Structure and robustness of China’s railway transport network

Railway is a fundamental transportation mode for medium and long-distance travel in China. China’s railway transport network (CRTN) has become increasingly complex. Clarifying the structure of the CRTN and its robustness to failures is important for ensuring safe operations. This paper uses train schedule data to construct a railway physical network (RPN) and a train service network (TSN), and proposes a method to simulate the CRTN change processes under different attack strategies, clarify its robustness, and identify its backbone. The results show: First, the RPN is a typical scale-free and small-world network, while the TSN presents a complex hierarchical structure; Second, the RPN is robust to random attacks but vulnerable to targeted attacks, and attacks based on the betweenness centrality as evaluated in the RPN is the most effective mode; Third, the backbone network consists 62 cities including Beijing, Tianjin, and Shijiazhuang.