Railway risks, safety values and safety costs

This paper has two principal sections. The first reviews railway risks since 1967, focusing on fatal collisions, derailments and overruns on running lines of the national railway system. Risks for most types of accident have declined substantially, but until the recent completion of the train protection and warning system, fatal accidents due to trains passing signals at danger at conflicting junctions persisted at about one accident per billion train-kilometres. The second main section discusses the valuation and costs of preventing rail fatalities, contrasting these with the valuation and costs of preventing road fatalities. The paper concludes by noting that society could prevent more fatalities at the same cost by devoting relatively more resources to road safety and less to rail safety, but is apparently content not to do so.