Abstract The Swedish railway has during many years received low customer satisfaction scores. Reasons for this are reliability, service and information concerns. The focus of this master thesis lies on the railway platform. The platform is an important part to the factors above as its information and facilities, which constitute a part of the service before the trip, could contribute in causing delays and reliability issues. This study investigates the behaviour of passengers on railway platforms and the effect that information, seats and entrances along the platform has on that behaviour. The goal is to find advantages and disadvantages and propose improvements in a Swedish setting. Platforms and trains that have been studied are in Stockholm, Sweden and Tokyo, Japan. Platform distributions and individual behaviour on the platforms are recorded with three different and relatively easy methods. Results of the Swedish study show aggregate trends where passengers tend to cluster around entrances and seats. Many Swedish passengers do not believe themselves to have enough information to know where their car will stop. These passengers do mostly not know that information exist and on average stand much further away from their closest door, when the train arrives, compared to passengers that believe themselves to know where their car will stop along the platform. The results of the Japanese study show that almost all passengers stand close to their door. From the findings in not only this, but also other studies, four aggregate properties in order to get better railway platforms are finally presented. These properties are reliability, clarity and availability of information and good location of seats and other facilities. Suggestions for tangible improvements for the Swedish railway platforms are finally given. Among these improvements are new information screens and standardized information and stopping position of trains.

When a train enters a bridge, passenger sitting inside will feel a sudden bump in the track, which not only affect the riding comfort of the passengers but also put a dynamic impact on the bridge structure. Due to this impact force, we have very serious maintenance problems in the track close to the bridge structure. This sudden bump is produced when train travelling on the track suddenly hit by a very stiff medium like bridge structure. In order to reduce this effect, transition zones are introduced before the bridge so that the change in stiffness will occur gradually without producing any bump.   This master thesis examine the effect of track stiffness on the bridge dynamic response under different train speeds from 150 to 350 km/h with interval 5 km/h and also estimate the minimum length of transition zones require to reduce the effect of change in stiffness on the bridge. Study also gives us some guidelines about the choice of loading model of the train, location of maximum vertical acceleration, effect of ballast model on the results and minimum length of transition zone needs to include in the bridge-track FE-model, for dynamic analysis of the concrete bridges. To carry out this research MATLAB is used to produce an input file for the ABAQUS FEM program. ABAQUS will first read this file, model the bridge and then analysis the bridge. MATLAB will again read the result file, process the result data and plot the necessary graphs.   The Swedish X2000 train is used for this study, which has been modeled with two different methods: moving load model and sprung mass model, in order to see the difference in results. For verification of the MATLAB-ABAQUS model, a 42m long bridge is analysed and results are compared with known results. In this study, concrete simply supported bridges with spans of 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 m have been analysed.