The development of railway safety in Finland

This study reviewed the development of railway safety in Finland from 1959 to 2008. The data for national analysis were mainly collected from the statistics of the Finnish railway operator (VR Group Ltd.), the Finnish Rail Administration, (RHK) and, for the international comparison, from the Eurostat database and the European Railway Agency‘s Public database of safety documents. The results showed that the level of safety has greatly improved over the past five decades. This positive development was owed to the use of new technology and the new procedures to protect railway employees working on the tracks. Furthermore, the number of road users killed at level crossings has diminished due to the installation of barriers and the construction of overpasses and underpasses at the crossings with dense traffic, the removal of the level crossings and an improvement of conditions such as visibility at the crossings. However, the number of trespasser fatalities has not seen a similar reduction. At the European scale, the level of railway safety in Finland is around the average based on the number of accidents per million train-km. The main plans for the future include the removal of 1,500 level crossings by 2025 and involving communities in the safety work related to railway trespassers to decrease the large amount of trespassing accidents.