Continuing safety management

It is always more effective to build safety in than to try to retrofit it later. Decisions on the form and structure of systems start to be taken at the beginning of projects, and safety analysis should therefore start at the beginning so that safety considerations can influence the earliest decisions. If you are not yet putting all of the Yellow Book safety fundamentals into practice, you should start as soon as you can.

Once you have started to put the fundamentals into practice, you should continue to do so for as long as you are responsible for safety aspects on the railway. Many railways are already involved with day-to-day Engineering Safety Management. Your organisation may already be using good practices in all or part of your work. If your safety culture is correct, you will already be looking for ways of improving safety further and monitoring changing risk by putting these fundamentals into practice.

It is good practice for project organisations to work closely with maintenance organisations when changes to the railway are to be introduced. Maintainers should ensure that they become involved in the project Engineering Safety Management process from beginning to end. This is so that safety is managed during stage-works and, as the project approaches its conclusion, a seamless handover of safety responsibility from the project to the maintainer can be achieved without introducing additional risk.

After the asset has been taken into use and operational experience is gained, you should challenge any assumptions made about safety, particularly where a recommended maintenance regime has been developed using predictive failure and hazard analysis. You should continue to collect and use operational data to develop a fully justified maintenance regime (see Chapter 16). Other ESM activities also need to be performed during these phases. This chapter provides guidance on what should be done and when. The guidance in this chapter is applicable to all phases in the System Lifecycle. This chapter is written for anyone involved in starting up a project and planning the later stages.