Proceedings of the
35th European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL2025) and
the 33rd Society for Risk Analysis Europe Conference (SRA-E 2025)
15 – 19 June 2025, Stavanger, Norway
Assessing CO2-e Emission of Railway Crossing During Maintenance Activities
1Department of Civil, Environmental and Natural Resources Engineering, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden.
2Faculty of Science and Technology, UiT, The Arctic, University of Norway, Tromso, Norway.
3Swedish Transport Administration, Trafikverket, Luleå, Sweden
ABSTRACT
Railway operation is considered as the most sustainable transportation. However, such observation often neglects environmental considerations during the maintenance stage, which is a carbon-intensive phase. This study aims to quantify carbon emissions related to the maintenance stage. In this study, we focused on railway turnout crossings (fixed manganese and movable) as a use-case located on Bandel (track section) 120 near Boden in Sweden for CO2 estimations. We utilize 14 years (2010-2023) of maintenance data collected from the Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket or TRV) databases. Results indicate that logistics (transportation) during the maintenance stage are the most significant contributors to fuel consumption and CO2-e emissions. Further, the interrelation between fixed and movable crossings demonstrates that the environmental impact of movable crossings is substantially higher than that of fixed crossings. The insight of this study can be integrated into decision-making models that combine Life Cycle Cost (LCC) and climate impact to optimize railway crossing replacement strategies.
Keywords: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Carbon emissions, Sustainable transportation, Railway maintenance, Railway infrastructure, Carbon footprint, Diesel, Emission factor, Environmental impact, Switches and Crossings (S & C), Greenhouse Gases (GHGs), Carbon footprint.
