Abstract
In recent years, the second-phase Shinkansen construction projects of the Development Plan have progressed, and construction of the Basic Plan lines began to be attracted attention as next projects. However, construction of new line with full-standard can provide high functionality but its cost is too high. Other low-cost installation methods have problems that they can supply only low-quality services, therefore, those are hardly to say high speed railways. Under such surroundings, the single-track Shinkansen system is proposed as a low-cost approach for local Shinkansen with certain quality. First, based on the results of a series of researches, a preliminary analysis was made from the scheduled speed of conventional railway, the unit price of each construction method, and the scheduled speed of Shinkansen. As a result, it was found that the single-track Shinkansen system needs less passenger to establish the system than the Super-limited express method. And also it was found that when the scheduled speed of parallel conventional line is slower than 100km/h the new system tends to require fewer passenger than full-standard Shinkansen. The next, as a result of searching what kind of section the single-track Shinkansen system can be applied in the actual trunk line railway network of Japan with genetic algorithm, it was found that the single-track system is suitable not for long distance sections but for the short-distance branch lines with fewer passengers. The reason is that the new system inexpensive compared to the full-standard system but the scheduled speed is inferior to the old system.
