How Safe are American Railroads

How safe are American Railroads That question can only be answered by making comparisons with other types of risks. This chapter compares employee risks in railroads with those in other industries, passenger risks across modes of transportation, railroads versus other hazards of modem life, and United States to railroads to those in Canada and Great Britain. 

While the overall average occupational risks in railroads are relatively low, the risks vary by type of employee. In the first chapter it was calculated that train crews face the most risk with a fatality rate of 23.6 per 100,000 employees. This would place the occupational risk to train crews as equivalent to the average risk to workers in mining or trucking. However, given that the mining industry also has a mix of different classes of employees who face different risk levels, train crews face less risk than people working at the mine face. 

Major transportation disasters with large loss of life occur randomly and rarely, so an appropriate view of the risks of different modes can only be calculated as an average over a lengthy time period. Table 4.2 shows the passenger fatality risk per billion passenger miles for different modes of transportation calculated for the period 1986 billion passenger miles is three to aviation, but ten times safer than 

Even when one includes fatalities at grade crossings, the approximately 1,000 people killed in accidents involving railroads each year represent a risk that is only slightly more than the risk of drowning in a home swimming pool or bath. 

There is no publication that permits easy and extensive comparison of international railroad safety data. However, table 4.4 contains a comparison between the United States in 1994, Canada in 1994 and Great Britain in 1993/94. The fatality and injury rates are expressed as an index with the United States equal to 100. Canada provides the best peer comparison with the United States because of similar terrain and the predominance of freight traffic. The British railway system is primarily a passenger system and the data, unlike the United States and Canada, includes mass transit. 

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