Timetable rearrangement to cope with railway maintenance activities.

•We introduce RECIFE-MAINT, a MILP formulation to solve the problem of rearranging a timetable to cope with railway infrastructure maintenance.•RECIFE-MAINT considers specific aspects of maintenance such as maintenance trains and temporary speed limitations.•We propose two algorithms to solve RECIFE-MAINT which are tested in a real scenario of the French railway network.•Our solution approaches obtain considerably better solutions than the algorithm emulating the current practice.•We identify and analyse some characteristics of the instances of the problem having an impact on their difficulty.