During recent years, railway operators have seen an increasing need to reduce their costs as they face increasing intramodal and intermodal competition. Additionally, railway operators are confronted with rising costs, particularly regarding energy supply. High-speed trains are in service for many years reaching a high mileage. In combination with energy-intensive, very high operational speeds, measures to reduce traction energy demand become crucial.

Railway operators therefore have started to include operating costs in their procurement decision processes, where traction energy costs play a major part. In this regard, saving operational costs over the whole life cycle can often justify higher investment expenditures.

This paper analyses the impact of certain vehicle characteristics on energy consumption by simulating train runs. These impacts are translated into monetary effects over a train's life-cycle. The parameters analysed in this paper are mass and aerodynamic drag of the 'Next Generation Train', a high-speed train research project at the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

The train runs are simulated for a high-speed reference route Paris to Vienna with five intermediate stops. Two velocity profiles have been developed which reflect different operational speeds. Scenarios, where either vehicle mass or aerodynamic drag of the train are systematically varied, are analysed in terms of the resulting energy demand reduction. Energy consumption of trains is simulated using Dymola, a software designed to model and simulate complex mechatronic systems.

The simulated energy savings are linked with prices for traction current, and split into a share of energy taken from the catenary and of recuperated energy. The resulting monetary savings over the train's life cycle are calculated based on a set of energy price inflation and financial interest rates. The particular levels of these savings were found to be strongly dependent on the general framework set. That is, velocity profile, operational profile and real interest rate. Assuming an annual running performance of 600,000 km and thirty years of operation, the potential monetary savings for a mass reduction of 1 ton range from 36,036 euro to 44,468 euro for a given real interest rate of 0.98 %. For a drag reduction of 1 %, savings range from 205,070 euro to 433,922 euro, depending on the underlying velocity profile. The potential for monetary savings in the operational period can justify higher costs resulting from the development and implementation of cost-intensive light-weight materials and drag-lowering new vehicle concepts.

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