Preserving an existing network based on engineering criteria and fixed renewal intervals has been the dominant approach to rail maintenance for many years.
Long-term planning of rail maintenance and renewal can reduce unit costs, because maintenance equipment and staff will be better adapted to the type and volume of works envisaged, whereas there will be less need to change plans at short notice. This holds for both in-house works and outsourced maintenance. It is, however, necessary for rail infrastructure to respond to future transport demand patterns and thus boost traffic and revenues from user charges. Multi-annual contracts should force both parties to take a long-term view and develop maintenance plans on the basis of the infrastructure manager’s business plan and thus on future service demand.
Under the pressure of ‘use it or lose it’, the managers usually schedule most maintenance activities towards the end of the year. The logic of public budgeting is such that budgets tend to be cut if they are not fully used in previous years. Massive maintenance works at this time also cause more delays and disrupt the service. Abandoning yearly planning in favour of multi-annual schemes thus reduces overall disruption as maintenance works can be planned such that traffic is disrupted as little as possible. Once effective performance regimes have been introduced everywhere, this strategy will pay off even more, as the infrastructure manager will have to compensate users for any disruption he causes.
Where a multi-annual contract includes only certain parts of life cycle costs, for example either renewal or maintenance costs, this can create incentives for exceeding life cycle costs or can lead infrastructure ma-nagers to do too little maintenance, knowing that renewal costs can be recovered from the state at a later stage. Such deferred maintenance can lead to lower infrastructure quality.
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