Abstract
The Norwegian railway is under pressure of increasing traffic. As a way to document the results of its safety management system, the Norwegian National Rail Administration has decided to measure its safety culture annually. However, there are no safety culture frameworks that have been validated for the railway domain. This study tested the ability of two safety climate models to account for safety climate among rail traffic controllers (RTCs). 15 semi-structured interviews of Norwegian RTCs from three rail traffic control centres were conducted. The interview transcripts were unitized into 1363 statements and coded in Flin, Mearns, O’Connor and Bryden’s (2000) Safety Climate Model (SCM) and Ek, Akselsson, Arvidsson and Johansson’s (2007) Safety Culture in Air Traffic Control (SCATC). The results indicate that none of these models account completely for the safety climate among RTCs. SCM and SCATC were combined in a big model, but there was still a significant residual. A thematic analysis of the residual from the combined model showed that 35 statements added new themes to the safety climate framework. This implies that a framework for safety climate in the domain of rail traffic management cannot be entirely based on the examined models.