National agreements on safety requirements for railway yards

A national framework agenda based on common goals for the safety requirements for railway yards

Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment

With their many train movements and hazardous goods storage in railway carriages, railway yards present safety risks to the environment, train operators and yard employees. In the Netherlands, organisations from both the private and public sectors are concerned about these safety risks.

Contact

These organisations include the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, railway agencies, carriers, work yard services and regional collaborative partners for safety, such as municipalities and fire departments. Each organisation has its own interests and views on how to mitigate safety risks and organise yard safety.

National agreements on safety requirements for railway yards

A single technical focus on risk controls to achieve common national agreements and standards on safety requirements was assessed as inadequate. The assessment revealed how vital it is to know and appreciate the different interests of the parties concerned and identify possible common ground. This would require robust process supervision.

Twynstra was asked by the Dutch government to draft a strategy for the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment for a national framework agenda based on common goals for the safety requirements for railway yards. Twynstra designed and carried out the process to fulfil these national requirements. We shared the role of process manager to involve and connect all parties concerned. We also played an important role in designing the strategic communication for this process.

Approach

Our approach included a four-step strategy:

First, we inventoried the different interests of the parties concerned using Twynstra’s strategic stakeholder management approach
Second, we set up a comprehensive action plan in which we defined our approach. This action plan, which forms the common ground for the whole process, was based on the input of all the parties concerned and signed by the State Secretary
In the third step, we set up a national research agenda for the national agreements. All parties involved could submit research questions for the agenda
In the fourth and final step in the process approach, Twynstra organised four roundtables with all parties concerned participating. The meetings were attended by technical experts, government policy advisors and directors. The fourth and final meeting was attended by mayors and director-generals. The national agreements on safety requirements for railway yards were adopted at the final meeting by all the executives involved. The agreements are now due to be presented to the State Secretary.

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