Amsterdam - Berlin - Warsaw railway corridor? RQ1.1: What are the effects of the scenarios on travel time? RQ1.2: What investment costs (in €) and operation costs (in €/year) do the scenarios induce? RQ1.3: What are the benefits due to travel time saved (in €/year) that the scenarios bring? The answer to the main research question was found by answering the sub-questions first. Firstly, an analysis of the current Dutch, German and Polish railway networks and a review of national and European plans and proposals for the corridor were carried out with collecting the appropriate data. This allowed for the determination of routings and stops for the North Sea - Baltic Express in the given scenarios. Next, the travel time for each scenario was determined with the routing information in OpenTrack (2024), a professionally used programme for simulating rail systems in time. Investment and operation costs were estimated with the EU toolset for estimating costs of railway EU projects (Attinà et al., 2018), relevant literature and, if available, public data on future projects. Benefits due to the travel time saved were calculated with the railway demand coming from the RHDHV random regret minimisation model (RHDHV, 2018), values of travel time savings and the saved travel time. The cost and benefit results were used to determine benefit-cost ratios, which allowed for comparisons of the scenarios with one another and across the three countries. The results for the three sub-questions coming from the aforementioned process are summarised in Table A. Although the benefit-cost ratios are presented, these are not a result of a full cost-benefit analysis and do not allow for a recommendation on whether to realise the scenarios, but can be for a comparison of them.