What constitutes a railway accident?
The Archive aims to record accidents and incidents which affect or change safety systems on the railway. For this reason, we define a railway incident as involving one or more railway vehicles behaving in an unplanned and dangerous manner. An accident occurs when this leads to damage and/or injury. These incidents and accidents include: • Derailment; • Collision with another rail vehicle, road vehicle, debris, structure or animal; • Unauthorised movement, e.g. runaways, signals passed at danger; • Fires and explosions; • Train splitting in two; • Train or part of train outside kinematic envelope; It is these incidents and accidents which the Archive aims to record. The incident need not have any consequences in terms of death or injury, as long as one of the situations listed above existed. The Archive does not aim to record details of the following events, as the safety of trains is not generally put at risk, and recording of such events would lead to a dilution of the archive and att
