Travelling by rail all around Europe will be even safer than it is today, thanks to newly published EN 15227:2020, Railway applications - Crashworthiness requirements for rail vehicles.

This standard establishes passive safety requirements to reduce the consequences of collision accidents: the measures proposed set some means of additional protection when all possibilities of preventing an accident have failed. EN 15227 provides a framework for determining the crash conditions that railway vehicle bodies can be designed to withstand, based on the most common types of collision.

In particular, the document sets out crashworthiness requirements applicable to the new designs of locomotives, driving vehicles operating in passenger and freight trains and passenger rail vehicles operating in passenger trains (such as trams, metros, mainline trains).

It also specifies the requirements and methods for demonstrating that the passive safety objectives have been achieved by comparison with existing proven designs, numerical simulation, component or full-size tests. Furthermore, it adds to the basic strength requirement defined in EN 12663-1 by setting additional requirements for structural passive safety, in order to increase occupant safety in case of collisions.

If a vehicle was already successfully assessed using the previous edition of this standard, and the technical changes of the new edition of EN 15227 do not affect this assessment, the vehicle can be regarded to conform to the new standard. Otherwise, if the vehicle needs to be reassessed, it is sufficient to conduct the assessment only on the new technical requirements.

(Source: CEN-CENELEC)