ABSTRACT
This paper describes recent risk analysis work undertaken to determine the safest operational responses to on-train equipment failures on the mainline railway in Great Britain. The current rules and guidance for managing these failures have focused on minimising the risk to passengers onboard the train with defective equipment. In more recent years, the rail network has become significantly more congested and it has become increasingly necessary to also consider the safety impact any control measures applied to an individual train will have on the rest of the network. For different operational responses two types of safety risk were calculated: the immediate risk from a train not being able to use the defective on-train equipment; and the knock-on risk resulting from any impact on train performance. To illustrate the methodology, results are presented for an Automatic Warning System (AWS) failure on a passenger train.
