Passenger- and operator-oriented scheduling of large railway projects

•Introduction of general planning principles aimed at reducing inconvenience caused by railway projects.•Illustration of a tradeoff that exists between reducing inconvenience and balancing resource requirements.•Formulation of two multi-objective MIP models to solve the problem.•The two models have complimentary strengths depending on certain instance features.•Realistic instances can be solved in reasonable time using an interactive approach.