<p>Improving railroad safety is a common goal for railroad systems worldwide; however, different systems may focus on differing features. These include geographic characteristics, railroad traffic density and mix, type and quality of infrastructure and rolling stock, train control and signaling systems, maintenance activities, operating practices, histories of railroad development, and safety culture. Over time, individual railroad systems have developed their own ways of investigating train accidents, gathering and presenting incident data, and measuring railroad safety performance. While different railroad systems may face differing safety challenges and priorities, the way one system addresses a safety question can be adapted to another and the ability to objectively analyze and compare safety performance among different railroad systems offers potential benefits.</p><p>This paper describes a safety evaluation analysis that is intended to enable comparison between the US and UK rail systems. The indexing system is composed of two elements – the first being a measure of the transparency and availability of data, and the second a weighted measure of safety derived from the data. The study also analyzes how the US and UK have addressed safety concerns and improved safety over time. The results provide insight on how to compare and measure the safety performance of different railroad systems. The approach can be extended to assess the safety performance of other countries’ railroad systems, and will help in the implementation and adaptation of risk management methodology and risk mitigation strategies for other nations' railroad systems.</p>

Benchmarking Railroad Safety Performance Between the United States and the United Kingdom

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/JRC/JRC2021/volume/84775

2021 Joint Rail Conference (JRC2021)

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