Over decades, the mobility of both persons and goods has increased. The demand for railway transportation has also grown. However, not all railway systems have expanded their capacity accordingly. This has led to situations where the railway network is congested, and disturbances easily spread from train to train through the network.

Our scenario is that a severe interruption occurs in a marshalling yard, so it has to be closed and there are many freight trains along the rail line that need to be rescheduled. We consider that there are a limited number of alternative formation marshalling yards available in the surrounding area and that the nearest one is several hours away. Due to the interruption, the capacity for the incoming trains in the interrupted yard is limited.

We propose a MILP model for rescheduling the railway timetable under a major interruption in the marshalling yard based on Törnquist and Persson’s model. The events include both the departure and arrival at any station or line segment. In our model, the two main modifications are constraints for conflicts resolution and travelling duration. In the conflict-resolution constraints, we introduce two new types of binary variables. One is to indicate which track a train uses in each segment or station. The other one is to represent which order each two trains use in each segment or station. By checking the occupation status individually on each track in each segment and station, the capacity limitation will not be violated within the corridor. The travelling-duration constraints consider whether the freight trains are allowed to stop at each track in all stations, since they might need to stop at the side tracks along the path during the interruption to extend the total travel time and postpone the arrival time at the destination yard until the interruption ends. Due to technical reasons, some side tracks only allow the trains towards one direction to stop. Thus, we introduce binary parameters indicating on which track freight trains are allowed to stop in each segment or station.