The railway has been accepted as one of the most environmentally friendly modes of transport for goods and passengers. However, the railway sector is striving to increase its capacity to meet the growing demand for the transport of goods and passengers with a high level of punctuality in its services. Higher availability requires the effective operation and maintenance of infrastructure, often necessitating the implementation of cost-effective preventive maintenance strategies. Therefore, a higher availability target means higher maintenance investment. However, the question of setting the availability target for the infrastructure is not easy, as it involves many influencing decision parameters, apart from a good understanding of the network configuration and traffic density.

Railway networks that have a smaller number of trains and a low punctuality requirement do not require higher availability targets. The aim of this paper is to estimate the availability target for railway infrastructure based on the capacity and punctuality requirements of infrastructure managers and train operating companies.

The objectives of the paper are to develop an approach to i) estimating the capacity of the infrastructure based on the design and operational characteristics and evaluating the influence of infrastructure availability on the required capacity and ii) estimating the volume of primary and secondary delay due to failures and maintenance of the infrastructure and establishing the relationship between availability and punctuality requirements.

To achieve these objectives, an example is presented with parameters drawn from failure, maintenance and traffic data. Finally, a model has been developed in Petri-Nets to establish a relationship between availability, capacity and punctuality. Monte Carlo simulation is used to establish the relationship. The simulation results illustrate the effect of infrastructure availability on train delays and capacity.