Learning from the experience of other high-risk industries, the EU Agency for Railways has developed a Safety Culture Model to support the embedding of safe practices within the European rail sector, as Programme Manager Grégory Rolina explains to Nick Kingsley.

ERA hosted a safety leadership training event at its Valenciennes headquarters in January 2020 to support the roll-out of it safety culture model.

Grégory Rolina, ERA

‘Safety culture must be embedded within an organisation; it cannot just have its own floor in the building, so to speak’

Few would argue that the rail mode does not merit its reputation as the safest mode of surface mass transport, but that enviable position has only been achieved by an unstinting commitment to improvement. Today, this increasingly means that organisations across the rail sector are adopting an inclusive approach to a ‘safety culture’, rather than seeing safety as a series of rules and regulations to be ‘bolted on’ to their business-as-usual activities.

In Europe, this shift in emphasis was formalised in 2016 when an article on Safety Culture was included in the Railway Safety Directive EU 2016/798. The European Union Agency for Railways was then able to establish a dedicated Safety Culture Team and develop a programme to support railway companies and authorities from the member states.