The decline of monopoly management of rail transport services and the move towards
efficiency have motivated demand for optimisation tools for the management of public
and private transport companies’ resources. Based on the ideas discussed in this
study, these tools apply a cost accounting system characterised by two different but
complementary types of intermediate cost aggregates: the activities and
the destinations. The use of this particular cost accounting system is justified by the
special nature of both the production process (in terms of the organisational structure,
concurrence between production and consumption, the immateriality of output, and the
great importance of the qualitative aspects of the process) and the cost structure (high
significance of the costs of the network infrastructure). We believe that the system is a
particularly useful tool for supporting the complex interrelationships involved in the
decision processes of a rail company’s strategic business units.