About 20 participants from the UIC Safety Database (SDB) member companies attended the yearly plenary meeting of this safety expert group, which took place on 23 April 2014 at UIC HQ in Paris.
The Chairman of the UIC Safety Database Correspondents Group, Andreas Hahnl (ÖBB), also welcomed Vojtech Eksler from the European Railway Agency (ERA) who attended this meeting as a guest. He informed the participants about the state of revision of Annex I to the Railway Safety Directive on Common Safety Indicators (CSI) and about the preparation of the 7th biannual ERA Safety Performance Report to be published within the next few weeks.
Peter Gerhardt, Manager of the UIC Safety Unit and Andreas Hahnl gave an overview of the UIC Safety Platform activities. Focus was put on the “UIC Media Kit about Safety”, a joint activity with the UIC Communications Department, including the publication of the press release about safety in January 2014. Jerzy Wisniewski, UIC Fundamental Values Department Director, underlined the need to provide journalists and media with quick informative reactions based on UIC members’ compact input.
Following this information, Olivier Georger, UIC Safety Database Manager, presented the updated SDB definition and causal tree documents. Both documents were adopted.
One main further topic was the preparation of the 2014 UIC Safety Database Activity Report with information about incidents and significant accidents that occurred during 2013. The participants agreed to focus the second part of the report on detailed information about Human Factors at the origin of railway accidents.
On the basis of practical examples inside railway companies, presented by Gaetan van Overmeiren (Infrabel) and Andreas Hahnl (ÖBB), Olivier Georger proposed a methodology to establish a “Global Safety Index” at UIC level. Participants were very interested and agreed that this should be further analysed.
Finally, the Group prepared its 2015/2016 work programme to be proposed at the next Platform Steering Group meeting from 24 – 25 June 2014, focusing on the follow-up of this activity as a contribution to further improvement of railway safety.
