Climate resilience of railway stations in The Netherlands

Abstract

As climate change takes hold, extreme weather events increasingly pressure the performance of the railway infrastructure. A first insight has been obtained into the impacts of climate change for the train system and the railway network, but there are almost no studies on the impact of our changing climate on railway stations. This study therefore aims to provide insight into the risks of climate change-induced hazards for railway stations in The Netherlands and the associated effects on the functionality of the station for passengers. Scenarios of climate change show that the Netherlands will experience increasingly intense rainfall, dryer, hotter summers and warmer, wetter winters. This poses a number of risks to the operation, reliability, availability and safety of train stations in a country with the busiest and densest rail network of the European Union. In this study, a method was created to study the risks of climate extremes for train stations on the basis of thirteen identified threats, and risk matrices were developed to support ProRail in defining their attitude towards climate risks. Results show that Dutch railway stations are vulnerable to climate change and demonstrate that there are many aspects of climate change at stations that require attention. The most important nodes in the station network, and stations that have a relatively high number of boarding and disembarking passengers per day, are at a higher risk than the national average. The results of this study show that this could have implications for a relatively high number of travellers in terms of their safety and contentment, and it could have socio-economic consequences for both ProRail and NS, as well as for the accessibility of The Netherlands. The local applicability of the risk assessment methodology was tested in five case studies on stations with very different characteristics, sizes and locations. The case studies have demonstrated that many of the identified risks appear to be relevant and appropriate on a local scale as well, but that risk is situation-specific. Furthermore, the case studies provide strategic long-term quantitative insights on adaptation strategies for all stations in the Netherlands, projecting the cases onto comparative situations.