Locomotive engineer safety with single manning operation

ABSTRACT

The paper is about practice, rather than research, and shows how a complex systems engineering project was done. The project was unique, involving a problem never before investigated, namely, to find the difference in occupational safety of a train driver between being alone in a locomotive cab and having an accompanying assistant. The project used a systems methodology discussed elsewhere. It required understanding the overall New Zealand Rail system and ensuring the objective was clear. A strategy was developed based on a set of system principles. Fault trees gave accident probabilities, from which relative values of Fatal Accident Frequency Rates were computed. As a practical simplification, detailed analysis was confined to a limited part of the overall rail system which could be taken as representative of the whole. Care was taken to treat input information as a whole rather than as separate unconnected items, emphasising information quality, which varied depending on type and source. Major points were the importance of (a) a clear and coherent strategy including careful system decomposition, (b) having a body of information of high and consistent quality, (c) fostering clarity and transparency in communication, and (d) having – and learning – good communication skills. This work is part of a Special Issue on Systems Perspectives: Clarity through Examples (see Dias 2023).

KEYWORDS:

• Systems
• complexity
• practice
• models
• railways
• fault-trees
• information
• communication

Acknowledgements

The formidable energies of John Mander and Ray Ryan of New Zealand Rail were of great help in this project. I also particularly want to acknowledge the support of the New Zealand Rail CEO, Francis Small. He was enthusiastic about the project, delighted at its outcome, and we became good friends, often working together both technically and in many other ways until his sad and untimely death. I dedicate this paper to his memory.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.