This year the UIC Security Division and the UIC Safety Unit have received several inquiries from various UIC members and external parties revolving around the topic of railway suicide and trespass. This topic was addressed between 2011-2014 in the RESTRAIL EU research project (www.restrail.eu) and its public toolbox, and we are still being asked by some railway members to present or update this tool. As a response to these inquiries, we have decided to organise a UIC workshop next year to readdress the RESTRAIL topic and discuss the ways to go forward with this topic.
We have identified the 25 March 2019 as the most suitable date because it is one day before the ELCF (European Level Crossing Forum) – a UIC working group which involves a related topic and relevant experts. Grouping these two events would further stimulate synergies between safety & security topics and allow the participation of new interested parties, beyond the RESTRAIL consortium members .
The list of possible actions (at European Level) includes:
- exchange up-to-date information about best practices within the extended RESTRAIL group
- bring together updates for the toolbox, especially updates on countermeasure evaluation studies and new implementation examples
- identify new solutions to be added in the toolbox
- identify a list of partners who would be interested to join a new research project proposal, if a suitable (European?) funding opportunity is identified
Other possible actions at international level:
- extend the European scope of RESTRAIL to reinforce cooperation with other regions such as the US and Australasia (e.g. links with the GRASP) or Africa
- extend and evaluate the RESTRAIL tools cross-culturally (e.g. RESTRAIL countermeasure assessment method, RESTRAIL problem-solving model) with the refreshed network of experts
The workshop is planned for Monday, 25 March afternoon (14:00-18:00 CET) at the UIC Headquarters in Paris. We hope this information gets to you quite in advance to allow you to participate in person. However, we will try to facilitate participation via web conference for those who cannot attend physically. More details and registration instructions will follow early next year. For now please save the date.