Environmental consideration in railway route selection with GIS - Case study: Rasht-Anzali railway in Iran  Ali A. Darvishsefat, Majid Makhdom University of Tehran, Faculty of Natural Resources, Karaj, Iran Tel: 0098 261 222 30 44 Email: makhdom@nrf.ut.ac.ir, adarvish@ut.ac.ir ahad Setoodeh University of Tehran, Faculty of Environment, Tehran, Iran Tel: 0098 21 640 66 0 50 Email: Ahad_se@consultant.com 1. Introduction Transportation network expansion is a key factor for realization of economic and social development, particularly in developing countries. Railways for having comparative merits such as high level safety and energy saving has a desirable place among different transportation modes. For particular condition of Iran, its extent and position in Middle East, sprawl of settlement and distance of growth poles, development of railway systems is vital. In conventional railway route selection, economic and technical parameters were mere determinant factors in which environmental impacts of projects were completely neglected. Minimization of environmental impact and liabilities requires consideration of environmental criteria in initial planning and railway route selection. Consideration of environmental parameters, in addition of economic and social ones by increasing required data, make more complex process of route selection in traditional mode. Emerging complexity of decision making process in new situation that involve much more data and consideration of different type of criteria, urge investigator and planner to utilize of more effective technologies such as GIS to help analyzing a great volume of data. GIS make possible to analyze and process data as quickly and precisely as possible. Over the past few years, an increasing number of investigations on GIS-base route selection became available. Feldman et al (1995) used remotely sensed data and GIS for pipeline routing in a small section of the proposed Caspian oil pipeline. For this mean a model was developed incorporating pipeline length, topography, geology, land use, stream, wetland, road and railroad crossing to identify least cost pathway. In another study (Jacobs and Vuong, 2001) that was done in USA, GIS technology was successfully applied for routing High Speed Railway (HST) in Minnesota Province. The purpose of this study was to develop a linear facility-siting method especially for a HST route. The key factor and constraints that affect land suitability for a HST route identified by this study were soil type, slope, roads and highways crossing, wetlands, lakes and streams and urban areas. Multi Criteria Evaluation (MCE) was used to identify suitable lands. The least cost pathway was also used to create a potential zone in which to locate a route. 2. Methodology 2.1. Study area An area in the Gilan province in north of Iran was selected for this study (Figure 1). Gilan province due to having some character such as existence of agricultural land, forest, wetlands, grand rivers and sea shores is one of the very important wildlife habitats and scenic landscapes in the world and regional scale that presents fragile and vulnerable nature against development of human activities. So Rasht-Anzali railway is of national level significance. Nowadays Rasht city plays an important role as an industrial and agricultural pole of region and Anzali port is also an import-export center in the north of Iran. Environmental characteristics of Gilan attract a large number of tourists and related human activities in parallel, that all require a clean and safe transportation system.  Figure 1: Location of the study area in Iran and its Landsat color composite image 321(RGB)
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