Estimating Available Traction Power in Multi-Train AC Railway Networks from a Distance-Dependent Power Envelope

Abstract

Decarbonisation is raising the electrical load on mainline alternating-current railway feeders that were not designed for sustained, simultaneous high-power demand. When several trains accelerate together on a shared feeder, the contact-line voltage can fall far enough to trigger rolling-stock current limitation or feeder protection, eroding capacity and reliability. Preventing this in real time requires a quantity conventional operation does not expose: a localised, continuously updated estimate of the traction power available to each train given the live network state. A railway power-flow model, with trains represented under a voltage-dependent automatic current-limitation characteristic, shows that the minimum network voltage is governed by the product of power and distance rather than by power alone, yielding a distance-dependent single-train power envelope. This envelope does not add up when several trains share a feeder, so a conservative pairwise screen is generalised to a solver-free multi-train estimate: a calibrated shared-path voltage model returning the minimum section voltage and the per-train available power for any number of trains. Calibration uses two short offline solver runs, one fixing the self-impedance and one the inter-train coupling through a separation-dependent factor. Its current-limitation behaviour follows EN 50388-1, and on matched multi-train cases the estimate tracks the full power flow to within about nine per cent on average across two-, three-, and four-train cases, improving as more trains share the feeder, while its online cost scales with the number of trains rather than the network size.