ABSTRACT
The focus and range of safety concerns of the railway are similar to those of other infrastructure sectors such as oil, gas and chemicals. Broadly we can distinguish safety related to operations – process planning and process control work, usually in clean isolated control centres (or signal boxes); and safety in engineering and maintenanceworkwhere dutiesmay be dirty, physically hard, outdoors and at night. We might be dealing with anything from an individual’s safety in working with equipment through to wider system safety where impact might be felt anywhere within or outside the organization. There are also differences to other infrastructure industries, typically to dowith ourmore varied and frequent contact with the public, as passengers or as “unauthorised users”.
