The time spent by passengers on the station platforms, including boarding and alighting processes, is a phase of the rail travel where accidents concentrate. Therefore, systematic analyses and robust methodologies to assess the risks in these phases are a priority to ensure the safety integrity of the railway system. The key aspects are the elements that play a role in generating hazards. Analyses and methodologies should be able to consider the large variety of infrastructural and traffic conditions to reach a quantitative risk assessment and pondering them. The paper describes the preliminary results of an ongoing research, developed in cooperation with the Infrastructure Manager RFI, specifically focused on these aspects. The inputs of the study are the various accessibility systems of the passengers to the platforms, rules and standards for their design, operational rules, mainly concerning maximum speed in stations, composition of trains, dwell times, etc. The research activities carried out include: 1) to study the state of the assets to identify common standards and infrastructure-specific elements (in terms of typology and accessibility) at network level; 2) to qualify the platforms in terms of number of served tracks, calling passenger services, passing through trains; 3) to analyse the accidents database from the stochastic viewpoint to identify recurrent locations, periods, causal factors; 4) to correlate accidents with single or groups of infrastructural and operational features; 5) to elaborate a specific risk analysis methodology; 6) to apply the elaborated risk analysis to a set of sampling stations for tuning and validating the methodology. As soon as the methodology has been setup, the application is focused on the expected results: A) to apply widely and systematically it at network level to rank the stations and the single platforms according to the risk level; B) to identify corrective actions, such as morphological, technological, operational measures.

Railway, Stations, Safety