A Proactive Risk Analysis Framework to Enhance Safety and Reliability in Railroad Operations: Assessment of the Positive Safety Culture Traits

Abstract

The railroad industry faces the inevitable task of avoiding catastrophic events while performing dynamic tasks under very strict time constraints and operating technology that poses large-scale physical hazards. This paper proposes a risk assessment framework by integrating the 10 traits of a positive safety culture, initially introduced by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with an accident investigation framework called AcciMap, originally proposed by Rasmussen, to proactively address and analyze risks of failures and accidents in the railroad industry. In the first phase, the AcciMap framework is developed to analyze different involved socio-technical and human factors that contributed to the 2008 Chatsworth train collision. The AcciMap, like other accident investigation frameworks, however provides retrospective analyses. Therefore, in the next phase, the 10 traits of a positive safety culture are integrated with each of the layers of the developed AcciMap framework to better understand the consequences of a weak safety culture in railroad accidents.