An efficient column generation approach for practical railway crew scheduling with attendance rates

•We study the railway crew scheduling problem with attendance rates and many requirements from practice.•A novel efficient hybrid column generation approach is presented.•Several real-world instances are solved and made publicly available.•Improvement strategies enhance the algorithm and are evaluated in a computational study.•Optimality gaps with an average of less than 10 % are achieved.•The presented approach is successfully used in practice at DB Regio AG.