Introduction

Railway is a superior transport mode in terms of safety and transport capacity and has a very low environmental impact as compared to other modes. Owing to their highly public nature, railway systems can contribute to sustainable economic development in the world with the sound consideration of environment, by means of shortening and leading to predictable travelling time, reducing traffic congestion, developing distribution network, fostering tourism industry, etc.

With these merits of railways, the market of railway has been expanding worldwide, and some countries and regions have experiences of conducting railway projects. In fact, a wide variety of railways are planned across the world, such as urban transit systems for enhancing smoothness of intra-city traffic or improving connectivity with other transportation modes, high speed railways interoperable between different countries/lines or operated on a dedicated line with simple assets, and freight railway systems to transport bulk freight by heavy-haul trains or to reduce environmental impacts like CO₂ emission.

However, it is difficult to gain outcomes as expected due to the complexity of railway systems, as shown in 4.5, especially for organizations without accumulated experiences of railway projects.

Therefore, reviewing and organizing every factor smoothly and efficiently have been challenging due to a lack of standards for appropriate railway project planning.

This document provides guidance for a successful planning process, aimed at helping those engaged in railway project by identifying key points to be considered. It also helps those experienced in railway projects by avoiding:

— possible pitfalls in the planning process such as short-sightedness;
— lack of balanced consideration;
— reworking due to overlooking important factors;
— extra time and cost.

While ISO 21500 is a generic project management standard and does not provide guidance on or discuss any specific aspects in a project field, this document assists planners or decision makers involved in the railway project planning process by incorporating specific characteristics of railway projects.

The goal of this document is to achieve desirable planning of various railway projects which provide benefits to society by underlining key points of the planning process of railway projects to all players, such as planners, consultants, suppliers, governments, clients, capital investors, etc. For players who already have experiences of railway projects, this standard provide benefits where they can strengthen technical validities, plausibility, accountability, unintentional/balanced/harmonized fairness and open/clear/logical/persuasive (transparency) of their proposal, commercial products etc. This document can also be beneficial to players without an experience of railway projects as it provides knowledge to compensate for this lack of experience and thus promote an efficient planning of railway projects. As a result of these, deliverables based on this document will also give indirect benefits to other stakeholders including end users (passengers, consignors).

PD ISO/TR 21245:2018

Railway applications. Railway project planning process. Guidance on railway project planning

Current

Published:

31 Dec 2018