Analyzing Efficiency of Railway Freight Transportation in a Corridor: Case Study of Countries in One Belt One Road Initiative

Due to globalization, more and more freight are transported across the globe annually. The greater the modal share of railways the lesser would be the carbon footprint because of inherent sustainable characteristics of railway transportation. However, transporting freight by railways along corridors that span through continents is not easy and requires close coordination and collaboration between many countries. In these cases, overall performance of the corridor would be limited by bottlenecks. In this research two mathematical models are developed that are based on data envelopment analysis which can measure relative efficiency of railways in different countries along a corridor. The newly proposed One Belt One Road initiative is chosen as the case study. The models rank performance of railways in this route by considering the facilities they have including length of railway lines and number of freight wagons, main economic drive for transporting freight (GDP) and the quality of their logistic to transport railway freight (measured by tonne-km).