Safety of Noncompliant Passenger Rail Equipment

To meet service needs, several rail transit systems have considered the concurrent shared track operation of non-FRA-compliant passenger equipment with limited conventional rail freight services. A major barrier to implementing such operations is concern over safety, especially in collisions between freight and noncompliant passenger equipment. This study analyzes the safety of concurrent shared track operations, including a preliminary hazard assessment and risk analysis. The analysis was supported by a one-dimensional collision analysis of noncompliant vehicle collisions between similar vehicles, as well as between the noncompliant vehicle and conventional freight cars and locomotives. The risk analysis was applied to a hypothetical shared operation representative of existing and planned noncompliant services. The results showed that, although the addition of limited freight service (two round trips per day) increased the risk of accident casualties among passenger train occupants by between 10% and 20%, several options are available to fully mitigate this increased risk. These options include adding a second track to a single-track system and applying one of several alternative train control systems to reduce collision risks. Although the analysis was highly simplified, the results are sufficiently encouraging to warrant continued research on this type of shared track operation. This was a research study only, and there has been no change in current Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and Federal Transit Administration (FTA) policy regarding shared operations or in the FRA waiver process required by that policy.