Abstract
Railways are a key infrastructure of any modern country where major
disruptions and large delays compromising the correct mode of operation occur
on a daily basis. Despite their importance, a general theoretical understanding
of the underlying causes is still lacking so that a deeper comprehension of
these critical situations will impact the effectiveness of traffic handling
policies.Here, we report a detailed study of the Italian and German railway
networks based on an extensive dataset retrieved during year 2015. We detect
universal laws ruling the occurrence of delay at stations and find that both
the Italian and German systems display a sort of delay contagion effect. We
exploit these results to propose a simple modelling scheme of train dynamics on
railway networks which is capable of reproducing the dynamical features of real
systems.
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