Abstract
The authors propose the development of "Ultra-Convenient Rail Transport (UCRT)" to make a drastic improvement of passengers' convenience (or reduce their inconvenience) on rail transport and thus strengthen its competitiveness over other modes of transport, especially road transport with the expected emergence of autonomous (driverless) cars into the market in the near future. UCRT is expected to have the capability to better meet individual needs of the rail passengers; in order to do that, drastic increase in train frequency to the level high enough to be called "ultra-high frequency" would be essential. In this paper, the discussions are made as to how this drastic frequency improvement can be made possible, especially by means of the introduction of new scheduling techniques. Realizing ultra-high frequency train operation would require some breakthroughs, such as synchronization control of trains under the moving block signalling system, together with the introduction of the concepts of scheduling schemes designed for higher frequency operations, such as the "zonal separation" schemes for radial commuting railways or "skip-stop" schemes for more general cases. In this paper, the adoption of the synchronization control to replace a single long train in a railway schedule under conventional scheduling scheme with a group of shorter trains under the synchronization control, and demonstrated that the passenger inconvenience can be reduced by the introduction of this new scheme. Other discussions, including the resilience of the high frequency train operations, are also made in this paper.
