Rail safety in Australia
The responsibility for rail safety
in Australia is shared by government and industry.
To assist in both maintaining
and continuously improving rail safety, each state and territory government
has implemented rail safety legislation and established a rail safety regulator. The
regulators are responsible for establishing standards in rail safety management
and monitoring the industry's
compliance with the standards in order to meet community expectations and maintain
public confidence.
Industry is responsible for addressing risks to safety
by identifying and implementing the most effective and efficient solutions
via their safety management systems. Industry
is accountable for achieving required safety outcomes.
As part of this process
of shared responsibility, industry reports rail safety occurrences to the regulators.
The regulators and operators use this data to assist with their safety analyses
and programs.
The present count data is designed to assist rail safety professionals
and researchers in understanding and mitigating risk. In addition, it can be
used for international comparative research, while informing the public about
emerging issues in rail safety. The present database contains frequency counts
of the following safety-critical event types:
- Derailment
- Collision
- Level Crossing Occurrence
- Signal Passed at Danger (SPAD)
- Loading Irregularity
- Track and Civil Infrastructure Irregularity
As the data is collected and published on a jurisdictional basis, frequency
counts for each of the above occurrences should be normalised according to
the size of the industry. The normalising data provided is
- Train kilometres
- Freight-train kilometres
- Passenger-train kilometres
- Total track kilometres
In addition, frequency counts are provided for
The definitions for data provided in each of the categories are taken from Standard No. ON – S1: Occurrence Categories and Definitions. These definitions have been developed by rail safety regulators in collaboration with industry. Rail regulators have provided the data to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) for national publication.
Australian Rail Safety Occurrence Data, January 2001 to December 2007
Download complete report. (Amended 30 May 2008) [1989kb
PDF]
Rail safety definitions [48kb
PDF]
Disclaimer
The data in this report are supplied to the ATSB by State and NT rail safety
regulators. The ATSB accepts no liability for any loss or damage suffered by
any person or corporation resulting from the use of these data.
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