Cross border railway operations: improving safety at cultural interfaces

Organizations with different cultures will interface with each other as legislation is introduced to ensure the interoperability of railway systems across Europe. To approach the safety challenges related to interfaces between cultures, the International Union of Railways (UIC) initiated the project Safety Culture at Interfaces. The project covers the development of a method for assessing and trying to improve safety cultural interfaces. The project was performed by SINTEF. This paper presents the method, which is called SafeCulture. The project has piloted the method in three railway organizations with positive evaluations from the participants, identifying several issues that could improve safety at interfaces. It is not possible to isolate safety culture at interfaces from the whole system, embracing environment, infrastructure, organization, individual and teamwork. Safety culture at interfaces is an integrated part of the whole picture. Building safety culture at interfaces has been seen as a learning process that requires involvement and commitment between organizations. This is a difficult challenge. One of the first challenges is to motivate and get involvement from the relevant parties in the process. The next challenge is to develop real commitment from the organizations that are involved to agree on common solutions. Our approach to these challenges has been to establish a qualitative method, consisting of questionnaires and exploration of scenarios where the involved parties feel confident of their knowledge and can be motivated to share experience. Involvement and participation from the workforce and management, from the beginning of the learning loop, will create ownership and commitment to the problems and their solutions.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]