Imperial College London
Alternate

Emeritus ProfessorAndrewEvans

Faculty of Engineering, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Emeritus Professor
 
 
 
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Contact

 

a.evans Website

 
 
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Assistant

 

Ms Maya Mistry +44 (0)20 7594 6100

 
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Location

 

406Skempton BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@techreport{Evans:2014,
author = {Evans, AW},
booktitle = {Fatal train accidents on Europe's railways: 1980-2013},
title = {Fatal train accidents on Europe's railways: 1980-2013},
url = {https://imperialcollegelondon.box.com/s/itrmj2a5njqjrudecna4waynf7t3wgzm},
year = {2014}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - RPRT
AB  - This paper presents an analysis of fatal train accident rates and trends on Europe’s main line railways from 1980 to 2013. The paper is the fifth in an annual series starting with 1980 to 2009. The data cover the 28 countries of the European Union as in 2013, together with Norway and Switzerland. The estimated overall trend in the number of fatal train collisions and derailments per train-kilometre is –5.4% per year from 1990 to 2013, with a 95% confidence interval of –7.2% to  3.5%. The estimated accident rate in 2013 is 1.26 fatal collisions or derailments per billion train-kilometres, giving an estimated mean number of fatal accidents in 2013 of 5.5. These results are similar to those in the previous paper, because the number of fatal accidents in 2013 was 6, and close to the trend. However, the number of fatalities in 2013 was 91; this was far above its mean, because of the exceptional severity of the passenger train derailment near Santiago de Compostela in Spain with 79 fatalities. That has the effect of raising the estimated overall number of fatalities per fatal accident by 7% from 4.04 in 1990-2012 to 4.31 in 1990-2013, and the estimated mean fatalities per year by 6% from 22.3 in 2012 to 23.7 in 2013. There are statistically significant differences in the fatal train accident rates and trends between the different European countries, although the estimates of the rates and trends for many individual countries have wide confidence limits. The distribution of broad causes of accidents appears to have remained unchanged over the long term, so that safety improvements appear to have been across the board, and not focused on any specific cause. The most frequent cause of fatal train collisions and derailments is signals passed at danger. In contrast to fatal train collisions and derailments, the rate per train-kilometre of severe accidents at level crossings fell only slowly and not statistically significantly in 1990-2013, despite a good safe
AU  - Evans,AW
PY  - 2014///
TI  - Fatal train accidents on Europe's railways: 1980-2013
T1  - Fatal train accidents on Europe's railways: 1980-2013
UR  - https://imperialcollegelondon.box.com/s/itrmj2a5njqjrudecna4waynf7t3wgzm
ER  -
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