Occasionally, rail freight safety is subject to severe public scrutiny. This is particularly true when talking about dangerous or hazardous freight, where rail operations are often seen as detrimental to public security. The same cannot be said for the road sector, but that could be a great misconception.
When a Dutch inspectorate reported on a 1400% increase in rail freight hazardous material leakages, it made national headlines. Online comments revealed a degree of public outrage about the perceived danger of the rail freight industry. Meanwhile, the Dutch sector maintains that it operates safely.
A newly published UK report by the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) may corroborate this. The report focused only on the UK, not on the Netherlands or elsewhere in Europe. Still, it revealed a massive gap in the safety levels of rail freight and road freight.
The UK study assigned values to various degrees of casualties that occurred during road and rail freight operations. Death corresponds to 1, a severe injury to 0.025 and slight injuries to 0.001. The study then calculated the cumulative values (Fatalities and Weight Injury score, FWI) of all 2022-2024 incidents across major UK highways and roads, those from which rail freight could hypothetically draw more freight volumes. It did the same for the railways, and then compared the two outcomes.
The road could be 120+ times more dangerous
Ultimately, the PACTS study estimated that rail freight had an FWI score of 5.5 — a weighted casualty score in rail freight movements. This is based on attributing 20% of severe injuries and 10% of non-severe injuries to rail freight, while the industry accounted for 6.35% of train-kilometres driven. By contrast, the road sector ended up with an FWI of around 431.
“Taking the […] FWI figure for [rail] freight of 5.5, and with the acknowledgement that all of the assumptions made around attributing deaths and injuries to rail freight are very conservative, this means that road freight has a […] FWI of at least 78 times greater than rail, and probably even greater”, the study explains.
The study estimates that road freight in the UK is at least 78 times more dangerous than rail freight. This figure could even be 120 times greater, if injuries were evenly distributed by percentage of distance travelled by freight and passenger train. The difference between road freight and rail freight could even be greater than that, if a larger number of the fatalities were not freight related. Due to dataset limitations, the study could not determine this. Similarly, the fatality risk of car travel is 22 times that of passenger rail.
Moving more freight by rail, rather than by road, offers very significant safety benefits, the study concludes. This comes on top of carbon emission and congestion reductions.