If the world's governments were ever tempted to follow the UK's exercise in fragmenting its rail industry, then the experience of the past years should chase such thoughts well away. Eric Russell reports.

The cost to the UK taxpayer, the deterioration in performance and the stalling of major safety projects for tens of years should be sufficient evidence of the folly of casting the country's core of rail expertise to the four winds.
While many incidents have made newspaper headlines, the most significant event is not doing so. It is that the UK rail industry is starting to regroup into a coherent organisation.
In one example, the industry has decided that the study of rails cannot happen in isolation from the study of wheels or the design of rolling stock and a group has been formed to co-ordinate the expertise of these three areas.
Now, further integration comes with the creation of a new national centre for railway research, Rail Research UK. Headquartered in the School of Engineering at the University of Birmingham, it will work alongside industry with the aim of re-creating a world class rail system for the UK.
The School of Engineering's work spans all aspects of railway research from track condition monitoring, timetabling and transport policy to aerodynamic trains, human factors, accident causation and signalling design through to ticketing and passenger information.
It already has a long history of railway research dating back over 20 years and has established a multidisciplinary team of researchers with a proven ability to collaborate with industry and other universities on a series of national and international projects.

Partnership

Rail Research UK will develop a unique partnership with Railway Safety, the national rail organisation charged with improving safety on the railways and which has already contributed to the start-up costs of the new centre.
The Centre is being funded with £7m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council's Infrastructure and Environment Programme, which is the UK's main agency for funding research in these areas. It is made up of a consortium of 12 research groups from seven universities jointly led by the Universities of Birmingham and Southampton.
Professor Keith Madelin, director of Rail Research UK, says the aim of the organisation is to provide a world class educational and research centre to support the railway sector in the fields of electronic, electrical, mechanical, civil and systems engineering. There is also input from other disciplines such as ergonomics, geography, geophysics and mathematics.
John Wilson, professor of occupational ergonomics at the University of Nottingham says there is a current renaissance in railway human factors research as rail industries around the world review how their railways should work. Drivers behind this re-think include the need to carry more passengers and more freight on the same infrastructure safely, increasing the need for trains to run closer together and for better planning so fast trains are not trapped behind slow trains, for example.
But railways are dependent on humans to operate them and using human factor studies to improve the performance of key staff is vital. This also includes studying the effects of underload on performance. But a key area is the lack of workload measures for the rail industry and this has to be addressed as a matter of some importance.

Tradition

There is also a need to change the outlook of management when dealing with accidents. Wilson says that, traditionally, the tendency has been to focus on the people involved, blame an individual, implement disciplinary action and increase training and rules. But these are short term and ineffective measures for improving safety. A more constructive approach is to understand the cause by considering the environment surrounding the individual.
Wilson says that his research has highlighted very many factors in an organisation that can contribute to the cause of an accident. Shortcomings in a safety culture can often be traced back to the policies of the highest levels of management.
Professor Wilson is also strategic advisor on human factors for Network Rail and is involved with the 1st European Conference on Rail Human Factors, which takes place on 13th-15th October in York.
But railway safety is a complex study and Dr Rebecca Lawton of the School of Psychology at Leeds University says that accidents can be caused by violations, defined as behaviour that involves deliberate deviations from written rules, as well as errors.
She suggests an integrated approach to accident liability that jointly considers these two routes to accident causation, which often involves errors and violations in combination. This would lead to an environment of safety proneness which embraces both the employees' safety behaviour and the safety culture of the organisation. The accent would move to the positive benefits of safety and away from the negative impact of accidents.
One of her studies covered shunters and their motives for violating. Generally, she says, violations were perceived to be the result of a well-intentioned desire to get the job done. But full accident investigation requires a psychological analysis as well as analysing the events that were observed.

Different forms

Violations take several forms and often take people outside the boundaries of safe working. They can be erroneous, mainly arising from a lack of understanding or experience and are largely unintentional. They can be caused by distractions due to excessive time pressure or workload and these are not strictly violations because the deviation from the rules is unwitting.
Exceptional violations tend to occur when unusual circumstances call for an unusual response. These tend to be high risk situations that occur relatively infrequently.
Situational violations are motivated by a desire to keep the job going in adverse conditions. They result from the immediate work environment such as when the work area conditions are less than ideal, equipment is unavailable and staff levels are low.
Routine violations occur when a short cut presents itself and is regularly taken. People believe their experience and skill offsets any risks. But accidents occur when such behaviour becomes automatic.
Violations result from the conflict between the organisation, which attempts to control the behaviour of the workforce, and the individual, who is attempting to optimise behaviour. The individual sees immediate benefits from a violation but the organisation sees the total cost of all such violations. Researchers have often found that an organisation's rules lag behind its practices.
The target must be to increase the benefits of complying with rules and to increase the cost of violating them. But Lawton says the task of organising a safety culture is much more complex. The rewards can be great: organisations that perform well and have high standards in health and safety are often the most successful irrespective of size or industry.
The type of research projects being implemented at the moment suggests that the rail industry has a lot to learn about safety. Its general understanding is proving to be shallow and, as facts are collated from completed research projects, it is obvious that deeper analysis is needed to obtain a full picture of accidents, how they happen and how safety can be improved.