SAMRAIL - Safety management in railways
Overview
Background & policy context:
The variety of Community legislations on railways have produced a myriad of safety requirements which it is often difficult to comply with. Moreover, there have been different national rules. Hence, safety approval evolved into one of the biggest hurdles for an open market.
The EC's Safety Directive has now set the legal framework for safety approval of a service or operation. Implementation issues of the Safety Directive are now to be addressed in a study allowing to propose a course of actions to be undertaken through SAMNET and other initiatives.
Objectives:
SAMRAIL proposes to develop a safety management approach for the EU's railways for implementing the European Railway safety Directive. Its objective is to develop an approach for ensuring safety on the European Union's railways by taking into consideration the social and economic needs of the community, diversities in their legal and regulatory systems, and cost effective technical and scientific innovations. Its output will be a common safety management system for the European railways with guidance for setting safety and performance targets, for assessing risks, and for specifying duties, rules and regulations.
The main aims of this approach are to develop a comprehensive and consistent safety management programme for the European railways which could provide a basis for:
- Developing and implementing the European Railway Safety Directive and interoperability requirements for high speed and conventional railways;
- prescribing and implementing a common safety policy in Europe;
- establishing a consistent and common set of criteria for safety performance;
- planning and establishing safety management systems to assure that the common safety policy is deployed and help in monitoring its effectiveness in achieving target levels of safety; and
- preparing the framework for harmonisation of safety assessment and hazard mitigation approaches, including those for rulebooks, safety reporting and monitoring processes, and risk management approaches.
Methodology:
The SAMRAIL work packages were planned to address the implementation issues of the Safety Directive, namely:
- The analysis of existing methods addressing the proposed common regulatory framework for railway safety;
- the implementation of the safety management system clause from the Directive;
- a risk analysis approach addressing the gradual introduction of CST and CSM tools;
- assessing acceptable risk levels through drafting of CSTs;
- safety approval and certification;
- accident and incident reporting and organisational learning;
- standards and best practice in national safety rules, which are often based on national technical standards; and
- the roles of regualtions.
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