The two stories below were published in the August 1994 issue of Safety+Health magazine, a publication of the National Safety Council. All rights reserved. Railroad safety - reducing the hazards in a risky profession By Charles Siler Railroads are dangerous places. *Six years ago in Pennsylvania, four people were killed when the sleep-deprived crew of a train nodded off, resulting in a head-on collision. *Last year, an East Coast rail car inspector had his legs cut off when he crossed between two trains, and one of the trains moved unexpectedly. *This year in Germany, four track workers were killed when they were mowed down by a train. *In Nebraska, a brakeman was recently killed when he was crushed between two train cars. Passengers are also at risk. *In London in 1988, 35 people were killed in a three-train rush-hour collision at Clapham Junction. *Amtrak had five wrecks in the 14 months prior to June of this year. The worst one, in Alabama, killed 47 people. The most recent, in North Carolina, killed one person and injured more than 350. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Talks with railroad managers, rail workers, union officials and researchers around the world reveal an alarming litany of crashes, near-crashes, deaths, injuries, toxic spills, runaway trains and dangerous policy making. There are stories of panicked crews jumping from fully-loaded trains seconds before the trains topple from their rails, engineers forced to drive trains they think are unsafe, sleep-deprived train crew members struggling to stay awake on the job, train crews who are lied to about the weight of the trains they are operating, railroad companies who use legal loopholes to avoid investing in life-saving technology and cash-strapped state railways that can't afford to keep their cars and track up to date. After each "incident," as the industry daintily refers to them, the spin doctors move into action with the usual finger-pointing and blame-shifting. An Amtrack spokesman blamed the railroad's recent crashes in Alabama and North Carolina on "bad luck." Yet at the same time, the taxpayer-supported railroad is asking the government for $4 billion to repair its vintage trains and grizzled stations. Most of Amtrak's trains are more than 40 years old. Clearly, when you have people working around moving trains that can weigh up to 15,000 tons, the potential exists for serious injury or death. Some might argue that this danger can never be eliminated, and all the industry can be expected to do is make a reasonable effort to reduce the threat based upon the limited resources at their disposal. But what is a reasonable amount of money to spend on creating a safe workplace? How can railroads be made more safe? Is there anything that the industry should be doing today to make itself more safe that it isn't doing? And does the highly-charged, often antagonistic relationship between railroad unions and managers help or hinder the creation of a safer workplace? Not everyone in the industry wants to discuss these kinds of questions. The very subject of rail safety makes some rail executives touchy. "I am not allowed to tell you anything about the security of the Deutshe Bahnen," says Yolker Appel, staff member of the product director's department at German Federal Railways. In Europe, the question of rail safety becomes even more delicate as the various state-owned railways on the continent begin to prepare for private ownership. British Rail, for example, was split into two entities in April of this year - one with responsibility for track and signalling, and one with responsibility to run the trains. Both of these companies are being divided again, amoeba-like, into still more companies which will then be turned over to private investors. Although this is the most common way to transform a government-owned railroad into a group of private railroads, and one that has been used with success elsewhere in Europe, some in Britain are worried about the scheme. "Our concern is that it will lessen the safety of the system," says John Richards, spokesman for the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Fireman, which represents more than 90 percent of the train drivers in Britain. "If you have one company that looks after the track and the environment, and you have several companies running the trains, this is in our minds a recipe for disaster." But Terry Worrall, director, safety at British Rail, insists that safety will not be compromised, and may even been improved, by the split-up (see adjoining story.) In Sweden, where the track operations were split off from train operations in much the same way in 1988, the state railroad has compiled an impressive safety record compared to its European neighbors. Swedish State Railway had 59 derailments in 1991, compared with 120 derailments at nearby DSB, the Danish railroad, and 405 derailments at DB, the Germany railway, according to data compiled by the Paris-based International Union of Railways. Christer Malm, manager of the safety office for Swedish State Railways, says the railroad has relied on a host of new technologies in order to make its lines safer. "One of our problems in the past was trains overriding stop signals," Malm says. "That was solved by introducing ATC systems over most of the network." ATC stands for automatic train control. These systems, which also go by the name of ATP (automatic train protection) are perhaps the most hotly-debated technology in railroad safety. They will automatically stop a train that is preparing to go through a stop signal. About a quarter of the rail lines in Europe have ATP. Some countries in Europe such as Sweden are enthusiastically embracing ATP, while others such as Britain are not. In the United States, ATP is used on only a few routes. The Federal Railway Administration requires ATP on trains that go over 80 miles per hour, so railroads get around the law by running their trains at 79 miles per hour. Most railroad unions approve of ATP; most railroads think the systems are too expensive. But not Malm. He says Swedish Rail trains used to run off the tracks at low-speed points when drivers allegedly fell asleep. Now that problem has been nearly eliminated. "Something like 90 percent of our traffic is operated on ATC-equipped trains," he says. "This has almost eliminated drivers overriding signals of danger. It is not only an automatic stop system, but it also supervises the speed of the train at any given moment. If the driver tries to exceed the speed limit by more than 5 kilometers per hour, he gets a warning, and if he tries to increase the speed to more than 9 kilometers per hour over the authorized speed level, the brakes are applied and he can't release the brakes until he is under the authorized speed level." Swedish Rail also has the ability in all of its switch yards to operate trains by remote control. The old method for moving a train to a siding is to have someone on the ground signalling to the engineer what to do. The rules say that drivers should stop if they lose sight of their signalman, but in practice they often don't, resulting in accidents in which the signalmen are run down by trains. With the remote control systems, introduced in Sweden over the past 15 years and now widespread across the country, trains can be moved to sidings even if no one is aboard, reducing the potential for an accident. In France as well, new rail safety technologies are being employed. Francis Taillanter, director of transport for SNCF, the state railway of France, says that automatic train protection systems are now in place on about half of the French rail system, and will be on all French trains within two years. Taillanter says that there are two ways to make railroads safer - with improved technology and better worker training. "The improved technology is the classic method," he says. "Improved training is more difficult and it takes longer but it is something we must do. For example, an accident may occur that we consider to be due to a mistake by the conductor. But we must understand why he made the mistake. Is it because of something we taught him, is it because of the hours that he must work, what are the reasons a man makes a mistake?" Collecting this kind of information can be a key factor in making a railroad more safe. Unfortunately, railroads generally do a bad job of assembling safety data, says John Corrie, divisional director of the railways division of Mott MacDonald Ltd., a Croyden, England-based consulting engineer that gets about a fifth of its business from railway consulting. "The biggest problem that I see in the railway industry today is collecting and analyzing the data, because railways are pretty poor at data collection," Corrie says. "Their attitude is that if something goes wrong, to fix it and get the trains running. I often have to use information from the nuclear and chemical industries on how reliable people are in a particular environment doing particular jobs, because the railways have yet to collect the correct data for the human reliability of their staff." That's too bad, because on trains not equipped with automatic protection devices, human reliability is the lynch pin of the system. In many cases, the skill and training of the engineer is the only thing keeping a routine, late-night freight run from turning into a bloody crash. This is frightening, considering that many train engineers say they are forced to operate under unsafe conditions. Listen to one East Coast train engineer for a major U.S. railroad who recently quit the railroad's employee safety board in disgust: "All of the nine major railroads in America are very similar," says the engineer, who was afraid to have his name used. "The railroads' safety programs are all the same. They are mainly concerned with dollars and cents. They are not making the railroads any safer. They are proud of figures that show fewer fatalities and injuries, but that is just because there are fewer employees." Then the stories begin. He tells of friends whose limbs have been amputated and whose faces have been split open in accidents, managers who have tried to dissuade injured colleagues from reporting their injuries, of being awakened at 4 a.m. to drive a 6,000-ton train, of being sent out in trains with broken "rear end telemetry" devices (which tell the engineer if the brakes are working at the end of the train), of the constant drug testing, sleep deprivation and other travails that are part of being a modern train engineer. He was once on the railroad's safety council, fighting for better conditions. Now he is simply bitter. "They try to come up with programs that look good on paper and which look good to the federal government," he says. "But it is still a very dangerous place to work." Sources: John Richards, spokesman, the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Fireman; Terry Worrall, director, safety, British Rail; Christer Malm, manager of the safety office; Swedish State Railways; John Corrie, divisional director of the railways division, Mott MacDonald Ltd.; Francis Taillanter, director of transport, SNCF; Yolker Appel, staff member of the product director's department, German Federal Railways; The International Union of Railways. -------------------------------------------- Will a private British Rail be a safer British Rail? By Charles Siler For several years now, Britain's state-owned industries have been going private. It happened to the state phone company, British Telecom, and to the state airline, British Airways, and now the privatization binge is coming to British Rail, the state-owned railroad that controls virtually all train traffic in Britain. In April 1992, British Rail was divided up into different businesses, and in April of this year a separate entity, Railtrack, was spun off and given responsibility for all track and signalling. The plan is now for both British Rail and Railtrack to be privatized, tearing the monolithic BR asunder and creating a system of smaller railways buying track time from smaller rail infrastructure companies. It won't happen overnight. It will likely take three years before Railtrack is privatized, and it could be a decade before all the state-owned parts of both companies are privately owned. By that time, each of BR's 25 passenger train operations could be privately owned. But how will railroad safety be affected by all of this? John Richards, spokesman for the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Fireman, calls the plan a recipe for disaster. "There are going to be so many entities involved, it is going to be difficult to get anyone to take responsibility," he says. It's a serious charge, especially considering that more than 60 percent of British Rail's business is passenger traffic, so any accident is likely to affect passengers as well as employees. Not surprisingly, Terry Worrall, director, safety at British Rail, sees things differently. "Everybody from the secretary of the state to the prime minister has said that privitazation must not, will not and cannot be allowed to compromise safety in any respect," Worrall says. "We have a continuity of highly qualified professional people who have been associated with railway activity. Every single component of BR and indeed of Railtrack was safety-validated had to have a safety validation certificate, having satisfied a safety panel, which included independent representation from our insurers." The starting point for any conversation about rail safety in Britain is the Clapham accident, a 1988 rush-hour collision that killed 35 people. The disaster occurred when an engineer got out of his train to report a faulty signal. While he was on the phone reporting the signal, a passenger train slammed into his train from the rear. The two trains then fell over onto an adjacent track and were struck by a third train. "There was no fault attached to the driver of the train," Richards says. "What was discovered was that the signal technicians had been working all over the weekend something like 17 hours a day trying to rectify the signalling, and the result was that it had been wrongly wired." An enquiry into the disaster suggested that BR look into automatic train protection (ATP) devices, which BR has been doing for the last five years. "Train protection is a good idea," Worrall says. "I would like to see some further assistance given to the drivers to reduce the potential for human error." British rail has been running ATP on a trial basis on two lines for two years, but remains undecided about expanding the use of the protection devices. Sources: John Richards, spokesman, the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Fireman; Terry Worrall, director, safety, British Rail.