The Federal Railroad Administration’s (FRA) Office of Railroad Policy and Development believes that in addition to process and technology innovations, human factors-based solutions can make a significant contribution to improving safety in the railroad industry. To test this assumption, FRA implemented the Confidential Close-Call Reporting System (C3RS), which includes (1) voluntary confidential reporting of close-call events by employees and root-cause-analysis problem solving by a Peer Review Team (PRT) composed of labor, management, and FRA; (2) identification and implementation of corrective actions; (3) tracking the results of change; and (4) reporting the results of change to employees. Confidential reporting and joint labor-management-FRA root-cause problem solving are the most innovative of these characteristics for the railroad industry. FRA is sponsoring a rigorous evaluation of C3RS to examine three important aspects of C3RS functioning: (1) What conditions are necessary to implement C3RS successfully? (2) What is the impact of C3RS on safety and safety culture? (3) What factors help to sustain C3RS over time? Some key findings were (1) a 31-percent improvement in cars moved between incidents; (2) improved labor-management relationships and employee engagement within the PRT and out in the field; and (3) a reduction in discipline cases.
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