Assessment of railway lines: an efficiency rating analysis for baltic countries

The article investigates a possibility of using the traditional multi-criteria assessment methods to evaluate how significance of a railway line is distributed for the countries it crosses. The article analyses two examples of railway lines: the railway line Rail Baltica (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) and the container train Viking route (Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine). When investigating for which countries the Rail Baltica project will have bigger significance, and for which smaller, indicators of the countries are analysed by the length of Rail Baltica in the country, length falling per million residents in the country, length falling per thousand km of the existing railway, length per area of the county and length falling per country’s gross domestic product (GDP). To generalize them, multi-criteria optimization methods, such the geometric mean method, were used. To answer the question whether the methodology used is adequate, it was tested using the example of the already operating container train Viking. The results of calculations for the previously mentioned criteria are combined with the actual distribution of the freight turnover. A positive conclusion is made about the adequacy of the methodology to assessment of the importance of the railway line for the country.