A new campaign to promote valuable safety initiatives across rural and regional railway crossings has seen 12 Australian families respond from tragedy.
The families involved have all lost loved ones in rural and regional rail crossing crashes, with the newly launched RailFail campaign asking rail corporations to install visibility lighting on trains and other safety measures at crossings to keep heavy vehicles safe.
Currently, the campaign says 80 per cent of rail crossings outside of metropolitan Australian cities don’t have flashing warning lights or boom gates, while trains don’t have any safety lighting.
In 2000, Western Australian pastoralist Christian Jensen and his friends Jess Broad and Hilary Smith were killed at a level crossing only fitted with a give way sign, with Christian’s sister Lara Jensen now part of the RailFail campaign.
MORE OWNERDRIVER TRENDING STORIES:
- VE Group welcomes special Kenworth into fleet
- Cahill Transport announces new CEO
- Pacific Motorway truck rest stop complete
- Friday road update: Bathurst traffic, Distributor works + more
- MaxiTRANS announces complete rebrand, new models and spare parts side
Christian’s family have campaigned for safer railway crossings ever since his death. However, Lara says nothing has changed as she joins the campaign to make railway crossings safer for drivers and heavy vehicle operators.
“For decades, we have campaigned to save lives and been met with an obstructive rail industry, a toothless regulator and successive governments unwilling to force the most basic safety reforms,” Lara says.
“As a result of this inaction, we’ve needlessly lost many more people at rail crossings and the figure grows every year.
“In many industries, flashing lights and side lighting are used to warn people of an approaching hazard. It’s crazy that trains, which hurtle across more than 20,000 level crossings in the country and can be up to 1.8km long, only have similar lighting to the tiny light you see on motorbikes.
“Coroners, safety reviews, the Monash Institute of Railway Technology and numerous committees have all recommended better lighting, such as rotating beacons or strobe lights, on trains. The rail industry has refused to budge. This has inevitably led us to conclude that the rail industry and its safety regulator don’t really care and the only way they will bring in adequate safety measures is if the federal government mandates them.
“So we have created the RailFail campaign which is calling on the federal government to legislate mandatory train and rolling stock lighting and force the rail corporations to install proper safety measures at rural and regional Australian rail crossings.”
Subscribe to the weekly Owner//Driver newsletter here.