A tool to predict environmental risk to UK rail infrastructure

Abstract

Researchers from the University of Southampton have collaborated with the rail industry's independent safety body RSSB on a pilot project for a geospatial risk model. The aim was to use the model to analyse and map derailments, suicides and slip, trip and fall risks across the UK rail network, initially in the Wessex region. The research has been extended to incorporate the impact of historic and real-time environmental data on rail risk. This paper presents a detailed description of the investigations, the resulting methodology and a prototype toolkit. The toolkit incorporates environmental conditions combined with rail incident data to help model and predict increased risk in real time.