Creating a culture of safety with purpose-built risk management technology
Workers in the rail industry are exposed to risk from sources such as moving trains, high voltage electricity, heavy equipment, and even hazardous materials. Further, rail workers often operate at height, by themselves, or remotely, creating additional opportunities for health and safety incidents to occur.
Over the past 50 years, there has been significant improvement across the rail industry when it comes to health and safety: Regulations have been tightened, safety standards have been heightened, and technological advancements - including the automation of train movements - have made working conditions safer. And yet, recent data reveals an increase in the number of injuries to all categories of the workforce (including train drivers, infrastructure workers, unclassified employees, and customer-facing staff) on the mainline railway in the UK.
In this article, we’ll briefly review the evolution of health and safety within the UK rail sector. Next, we’ll discuss how technology can support safety management efforts for rail workers, and explore what the future might hold for the continued innovation of health and safety solutions within this large and critical industry.
The Evolution of Health and Safety within the Rail Sector
Throughout the rail sector’s modern history, there has been steady progress made toward safer, healthier conditions for workers. Over the past half-century, railway safety regulations and policies have been rolled out and improved, resulting in sweeping changes to all areas of railway operations. One of the most important shifts occurred in the 1990s, with the introduction of Health and Safety (Training for Employment) Regulations (1990), which mandated safety training for all railway employees. Four years later, The Railway (Safety Critical Work) Regulations were rolled out, which ensured the competence of critical members of railway staff by requiring them to meet specific objective standards for training and health.
The early 2000's saw even more progress in this area, with the creation of the Rail Safety and Standards Board. The RSSB was formed to improve safety, efficiency and sustainability across the rail sector. Over the next two decades, the rail industry made further progress towards standardisation, technological advancement, and overall health and safety initiatives. But despite this progress, there remains significant barriers to true success in this area.
Today, the UK’s rail industry is the fifth most-used rail system in the world, managing over 1.6 billion journeys in 2024 and employing over 100,00 people. With the sector poised for further growth, the need for effective, scalable health and safety solutions is clear.
There has been significant improvement across the rail industry when it comes to health and safety and technological advancements have made working conditions safer.
Managing Risk Across a Vast Network and a Dispersed Workforce
Workers in the UK's rail sector face unique health and safety challenges: As of 2024, the network is nearly 16,000 km (approximately 6,000 miles) long, with repairs, maintenance, and improvements being carried out constantly by workers in urban, suburban, and rural areas across the nation. Unlike other working environments, the rail system has no single hub or headquarters to which all rail workers report on a regular basis. Rather, the infrastructure is expansive, operations are dispersed, and hundreds of ongoing projects (from small maintenance tasks to large-scale infrastructure upgrades) are managed alongside dozens of partners, subsidiaries, and various other third parties, around the clock.
And while technological innovation has been widely implemented across the network to streamline operations and improve everything from signalling systems and track integrity to cybersecurity, there is room for further progress when it comes to the implementation of technological solutions purpose-built to monitor and manage the health and safety of rail workers themselves.
Common injuries for rail workers include back and musculoskeletal injuries from heavy lifting, crush injuries from moving equipment, head injuries from falling objects, and hand-arm vibration syndrome (HAVS) due to prolonged use of vibrating tools. In fact, HAVS is the most common occupational disease among all rail workers. To adequately address these issues across such a vast and diverse workforce, an approach that’s robust and data-driven is required.
Embracing Innovation to Create a Culture of Safety
Personalised risk monitoring and management technology presents an incredible opportunity for the rail sector to make a meaningful upgrade to the way it protects the health and safety of its workers.
With a tool that tracks individual exposure to multiple sources of risk and which analyses the data in a single platform, the rail sector can overcome one of its greatest risk management challenges: its vast, decentralised workforce. With such a solution, safety managers and duty holders can monitor and manage the health and safety of workers in a hub that’s powered by real-time data, and built to generate reliable insights.
Currently, Reactec’s third-generation workplace wearable technology, R-Link, is being used on-site in Penzance, where a large rail construction project is underway. The team there is using R-Link to improve awareness of exclusion zones around machines, and to monitor workers’ exposure to hand arm vibration and silica dust levels at work. This is part of an overall effort on the part of major rail companies to create and develop a so-called ‘culture of safety’ at work. This initiative marks an important step forward for the rail sector, as it embraces innovative health and safety technology.
One Platform, Multiple Sources of Risk
The UK’s rail network is the oldest in the world.
The infrastructure is vast and under constant maintenance by workers who face daily exposure to a variety of potentially dangerous sources of risk, including dangerous proximity to hazards, vibration and awkward working positions, dust, and noise.
Tracking, analysing, and improving their risk from exposure to these sources requires an approach that offers teams a 360-degree view into their total workplace risk environment. R-Link is a streamlined solution that makes it possible for teams to overlay and analyse real-time data about individual workers’ exposure to risk from multiple sources. Powered by a best-in-class Analytics platform, R-Link helps teams better understand their risk environment by making it easy for them to identify hotspots, problem areas, bottlenecks, patterns, and trends, so that they can take swift and confident action to improve controls and ways of working.
