The Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) has continuously shown its dedication to improving the railway network with its unique and tailored services.
As an independent safety, standards and research body for Great Britain’s rail network, The Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) strives to evolve the railway network and improve safety, efficiency, customer satisfaction and sustainability across all projects.
Working across Britain’s railway, RSSB rail consultancy ensures its experts are available on a project-by-project basis to support existing and new rail projects. It primarily advises clients on reducing system risk and supporting safe and effective operations.
The company helps guide an organisation to make safe, defensible decisions by providing toolkits, insights and resources, ensuring operational safety is at an optimal level.
With a focus on reducing industry cost and supporting freight growth, RSSB is now looking to bring its experience and knowledge to the Asia Pacific. Recognising the connection between the region and the UK’s rail network, RSSB believes the transition to Australia will make the sharing of knowledge and ideas simpler.
And with more than two decades supporting the UK and international rail projects, the company has no shortage of examples of its hands-on experience to showcase its effective solutions.
Timetabling in the UK
One past client engaged RSSB to modernise railway timetabling, so that the new system was a single, integrated, and properly co-ordinated timetable planning system.
RSSB brought its expertise in to revamp timetabling standards that would lead to an enhanced and improved process for the UK railway industry.
Due to the sector having faced a national timetable challenge which caused significant passenger delays during peak hours, the client wanted to turn to a trusted expert with an existing relationship with the infrastructure owner. RSSB was chosen due its prior experience working on control, command, and signalling (CCS) shared systems on the Great Britain (GB) mainline railway.
RSSB’s role on this project was to identify target areas for railway timetabling standardisation.
Using a detailed analysis of the GB rail business architecture, the team implemented certain standards to modernise GB mainline timetabling resulting in a comprehensive project plan.
With an understanding of project requirements, RSSB listened to the desires of the client and avoided any repetition of timetabling confusion and passenger delays during the next set of timetable changes.
The project concluded after a six-month period, with detailed recommendations supplied by RSSB which were used by the infrastructure owner to prioritise which standards needed to be changed and in what order.
Risk assessments in the UK
On a separate project, a light rail tram operator needed to conduct a review of common safety methods for risk evaluation on unmanned train stations that operate on unsecure tram networks.
The light rail tram operator required the support of RSSB to provide expertise on two key risks.
The first was associated with the platform train interface. RSSB assessed the risk of potential incidents involving members of the public falling or becoming trapped in the gap between tram and platform edge.
The second involved assessing the risk of passengers falling into the gap between the carriages, which could happen as a result of coupler surfing or moving between trams.
RSSB was tasked with undertaking a tram operation risk assessment review which was then delivered in the form of recommendations to the client.
An RSSB system safety engineer and principal system safety engineer used RSSB guidance documents to ensure their recommendations were aligned with good industry practice, while identifying whether risks had been recorded correctly in the recommendations.
The project scope included recommendations for the tram operator to generate risk assessments that target operational areas of improvement.
RSSB provided recommendations that aligned its risk assessment practices to best practice in rail, which enabled the tram operator to help target risk management activities in the most effective and appropriate way.
Regulatory framework in South America
RSSB experts work every day to solve the complex challenges faced by rail operators, infrastructure partners, and suppliers both in the UK and internationally.
Outside of the UK, a South American country needed to develop a new regulatory framework for its railway.
For this project, RSSB was approached at a government level to provide specialist recommendations.
This project was structured into two phases: a detailed assessment of the problem, followed by developing the regulation framework roadmap.
Applying their wide-ranging expertise, RSSB specialists performed a rapid assessment of the current railway systems within the country.
This involved identifying relevant regulatory governance, systems, and assigned responsibilities.
With these findings, experts shared a detailed summary report with stakeholders which answered a number of questions.
The report was used to set key objectives for a new rail regulatory framework by holding a facilitated workshop to establish and define program goals, planned activities, and desired results.
At the conclusion of the project, a meeting was held with all stakeholders to outline the roadmap and propose next steps to enact the regulatory framework.
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