Research and Development on Safety

This paper describes the three specific research areas adopted by the Japan Rail (JR) East Group in its research and development activities. Using two recent derailing accidents as an impetus, researchers determined that their work would focus on the themes of: 1) preventing railroad accidents; 2) securing safe and stable transportation and safety measures for coping with earthquakes, and 3) human factors. The paper relates that under the first category, research has been conducted on wheelclimb derailments, train draft resulting from passing t rains, and short-circuit running of maintenance cars. Under the second category, research has focused on risk management, and coping with natural disasters such as developing a gale warning system and an earthquake impact assessment system. Under the category of human factors, researchers have created a training and analysis support tool for studying human errors and have risk monitoring training methods.