International train travel could serve as a more sustainable alternative to flying, especially for short distance journeys up to 750 km. Though both forms of transport have negative impacts, the environmental costs of travelling by train are significantly lower than travelling by plane (European Environmental Agency, 2021). Therefore, the European Union, governments, environmentalists and railway companies see great value in promoting train travel over flying for short distance journeys (Ministry of IenW, 2022). In order to further promote this transition, a couple of action points have been identified by Donners (2018) to improve international train travel, ticketing being one of them. Unlike booking a flight ticket - which can be done within just a few clicks - finding, comparing, and booking a train ticket has proven to be a more challenging task. Recent research conducted by the University of St. Pölten in Austria (Preslmayr, 2022) revealed that one third of travellers are unable to complete their booking, highlighting the difficulty of this process. In order to promote the transition from air to rail for short distance journeys, the bookability of international train tickets in Europe needs to be improved. It is difficult to change a complex system such as the international railway industry, but we can help travellers navigate it. This project aims to do that by redesigning a booking platform and app that support holiday travellers when booking and potentially rescheduling their international train journey in Europe with an intuitive booking process that provides clarity and guidance at every step leaving them feeling confident and excited about their journey. An iterative design process led to the final design proposal. Created to be intuitive, supportive, adaptive and exciting, this redesign booking platform aims to ensure that every traveller, regardless of their prior travel experience, can easily book a suitable train ticket, leaving them feeling confident and excited about their journey ahead. The booking platform was designed to align with the user needs and decision making patterns. Core features to support this include route characteristics, transfer alternatives and search filters. A travel app was redesigned to complement the booking platform, creating a bridge between the booking process and the train journey. In case disruption does occur, the travellers are supported by the travel app that provides clear guidance for how they can continue their journey. The user evaluation of the final design proposal shows promising results with an excellent score on its usability according to the adjective rating scale of Bangor et al. (2009) and positive responses from participants. To facilitate this redesigned user journey, some supportive processes need to be improved, including open communication and collaboration between carrier and ticket distributors, updated route information database and an EU wide disruption protocol. All in all, it is difficult to change a large complex system such as the international train industry, but we can help travellers navigate it. While the railway system is expected to evolve, impactful changes may take time. Meanwhile, optimising services through redesigns can have a significant immediate effect on the travellers experience and provide access to a sizable potential customer segment. Therefore, further exploring and implementing the designs as proposed in this report will improve the bookability of international train tickets in Europe.

In the upcoming years more train passengers are expected and with more trains on the tracks railway systems require greater resilience. Switches can play a major role during disruptions as they enable trains to be rerouted onto other tracks, allowing them to bypass the disruption but switches also facilitate overtaking, meet-pass operations at stations as well as diverging and merging at junctions. Since switches consist of numerous parts and the fact these are moving infrastructure elements they are subject to failure itself. Maintenance is expensive and ProRail, the Dutch infrastructure manager, only has a limited budget from the government and if certain switches are only used during disruptions it sounds logical to remove those switches. With on average 50 disruptions per day in the Netherlands with both small and huge impact, it is important to get insights into the relationship between resilience and the location of the switches. In this thesis a model is constructed that evaluates the impact of a set of disruption scenarios on different switch configurations. Four key performance indicators are found in literature that can measure resilience quantitatively: costs (number of switches), rate of cancelled services, punctuality and time to recover. In interviews with rail experts, weightings for the four KPIs are derived which are used to calculate a score for all disruption scenarios and infrastructure layouts. A trade-off between costs and resilience is made in order to find the optimal switch configuration for a double track and four track layout which provides the highest capacity during disruptions. The set of disruptions including cause, location and duration come from an extensive analysis of disruption events of the past 6.5 years in the Netherlands. Currently, NS is cancelling many trains since NS is examined on punctuality and not on the number of trains. This research aims to cancel as few trains as possible which is also examined in a case study where the model is validated. The Dutch railway line Utrecht Centraal – Arnhem Centraal appears to have a weak spot and by proposing new switch location configurations on a part of this line the score increased, despite the fact that more switches have been included in the proposed solution. Since the big renovation, 108 switches in Utrecht Centraal were removed by ProRail which improved punctuality, capacity and speed but decreased the flexibility: a disruption between Utrecht and Arnhem (or Eindhoven) currently has a lot of impact on the train service between Amsterdam and Utrecht, because short turning options in Utrecht are rare. This means that trains are now being cancelled completely or short turn already in Amsterdam. By using smart options with new rerouting strategies, capacity between Amsterdam and Utrecht can be kept high with the proposed solution during a disruption between Utrecht and Arnhem or Eindhoven.

In the upcoming years more train passengers are expected and with more trains on the tracks railway systems require greater resilience. Switches can play a major role during disruptions as they enable trains to be rerouted onto other tracks, allowing them to bypass the disruption but switches also facilitate overtaking, meet-pass operations at stations as well as diverging and merging at junctions. Since switches consist of numerous parts and the fact these are moving infrastructure elements they are subject to failure itself. Maintenance is expensive and ProRail, the Dutch infrastructure manager, only has a limited budget from the government and if certain switches are only used during disruptions it sounds logical to remove those switches. With on average 50 disruptions per day in the Netherlands with both small and huge impact, it is important to get insights into the relationship between resilience and the location of the switches. In this thesis a model is constructed that evaluates the impact of a set of disruption scenarios on different switch configurations. Four key performance indicators are found in literature that can measure resilience quantitatively: costs (number of switches), rate of cancelled services, punctuality and time to recover. In interviews with rail experts, weightings for the four KPIs are derived which are used to calculate a score for all disruption scenarios and infrastructure layouts. A trade-off between costs and resilience is made in order to find the optimal switch configuration for a double track and four track layout which provides the highest capacity during disruptions. The set of disruptions including cause, location and duration come from an extensive analysis of disruption events of the past 6.5 years in the Netherlands. Currently, NS is cancelling many trains since NS is examined on punctuality and not on the number of trains. This research aims to cancel as few trains as possible which is also examined in a case study where the model is validated. The Dutch railway line Utrecht Centraal – Arnhem Centraal appears to have a weak spot and by proposing new switch location configurations on a part of this line the score increased, despite the fact that more switches have been included in the proposed solution. Since the big renovation, 108 switches in Utrecht Centraal were removed by ProRail which improved punctuality, capacity and speed but decreased the flexibility: a disruption between Utrecht and Arnhem (or Eindhoven) currently has a lot of impact on the train service between Amsterdam and Utrecht, because short turning options in Utrecht are rare. This means that trains are now being cancelled completely or short turn already in Amsterdam. By using smart options with new rerouting strategies, capacity between Amsterdam and Utrecht can be kept high with the proposed solution during a disruption between Utrecht and Arnhem or Eindhoven.