Methodical approaches to the distribution of actual costs of railway infrastructure in conditions of fuzzy indeterminacy

The authors propose methodical approaches to the distribution of actual maintenance costs for the station infrastructure of the track facility, as well as the signalling and communication facility of each station, as well as the distribution of cost measurements according to the type of work and the implementation costs in the organization of freight transportation.


Problem Statement
Currently, the development of market relations in the railway transport and intensification of competition raise the question of using the inefficient infrastructure, including such vivid examples thereof as low density areas and loss-making stations. Their operation requires a constant increase in the maintenance cost of outdated fixed assets, increased cost of materials, etc. This largely contributes to the increase of the primes cost of railway transportation, which, in turn, significantly reduces the level of socio-economic development and competitiveness of railways.
Today, when the reformation of the railway transport is in progress, and the competition in the transport services market increases, the railway industry should be adjusted to operating in the market economy, when in the transport services market the competition between different modes of transport intensifies, the volume of governmental orders for transportation is reduced, and the budget provides almost no funds for the development of the railway transport. The above facts make issues of ensuring sustainable socio-economic development of the Ukrainian railway transport under conditions of indeterminacy of its provision particularly relevant. Those cannot be solved without identifying ways to improve the efficiency of railway sections with a small volume of works, which accounts for about 60% of the total length of the railways.
The operation of low density railway sections and loss-making stations of the regional branches of Ukrzaliznytsia JSC, providing services for population and enterprises located in the area around these sections, causes quite significant losses to Ukrzaliznytsia and is accompanied by considerable organizational and managerial problems (such as maintenance and repair, staffing, traffic safety, etc.). Therefore, the essence of the problem is reducing the dependence of efficiency of the operation of railway transport on the operation of low density sections and loss-making stations.
At present, there is only an outdated definition of a low density section, while there is not at all a legal definition of a low density loss-making station is absent. There are also no methodologies for cost accounting and calculating for individual sections and stations. Therefore, the relevance of the topic of the study is doubtless. Many researchers focus on the problems of the formation and development of a transport potential; the following However, in view of the evident scientific interest to the issues of improvement of performance of the railway transport and a wide range of studies conducted in this line, the problem of ensuring economically effective operation of low density railway sections has not been considered in detail and needs to be addressed.
The purpose of the article is improving the methodological approaches to the definition of operating costs for the maintenance of freight stations, including loss-making ones, at the present stage of operation of the Ukrainian railway transport.

Basic material of the research
Operating costs of railways are determined using data provided by the structural unit of the regional branch of Ukrzaliznytsia JSC, to which a particular station belongs. In this case, the financial statement for the full calendar year preceding the year when the event is considered is used.
The presented data are combines according to the aggregated cost indicators that describe the estimated capacity volume of the freight station and the adjacent track areas it maintains. The composition of the analyzed aggregated performance indicators is presented in Table 1. ( where f c s b .
. is actual specific costs for the maintenance of 1 kilometre of the station infrastructure per hour, UAH.
The actual operation costs of shunting locomotives for each station are determined depending on the actual workload of the shunting locomotives by the type of traction (lochrs.) The actual specific costs per one loc-hour of operation of a shunting locomotive by the type of traction can be calculated using the formulas: -diesel locomotive traction . , are actual volume of shunting workload of shunting locomotives and shunting electric locomotives, respectively, for the j-th station, loc. hour.
The results of calculations are proposed to be included in a table containing the provisions summarized in Table 2.