Sim win for rail safety teamwork research
CQUniversity safety researchers have won a prestigious innovation award, recognising their work to understand and model driver reactions to risky situations in rail operations.
CQUniversity’s Human Factors and Operational Readiness Cluster at Appleton Institute won the Project Innovation category at the 2025 Simulation Australasia Awards on Wednesday.
Organisers from the Simulation Australasia Congress, held in Adelaide from August 11-13, said the award recognised significant contribution to the simulation and modelling community.
The annual honour acknowledges a simulation project team that has achieved outstanding results in delivering a new simulation capability, or utilising a simulation capability in a new and improved way.
The award-winning project, The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts: Improving Rail Safety Through Teamwork, was led by CQUniversity Human Factors researcher Professor Anjum Naweed.
He explained that ‘human factors’, and particularly how employees worked together, had big implications for the safety of train passengers and rail workers.
“When trains go through danger signals - an incident known in the industry as Signal Passed at Danger (SPAD) - there is an increased risk of accident and injury,” he explained.
“Rail organisations use models to manage this risk, but they are focused primarily on technical factors, like signals and communications technology...and often fail to include key human dimensions as a cause.”
Using a mixed methods design, CQUniversity researchers conducted the research with Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) funding.
The project involved interviews and observations with network controllers around Australia and New Zealand using an innovative simulation-based task to identify high-risk scenarios.
Using a rail sim laboratory, the scenarios were tested with real train drivers.
With a focus on real-time strategies of drivers to manage risk, the research identified systemic challenges that undermined teamwork, trust and improved safety culture.
“This project is enabling rail organisations to better understand and design for human factors, and therefore identify and mitigate safety risks,” Prof Naweed said.
Since project completion in 2021, it has informed the development of multiple Australian standards and guidelines on rail safety, and Prof Naweed’s successful 2025 ARC Future Fellowship exploring investigation trauma.
Explore more CQUniversity Human Factors and Operational Readiness research at the Appleton Institute website.
