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Safety monitoring

SAFETY MONITORING

Initiating measures aimed at improving the safety of entities’ functioning on the domestic rail market, including in particular railway undertakings and railway infrastructure managers, and also increasing the safety level of the rail system as a whole, requires continuous access to knowledge on threats identified by market participants, data on safety trends and information on progress in implementing safety recommendations.

This requires a particularly solid and consistent reporting of railway events by railway undertakings and railway infrastructure managers, the continuous processing and analysing of information on events, including statistical data, and analysing and implementing safety recommendations on the basis of the appropriate procedures of safety management systems (criterion Q in Commission Regulation No 1158/2010 and Commission Regulation No 1169/2010 on a common safety method for assessing conformity).

Information on safety trends, on the one hand constitute a key factor in the process of increasing the safety of railway undertakings and make it possible to upgrade the adopted and implemented management systems (monitoring the effectiveness of systems and implementing solutions minimising the risk), and on the other hand they help develop the supervision policy of railway sector entities to be implemented by state administration bodies,

The President of the Office of Rail Transport, in carrying out tasks in the aforementioned area, collects and analyses a range of information significant from the perspective of safety. The sources of such information are primarily entities of the railway sector obliged by legal regulations to submit the following data, including in particular:

  • Events within the railway network (incidents, accidents, significant accidents, serious accidents),
  • Safety reports of railway undertakings and infrastructure managers,
  • Maintenance reports of entities in charge of maintenance,
  • Reports of advisors for the transport of dangerous goods,
  • Information on the implementation of recommendations of the President of the National Railway Accident Investigation Committee (PKBWK).

Information from the above-mentioned sources are regularly analysed in order to identify problem areas, trends and key risks which should be minimised at the level of individual enterprises operating in the rail sector and the rail system as a whole.

An effective system of safety monitoring should therefore allow the interested parties to assess the effectiveness of the safety management system of each entity and ensure that risk control measures adopted at the level of particular enterprises and the rail system as a whole are effective and bring the expected results.

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