AS 7522 – Access and Egress

The objective of this Standard is to describe the requirements for access and egress of crew and passengers on locomotives, freight, passenger, crew cars and infrastructure maintenance (track machines) rolling stock.
The main purpose of the requirements is to provide safe, efficient, equitable and dignified access and egress, and to minimize risks to passengers and crew associated with access and egress, emergency evacuations, and requirements for people with disabilities.

AS 7522 is an Australian standard for railway vehicle access and egress requirements. It was subjected to a targeted review following a commitment made by RISSB to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) after the tragic XPT passenger train derailment at Wallan, Victoria in February 2020. This accident resulted in the death of 2 crew members and numerous injuries to passengers and onboard crew.

The ATSB report into the derailment identified that AS 7522 did not provide emergency egress requirements for overturned locomotives or passenger cars (refer ATSB-RO-2020-002 Derailment of passenger train ST23).

The targeted review has resulted in several important changes:

• Incorporation of the latest Australian person size data set for access and egress
• Including crew cars and relay vans in the scope
• Requirements for locomotive windscreens and windows to be able to be used for emergency access and egress
• All crew areas and cabs to have multiple emergency exits that are accessible during incident events
• General updates to correct errors from the previous revision

The updated standard aims to influence future designs of locomotives and passenger rolling stock by:

• Specifically detailing requirements for rolling stock that is subjected to a rollover event
• Improving the survivability of train crew and passengers during and after an incident
• Providing better emergency ingress and egress for both persons exiting and persons gaining access from external areas to assist in achieving better outcomes for injured people

The standard helps manage several critical risks including:

• Emergency egress difficulties
• Emergency ingress challenges for rescue personnel
• Harm to train crew during incidents
• Harm to passengers during incidents

A systematic approach is recommended:

• Review AS 7522 against your internal applicable standards
• Review existing contemporary or under-development rolling stock designs for use by your organisation
• Identify common areas and variances between standards
• Where commonality exists, use your organisation’s change management process to update requirements to reference AS 7522 (for example, change a requirement to ‘Design shall comply with AS 7522’)
• Where variances occur, assess whether AS 7522 provides better safety and/or interoperability outcomes against your organisation’s risk profile and SFAIRP argument
• If AS 7522 results in improved safety and/or interoperability outcomes, amend organisational standards to reference AS 7522 using your organisation’s change management process
• If your internal standards provide better outcomes, you may still reference AS 7522 but include a derogation or deviation statement within your organisation’s standards