Unification of Passenger Trains when Organising Irregular Railway Transportation

Passenger transportation by rail can be divided into regular (travelling with labour or recreational purposes, weekend trips), and irregular (tourist, rotational, migration and others). The organisation of regular transportation is based on medium- and long-term planning of number of transported passengers, which is not applicable to irregular transportation.Determining the optimal layout of a passenger train, the number of main types of sleeping cars (with compartments and reserved seats without compartments) is one of the key tasks in organising railway passenger transportation, including irregular one.One of the promising improvements in development of longdistance railway passenger transportation is unification of passenger trains, which makes it possible to organise a comprehensive rotation of trains, thereby reducing non-operational downtime and increasing the efficiency of using rolling stock.Studies to assess the optimal composition of a long-distance train were carried out for regular railway transportation. However, considering several features of irregular passenger transportation, such as short-term planning of the volumes, high differentiation in the number of groups of passengers, a possibility of using free seats on trains on existing routes, it is necessary to re-evaluate the effectiveness of using unified passenger train composition schemes under these conditions.The development of standard compositions of passenger trains is carried out using the cluster analysis method. The use of three unified compositions is proposed. When developing proposals for unifying the layouts of passenger trains in circulation, it is necessary to consider the additional passenger traffic in irregular transportation, which cannot be absorbed using the remaining free seats. The results of the study were applied to a fragment of the North-Eastern part of railway network.