Mix of Trains and Coaches for Riga Suburban Transport

Yesterday morning I took an early suburban train (7:45 a.m.) from Riga to Jelgava and found that train load was very light – just about 5% of seats was filled in my car. Actually this is not a surprise for of-peak (weekend) train. The operator use a strategy to keep train headways of around 40 minutes with makes the service quite attractive for the costumers. But how to keep the operation costs down and keep the short service intervals at the same time? Easy – use lower capacity coaches on the instead of the heavy trains.

Mix of trains and coaches on the same line gives good cash and time savings and go well together because:

1. Busses are used for off-peak traffic when passenger numbers are lower and spacious trains are used only when crowd of pax is expected. There will be no need for peak passengers to cross-subsideze off-peak passengers and ticket prices would go down for everyone.

2. Suburbs (at least around Riga) are situated along transit corridors where both – railways and highways are present.

3. Off-peak on rail means also off-peak on roads so coach travel times would be acceptable for passengers. The travel distances are not typically extensively long (<50 km) so the difference in real travel times because of operation speed can’t be big.

4. In most cases all passengers from one off-peak train can’t be fit in 50-seat coach so number of runs could actually be increased and headways cut so making the average waiting time shorter and give a time saving (and make the service more attractive).

A problem for introduction of mixed train-coach service is lack of coach piers in Riga central station and even worse - problems of approaching some intermediate train stops. This means that some stops will be located physically separate from train stops (near a highway) or even passed. It gives serious limitations for dynamic change of vehicles because passengers can not quickly move from railway to highway in many cases (e.g. rail to highway distance in Salaspils is 1.3 km) but - if the schedule is stable and known for everyone – it should not be big headache for passengers.