AS 7457 Management of Proceed Authority Exceedance Events

This document contains the minimum requirements for managing proceed authority exceedance (PAE) events as defined by the Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator’s (ONRSR) guideline Notifiable Occurrences Reporting Requirements.
The term PAE is used throughout the document to ensure an approach which encompasses all PAE events and replacing the commonly used reference of signal passed at danger (SPAD).
The scope includes the management of the PAE event from the occurrence to the closure and communication of the investigation.
This document may be applied to light rail.

This Standard details the requirements for:

• RTO’s actions immediately after a PAE event,
• The care and continuation of rail safety workers involved in a PAE event, and
• PAE specific investigation considerations.

The review of this standard has provided alignment with current terminologies, recently published RISSB Guideline Rail Traffic PAE Risk Management and promotes RSW wellbeing and a just culture approach to PAE Management.

Key changes include:

• Greater emphasis on Human Factors and evidence relating specifically to PAE investigation.
• Increase requirements to rail safety worker wellbeing post an event.

Removal of content not explicitly related to PAE events and duplication of content found in other publications.

Improved management of PAE events will reduce the risk of increasing psychological impacts of the rail safety works involved. Greater harmonisation will be driven by applying a consistent approach across rail transport operators in the management of PAE events.

• Failure to follow appropriate risk management process
• Failure to implement rail safety incident and accident reporting
• Personal stress
• Subsequent incidents following a PAE occurrence

Rail transport organisations may review their internal procedures and processes against the Standard and adopt best practice approach to the management of PAE events.