• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.294-299
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• 2012

Rail transport has been considered an environmental-friendly transport mode compared with other transport modes such as ship, truck, and aircraft. However, air pollutions emitted by diesel locomotives have emerged as social issues. In addition, the railway industry may not be able to avoid a duty of alleviating greenhouse gases emission owing to the Korean government policies for green growth which is an economic paradigm that simultaneously pursues growth and environmental improvement. Moreover, rising oil prices has burdened a train operating company. The purpose of this paper is to develop a methodology of determining an economical speed of diesel freight locomotive from the viewpoint of the train operating company. In the methodology, we first define an operational cost function based on various cost factors and then suggest formula to calculate an economical speed of diesel freight locomotive. To estimate the influence of cost factors such as diesel price, carbon taxes, and time costs on the speed of diesel freight locomotive, sensitivity analysis was conducted.