The third meeting of the “Organisational and human aspects of safety at border crossings” project was held at UIC on 07 October.

Crew members are crossing ever more borders between states and between different railway, safety and traffic management systems (e.g. high speed lines and conventional networks) as well as between different language zones.

The objective of this project is to identify, observe and analyse specific human behaviour caused by these border crossings (not solely geographical borders) by collecting and developing recommendations, best practices and methods which are useful for railway undertakings and infrastructure managers to best manage risks produced by these situations.

This project, launched by the UIC Safety Platform on 1st April 2009, has been making good progress and is primarily based on cases originating in the field.

Having looked into the types of borders which are safety-relevant and selected some of them, our first visits took us to freight drivers in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France and Belgium.
We did not want this project to be limited solely to drivers and therefore decided to extend it to train managers, resource managers, signalmen, dispatchers, shunters, etc.
We have planned other visits this year to meet THALYS and Eurostar train managers as well as resource managers.

An initial series of risk situations has already been identified.
At the same time we are drawing on information from existing studies.