201003 – Robinson – Growing a Good Safety Culture in Railway Signalling

An organisation’s “Safety Culture” is generally defined as “the way we do things round here” with
respect to safety. There are several human-factor driven frameworks [5,6,14], available for describing the Safety Culture concept in much more detail. Many of these frameworks define levels of Safety Culture that can be used by organisations as paths for an improvement program.

All the definitions of Safety Culture agree that a Safety Culture is more than just a safety management system. It emerges from the systems, practices and people that make up an organisation. But, if having a safety management system, even one that includes controls designed to encourage a good Safety Culture, is not enough to create a good Safety Culture, then what should an organisation do? And specifically, what should a railway signalling organisation do?

In this paper we briefly define what is meant by a Safety Culture, with reference to the literature. We review the work that has been done in the UK, Australia and elsewhere on reviewing and improving
Safety Cultures in the railway industry, and comment on how that work relates to railway signalling.
For example, many railway organisations in Australia have already used the UK RSSB railway Safety
Culture toolkit [6] to conduct surveys and report on the maturity of their Safety Culture.