Estimation and Evaluation of Risk in the Railway Infrastructure

Management of railway infrastructure in the European Union (EU) must be performed in accordance with the regulations of the Railway Safety Directive, i.e. it must be covered by a safety management system. The legislation specifies criteria which must be met by such a system, the first being the implementation of risk-related tools. Unfortunately, most of the internationally recognized research is either too general or too specific for direct application in the areas where safety management is still under development and there are not enough resources for complex reliability analyses. Therefore, in the paper, we show a proposal of a relatively simple risk model designed for estimation and evaluation of risk, which could be applied by railway infrastructure maintenance staff to identify the most urgent needs for maintenance works. For this reason, we propose to virtually split railway lines into segments of several types, according to their accessibility by emergency services. As a result, the criteria used in the model for risk estimation can better reflect the reality.