Abstract: Climate change is related with weather extremes, which may cause damages to infrastructure used by freight transport services. Heavy rainfall may lead to flooding and damage to railway lines, roads and inland waterways. Extreme drought may lead to extremely low water levels, which prevent safe navigation by inland barges. Wet and dry periods may alternate, leaving little time to repair damages. In some Western and Middle-European countries, barges have a large share in freight transport. If a main waterway is out of service, then alternatives are called for. Volume- and price-wise, trucking is not a viable alternative. Could railways be that alternative? The paper was written after the unusually long dry summer period in Europe in 2022. It deals with the question: If the Rhine, a major European waterway becomes locally inaccessible, could railways (temporarily) play a larger role in freight transport? It is a continuation of our earlier research. It contains a case study, the data of which was fed into a simulation model. The model deals with technical details like service specification route length, energy consumption and emissions. The study points to interesting rail services to keep Europe’s freight on the move. Their realization may be complex especially in terms of logistics and infrastructure, but is there an alternative?
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Traditionally, most cleaning activities take place in the evening or during nighttime.In the Netherlands, day-time cleaning is becoming increasingly popular. It is however unknown how day-time cleaning affects perceptions and satisfaction of end-users. An experimental field study was conducted on trains of Netherlands Railways (NS) to determine how the presence of cleaning staff affects perceptions and satisfaction of train passengers.
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Kwaliteitstrajecten worden vaak beschreven in de termen waarmee Nicolaas Beets eind negentiende eeuw vertelde over een rit met de postkoets. Hij duurt lang, is zwaar en het gaat er soms heet aan toe.
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This paper presents an overview of studies that explore the impact of digital signage, environmental design and the use of background music on time perception and customer experience, thus exploring the psychological value of time.
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The central question in this building block of the Business Model Template (BMT) is identifying what stakeholders and other parties are pivotal for your success. Here you make an overview of them, not only determining who they are but also what interests they have in...
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n this chapter, the central question is which core activities you will undertake in order to achieve your goal, organizing your value proposition with success. Because you are working towards a specific goal, and with selected strategies, it is useful to state which (core) activities are necessary to realize your sustainable business model. The idea of a core activity is that a specific part of the organizational activities can be seen as the speciality of a company, a network, or a community: it tells what they are really good at. Core activities should contribute to operationalizing the chosen strategy, thus contributing to the realization of the overall goal, coherent with the value proposition. We offer a core activities framework based on the conventional sustainability trio: reduce, reuse, recycle. This has evolved over the years into a whole family—commonly referred to as the RE-strategies and presented here as the 13 REs.
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The present invention refers to an autonomous road transport system based on autonomous vehicles operating similarly to trains on railways. In this system, a regular road vehicle, such as a car, bus or truck, can be properly equipped with sensors and computers to drive itself, guided by virtual tracks from one station to another. A virtual railroad is built from a set of stations connected by virtual rails. Virtual rails can be any type of technique or equipment capable of guiding the vehicle through the center of the road autonomously, such as advanced mapping and location techniques. The stations serve as a starting and stopping point for vehicles.
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