Reducing Risk at Automatically- Operated Level Crossings on Public Roads

The road-rail interface covers a wide spectrum of potential hazards: 1) At level crossings of all types, public, private, manned, unmanned, manual and automatic, gates, full barriers, half-barriers and no barriers, road traffic signals or none; 2) At road bridges under and over the railway; 3) At roads and land alongside the railway; 4) and even where road bridges have been demolished and level crossings closed. The sombre list of accidents at such locations is lengthy and goes back nearly two hundred years, but today we are concerned only with level crossings on public roads protected by automatically-operated half barriers. A dominant feature of such crossings has been the need to consider the possible obstruction of the track when a train comes along, and to take whatever steps are practicable to deal with such an eventuality, but we have not been entirely successful in doing so and the price of failure can be high.