An Evaluation of Safety Culture Initiatives at BNSF Railway
Major safety culture (SC) initiatives initiated in the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) Office of Research, Technology and Development (RT&D), such as Clear Signal for Action (CSA), the Investigation of Safety Related Occurrences Protocol (ISROP), the Participative Safety Rules Revision, and the Confidential Close Calls Reporting System (C³RS) have evolved from successful pilot demonstration projects to company-wide and industry-wide initiatives, including Amtrak’s Safe-2-Safer program, the BNSF Railway (BNSF) SC program, Union Pacific Railroad’s Total Safety Culture program, and FRA R&D CSA’s Program for the Passenger/High-Speed Rail Industry, among others. These successful SC pilot initiatives illuminate challenges which occur when similar but larger-scale implementations are evaluated: − How can a very large, complex dynamic corporate railroad organization, with a multitude of crafts and locations, improve upon and institutionalize a stronger safety culture company-wide? − How can FRA R&D support broad scale acceptance, adoption and implementation of stronger safety cultures across the rail industry? To address these key questions, FRA R&D has begun to evaluate company-wide or industry-wide SC initiatives. This report describes the evaluation of one such initiative at BNSF.