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 for
the period:
- 1 January 2001 to 30 June 2008 are taken from Occurrence
Notification Standard 1 (ON-S1, 2004 Rail Safety Regulators'
Panel); and
- From 1 July 2008 are taken from Occurrence Classification
Guideline 1 (OC-G1, July 2008 Rail Safety Regulators' Panel).
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.
ON-S1 occurrence definitions [
PDF:
36KB]
OC-G1 occurrence definitions [PDF:
36KB]
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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