Rail Human Factors

Supporting the Integrated Railway

J Wilson, B Norris, Ann Mills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351552394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Transportation Industry
• Index: Business

In recent years, for reasons connected to the organization of the industry, technical developments, and major safety concerns, rail human factors has grown in importance at an international level. Despite its importance, however, supporting literature has been largely restricted to specialist journal publications and technical reports. Rail Human Factors addresses this imbalance by providing the first fully comprehensive overview of the area. The volume includes contributions from leading ergonomists, psychologists, sociologists, management scientists and engineers whose common theme is to investigate, understand and design for people on the railways, including staff, passengers and the general public. Every area of ergonomics/human factors is covered: physical design of work and equipment in maintenance; cognitive ergonomics in driving, signalling and control; organizational and social ergonomics in the way teams are formed, plans are made and organizations are structured and run. Topics covered include: Systems views of rail human factors Driver models and performance Train and cab design Network and train control systems, including ERTMS Signals and signal SPADS Signalling and control center design Signaller performance Control center interfaces Workload, situation awareness, team working Human error and reliability Timetabling and planning Maintenance planning and work Safety climate and safety culture Passenger comfort and behaviour Station design Public information systems Level crossings Trespass and vandalism Ergonomics standards and guidelines Human Factors integration The book is the definitive guide for all those concerned with making railways safer, more

Introduction

The speed with which rail human factors has lost its status as the ugly duckling of the transport ergonomics world has taken many of us by surprise. It is not so long ago that if we were to talk of transport ergonomics then it would be assumed that we meant road transport, aviation and air traffic control and even perhaps the maritime industry. Rail human factors research work barely made an appearance in the journals and the conferences of our profession for much of the 1980s and 1990s. Now that has changed. For instance in the UK, both Network Rail (the operator of the infrastructure) and Rail Safety and Standards Board (the body overseeing safety and related issues on the rail network) have substantial human factors teams. The University of Nottingham is a member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council's Rail Research UK, a network of several universities where human factors is taken seriously and to be integrated along with engineering, operations and management concerns.

In addition in the past 18 months the European Network of Excellence for the railways, EURNEX, has started operation and one of its ten poles, out of which the new research agenda will be defined, is explicitly on human factors (there are in addition poles on safety and security, the environment and training and education with strong overlaps with human factors). Furthermore, all across Europe a growing number of leading human factors consultancies and universities are establishing or re-establishing programmes of work dealing with the railways. This is in cooperation with rail companies themselves who also have both strong traditions in ergonomics and also current inniovative programmes – for instance in The Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy and across Scandinavia.

All this activity is all very well, but we need to be sure of the quality of what we do as well as the quantity. It was for this reason that Network Rail, RSSB and the University of Nottingham organised the First European Conference on Rail Human Factors in York, in October 2003. This was in association with RRUK and the Ergonomics Society. From the papers presented at that conference and from other contributions elicited since, we have brought together this edited book, the first to bring so many contributions on rail human factors and ergonomics between one set of covers. We have reflected as well as we can the issues which were seen as important by the people at the conference at the time, as well as those seen as important by the industry as a whole, and have managed to provide contributions relevant to most of the functions and stakeholders in the rail network. Whilst the majority of contributions are concerned with driving and signalling and control, we also cover functions such as maintenance, station operation and planning, as well as issues such as evacuation, violence to railway staff and safety culture.

What is perhaps most gratifying, along with the needs expressed by industry for the products of ergonomics and human factors work, is that this domain has started to now produce its own approaches, methods and tools rather than rely on the adaptation of those developed in different domains, and it is this that we will see increase into the future. Therefore we intend this book, and the conference series itself, to continue, and the second conference will be held in November 2005 with a second book to follow in late 2006.

The editors are grateful for the help of their colleagues at Network Rail, RSSB and University of Nottingham in both managing their programmes of rail human factors research and also in helping put on the conference and put this book together. They are also grateful for the assistance of Anne Floyde, Sarah Spencer and Lynne Mills to liaise with all the conference participants, with the authors of the chapters within the book and not least ourselves! At an institutional level we are also grateful for the support of our employers in putting the book together. The staff at University of Nottingham also acknowledge the contribution made by RRUK and EURNEX in funding some of the time spent in editing and producing the book. Finally thanks are due also to our publishers and editors at Ashgate, and particularly Alison Kirk.

We hope and expect that the book will be of interest not just to those working in the rail sector from a human factors point of view but also to the rail industry generally, and we also expect that it will be of interest and value to our colleagues in human factors working in other industries.

John R. Wilson
Beverley J. Norris
Theresa Clarke
Ann Mills
February 2005

Part 1
Perspectives on Rail Human Factors

Chapter 1
Rail Human Factors: Past, Present and Future

John R. Wilson and Beverley J. Norris

Introduction

Rail human factors research is growing rapidly in both quantity and quality of output. There was an early base of work carried out over many years, but the continual influences of safety concerns, new technical system opportunities, reorganisation of the business, needs to increase effective, reliable and safe use of capacity, and increased society, media and government interest have accelerated research programmes in several countries. One consequence is that ergonomics models and methods are being reassessed, and new ones developed, to meet the requirements for better human factors on the railways. This chapter picks up on these themes in the light of previous, current and future research.

Rail human factors research has, to an extent, been the poor relation of transport ergonomics, at least in comparison to aerospace (cockpit and air traffic control) and road driving. Good research has been carried out over the years – for instance in Sweden, the Netherlands. Japan and the UK – but this has been scattered around many different themes and sometimes appear to be more concerned to focus on an underpinning human factors issue than with the railways per se.

In the UK there was a good deal of rail human factors research carried out in the 1960s and 1970s largely through the British Rail Research Centre. Unfortunately, at least some of this research is no longer available to us, although the human factors research catalogue produced annually by Rail Safety and Standards Board (for example, RS,B. 2004) lias managed to retrieve a considerable part of it. Although research did continue through the 1980s and 1990s, the small amount of this compared to that for other transport industries paralleled general lack of government interest in investing in the railways in any shape or form, again in the UK at least. For the human factors community as well, it is possible that the railways did not seem to provide an 'exciting' domain to work in as much as did aviation and air traffic control, and perhaps did not seem as high a priority to research funding bodies in terms of accident rates or passenger miles as road transport.

This neglect – by the human factors community, by researchers in other domains, and by society as a whole – has changed markedly since the mid or late 1990s. For many years, rail was a business that evolved slowly and where, despite occasional disruptions and major accidents, it appeared to run relatively smoothly. Recently, however, the Chief Engineer of Network Rail highlighted the influence of radically changing public and government perceptions and relatively fast changing technical systems in an industry where nothing much changed for 250 years (McNaughton, 2003). He highlighted also the very different demographics and workforce nowadays: no-one any longer expecting to be in a job for 40 years, more like 2-3 years; much greater population mobility; less willingness to work within a structure; new entrants with less time and supervised experience to pick up skills; and a bimodal population of 16-25 year olds – either with degrees or with few qualifications or competencies. He saw ergonomics as helping bridge some of the gaps between what the industry has and what the industry and wider society actually want. He also believed that ergonomics can contribute greatly to ensure that existing and new systems meet the needs and capabilities of passengers and staff.

Interest in the human factors of railway operations has never been greater amongst governments, the media, the public, as well as operating companies and academics and practitioners. Of course, fatal accidents (and subsequent inquiries) have encouraged focus on safety, and on the contributions of human error, poor communications, maintenance procedures and other central issues in ergonomics (see Farrington-Darby el al., 2005; Hale el al., 2003. HSE, 2001a and HSE, 2001b). In parallel, the need around the world to shift passenger miles from the roads to rail, the increased potential performance of trains and the changing nature of railway ownership and organisation have encouraged focus on a systems ergonomics view of total rail network performance. This, and other contextual influences, are discussed next.

Context for Human Factors in the Railway

Any useful ergonomics contribution must reflect its setting, and some of the relevant context was alluded to above. The very environmental and internal factors which generate the need for thorough human factors investigation in the railway network also provide the very issues, difficulties and challenges for such research. The context discussed below is certainly relevant to the UK, and probably in many other countries as well.

There will be considerable changes in the technology used to identify where and which trains are on the track, control their progress by keeping safe but efficient separations, and communicate between train and signalling and control functions. Design, implementation and operation of new systems will generate a host of new human factors problems (and successes!) and will require fundamental and applied understanding. Future control of the railway network will probably be much more centralised, with many of the functions and operations currently carried out at numerous small and large sites being brought into fewer centres. The integrated functions may include route control, electrical control, signalling and possibly train ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Index