Charging for Scarce Rail Capacity in Britain: A Case Study

The aim of this paper is to examine the feasibility of identifying an appropriate rail scarcity charge which would make operators pay for their use of rail capacity in line with the opportunity cost of the use of these slots and to give some idea of the likely effects of such charges. The way in which we do this is to use a passenger demand forecasting model, PRAISE, to consider a situation on the East Coast Main Line which is characterized by scarce capacity and a degree of competition.