RSSB@20 – celebrating 20 years of progress

The Rail Safety and Standards Board was created 20 years ago this month. This milestone marks two decades of collaborative work to support rail organisations through challenges and changes. The launch of our 2023-24 Business Plan this April lays out how we’ll continue to help for years to come. 

A wake-up call for rail

When we were founded, Britain’s rail industry was very different. The Ladbroke Grove crash in 1999 was one of the country’s worst rail incidents. RSSB’s creation was a direct recommendation from Lord Cullen’s wide-ranging inquiry, as part of separating the setting of standards, investigation of accidents, and regulatory functions for rail.

But our remit has always been bigger than standards. We promote industry safety, research and development, monitor and report on safety performance, and provide guidance and good practice. 

Linking innovation, standards, and safety

Today, we provide a dynamic, impartial link between innovation, standards, and safety. We ensure that knowledge gaps are addressed, that new technology can be operated safely and efficiently, that best practice is codified and shared, and we offer independent knowledge of all rail systems and their interfaces. 

We promote sharing decisions, products and services, and resources – to help eliminate unnecessary costs, improve business and safety performance, and develop long-term strategy. 

Our outputs underpin how the railway works

We develop the common standards that allow our diverse network to function as a single system. We lead cross-industry strategies, like Leading Health and Safety on Britain’s Railways, the Rail Standards Strategy and the Sustainable Rail Blueprint, plus cross-industry working groups and committees on subjects from mental wellbeing to driver advisory systems. 

Our research has allowed existing and new vehicles to operate at different speeds on the same track, optimising journey times and maximising route capacity. Our revised standards for AC electrification have the potential to save £700 million, if all the 13,000 single track kilometres in the Traction Decarbonisation Network Strategy are electrified, mainly by reducing costs in the design, construction, and maintenance of infrastructure. 

Our insights and analysis have helped put rail at the cutting edge of health and wellbeing practice. We’ve started a programme to gather consistent sustainability-related data from across the industry, and our Rule Book ensures industry knowledge is reliably applied on the front line. 

Looking forward

We’re enabling more radical changes too. Our research and innovation is already second to none – but we’re enhancing our data science abilities with new datasets, like weather data, to help model how the changing climate will affect rail’s fixed assets. We have access to more data than any other rail organisation, and we’re working with academia to lay the groundwork for blue-sky innovations. 

It's been an honour to head RSSB since 2016 – that’s around a third of its lifetime. And I’ve been grateful for its presence throughout my rail career. It's sometimes said that if the industry needs arcane knowledge, the first call is to us – and I can confirm I’ve made such phone calls. 

But nowadays, my job is to encourage RSSB members to make those calls – and to make full use of the resources we offer to rail.