Accidents and dangerous situations involving rail buses: the risk assessment of working alone in evacuation situations must be updated

The Safety In­ves­ti­ga­tion Au­thor­ity, Fin­land, has com­pleted the in­ves­ti­ga­tion into the fire in the rail bus in Joroinen on 5 June 2021.

A train consisting of two rail bus units was travelling from Joensuu to Pieksämäki on Saturday 5 June 2021, when one of the rail buses caught fire. Thanks to the resourceful actions of the driver, the passengers could be evacuated even though there were no instructions for the evacuation, and it had not been practised. The accident did not result in personal injuries, but the rail bus sustained considerable damage in the fire.

“Several fires have occurred in rail buses during the past decade, in which it has been necessary to evacuate the passengers. More than half of the fires occurred at a time when there were no train personnel in the passenger cabin, and the train driver took care of the evacuation alone. This model was introduced in 2015, but the risk assessment of working alone has not been updated in this respect. No new risk assessment has been made even after the eight fires that have occurred since 2015, even though the deviations were handled in accordance with the operator’s safety management system,” says Investigator-in-Charge Lasse Laatta.

Laatta continues: “With the safety recommendations that we are now issuing, we address specifically the risk that in practice, the responsibility for organising the evacuation lies on the shoulders of the driver. This begs the question of what happens if the driver is incapacitated. In addition, we are calling for a better supervision mechanism on both the national and the international level for how the operators in the field are supervised and how deviations are handled.”