The railway infrastructure charge in Norway Summary report

On commission from the Ministry of Transport and Communication, TØI has revised the Norwegian railway infrastructure charge. This is a charge which the rail transport are paying for using the national railway infrastructure. We discuss different charging principles and recommend a system, considering among other things the EU regulations on railway infrastructure charging. The charge should be based on short run marginal costs (SRMC), i.e. short run infrastructure costs, external congestion costs, environmental costs and external accidental costs. We recommend to reduce the charge from SRMC when competing transport modes do not pay for their external costs. We also look at calculations of SRMC for rail and competing road traffic, and give recommendations of the levels of the charge.