Abstract
The railway network in Poland with over 19000 km is one of the biggest in the European Union (EU). At the same time safety indicators collected by the European Union Agency for Railways (ERA) show that it is one of the least safe in Europe. Consequently, all the actions taken in safety management of Polish Railways are particularly important for the society. In 2015, there was a change in the main infrastructure manager’s rulebook on track maintenance. A new process rule was introduced to replace a large set of long-established action rules. However, supervision reports of the Polish National Safety Authority indicate that the new rule is not used properly. Therefore, the current process of taking maintenance decisions on Polish Railways was described and a novel concept of maintenance layers and Maintenance Board meetings was proposed. The change would allow to choose the order of maintenance activities in a more objective way than it is done nowadays, without the necessity to make any major investments.
Highlights
Railways are generally seen as one of the safest means of transportation
The European Union Agency for Railways (ERA) collects so-called Common Safety Indicators (CSI), a set of characteristics used for describing the level of safety in different parts of the European railway area
The Polish Railway Network has a considerable share in the part of the European railway area where safety performance is relatively poor, reaching nearly 30% of the European network where fatality risk is higher than the European Union (EU) average (ERA 2016)
Summary
Railways are generally seen as one of the safest means of transportation. This statement is true for the situation in Poland, where the risk of being killed or injured on railways is about 7 times lower than in case of their main competitor, road transportation (Krystek 2009). The Polish Railway Network has a considerable share in the part of the European railway area where safety performance is relatively poor, reaching nearly 30% of the European network where fatality risk is higher than the EU average (ERA 2016).
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