The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has taken a major step forward in its investigations into incidents and accidents on Australian railways by gaining access to data feeds from the States and Territories.
Through collaboration with the Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator (ONRSR), the ATSB now has access to many years’ worth of historical records.
Executive Director of Transport Safety at ATSB, Nat Nagy said that originally, the Bureau had a limited focus on occurrences on the interstate rail network.
“More recently, as part of the national rail safety reforms, the ATSB’s rail safety investigation role has been expanded to include all operations within every Australian State and Territory, Mr Nagy said.
“The access to the new data represents an important step forward.”
He said the additional data covered everything, including suburban rail, providing an invaluable context to the ATSB’s rail safety investigations.
“The limitations made it difficult for the ATSB to conduct significant analysis of rail safety events, preventing any effective analysis of safety trends and statistics,” Mr Nagy said.
“The ATSB now receives a daily feed each evening from ONRSR containing a complete update of all occurrences reported by the rail industry Australia wide.
“The ATSB can now combine this information with its own data holdings on safety investigations to form a rich dataset.”
He said that in addition to the daily feeds there was a transfer of historic occurrence records dating back to 20 January 2013.
“Over 208,000 records are migrating over to the ATSB databases,” he said.
“Some of the occurrences recorded are highly significant, others are routine, but combined they form a detailed picture of rail safety in Australia,” Mr Nagy said.
