Human factors in support of a successful railway: A review

One of the critical infrastructure components in most economies across the world is the rail network. In different nations rail is responsible for ensuring that there is not complete gridlock on the roads in commuter hours, and for moving both people and freight for long distances in an as efficient manner as possible. This critical role, a number of high profile accidents and proposals for new network control philosophies and systems have led to a great upsurge in human factors rail research and applications in the past few years. This paper provides a retrospective on rail human factors research covering driving, signalling and control, maintenance, incident reporting systems, passengers and the public, planning and technical systems change. This research foundation, and also current major rail human factors programmes, are placed in the context of technology, investment, competition, cultural and safety requirements and constraints. The paper concludes with an examination of where rail human factors should and will be going into the future.