Introduction

It seems only a handful of years since those of us working in rail human factors were almost apologetic about its ‘little brother’ status as compared to the well researched and published areas such as aviation or nuclear human factors. We perhaps felt too much the need to apologise for the barren years where little research was carried out apart from amongst a few brave souls in places such as The Netherlands and for the consequent dearth of specifically rail human factors oriented tools, methods and theory-led developments. This of course is not to say that we felt that we had to reinvent the wheel just to be specific to rail – we have always known that there was much that we could adapt from other fields and domains which was quite serviceable within the rail domain. However, we certainly felt that the real strength of activity in this field would only be evident when it began to have its own literature reporting on its own original investigations and method and theory development.