The railway is becoming ever more complex – organisationally and technically – with a greater range of people and backgrounds working all together. Maintaining performance is key, but so is safety, and learning from incidents plays a key part. A recent software-related incident, investigated by the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB), occurred on the Cambrian line, has highlighted the importance of taking a systems safety view through the project lifecycle.
Cambrian Incident
A short summary of the Cambrian incident, including the immediate cause of the incident, the causal factors, and an analysis of when the causal factors occurred during the project lifecycle, can be found here.
For an overview, listen to this short podcasthere.
The full report on the Cambrian incident availablehere.
Recommendations
Based on the RAIB Cambrian recommendations, this webpage is to “support the wider rail industry with improved capture and dissemination of safety learning through the reporting and systematic investigation of complex software-based system failures”. Case studies of non-software-based complex accidents with organisational factors relevant to systems safety are also includedwww.rssb.co.uk/what-we-do/insights-and-news
RSSB have also produced some short podcasts (15-17 minutes long) and blogs (2-3 minutes read) which support increased integration of complex software-based systems within the rail network system, including:
An introduction to digital safety (podcast)
The different types of asset integrity data (blog)
从重大事故学习的重要性rail and other sectors (blog)
