When world chickpea prices spiked above $1000 a tonne last year, Australia’s farmers and grain traders turned to rail to get their crops to market fast.
As the price began to fall, difficulties finding drivers qualified to operate trains on networks between farms and ports meant some contracts couldn’t be made in time, and many farmers missed out on the premium rate.
“Rail freight offers the fastest, most cost-efficient way of moving harvest, but traders are all competing, and if we don’t have confidence in the rail network to support the movement of that grain, we won’t make the bid,” said Alex Donnelly, Graincorp’s Rail Commercial and Contract Manager.
With 12 different safeworking rule books used across the country and many variations in roles, terminology, and work practices, freight operators face major challenges in ensuring enough drivers are available to meet sudden changes in customer demand.
“When we work under multiple sets of rules, the biggest issue is around safety, but we also lose the agility to deploy rapidly to support our customers and respond to the peaks and troughs of demand on other networks,” said Nicholas Angelos, Qube’s National Rail Access Manager. “When our customers miss out on peak prices, we’re missing out on money that would otherwise be going into the national economy.”
Addressing the complexity of rail
The many and varied rail operating rules place a significant knowledge burden on all workers who operate across networks, including drivers, network controllers and track workers.
The lack of standardisation affects safety, drives up training costs and makes it difficult to move workers around the country.
Right now, more than one third of Australia’s rail safety workforce operate from more than one rulebook, according to the Australasian Railway Association (ARA). Across the supply chain the figure is even higher, with 43 per cent of workers operating on an average of two and a half networks, costing the sector an extra $12.4 million in additional Safely Accessing the Rail Corridor (SARC) training alone.
“The cost and complexity of managing a workforce that can operate across multiple rail networks is particularly high in Australia,” NTC Chief Executive Officer Michael Hopkins said.
“Today, train drivers and crew need to know and be tested on up to seven different sets of rules to take a train across the country. Rail workers and contractors also need to be trained and have their competencies maintained for every network on which they operate.
“Not only do networks use different rule books, but the rule books don’t align. There are different role titles and responsibilities, different terminology, hand signals, signage – even personal protective equipment.”
The NTC is working with industry to reduce these differences and develop a national set of operating rules and practices for adoption across the national network.
“The National Network Rules project will reduce the knowledge burden on workers, improving safety,” Hopkins said.
“Having greater commonality across network rules means there will be less need for bespoke training. This will cut training costs and improve mutual recognition of workers’ skills, making it easier for them to work on railways around the country.
“A more mobile workforce will help to ease the country’s rail skills shortage, support interoperability and help networks operate as a single, integrated national rail system.”
The project is part of broader reform across Australia’s rail system as the NTC works with industry and all Australian governments through the National Rail Action Plan (NRAP) to address many of the long-standing challenges that come from having 18 separate rail networks.
By taking a national approach to rail standards, train control technology, rolling stock approvals, skills and training, they are working towards a single, interoperable network linking Australia’s cities and ports.
Hopkins said reducing differences will help to improve network efficiencies and capacity. As a result, passenger services will be more frequent and reliable, and rail freight will be more competitive and better able to support local industries and major exports.
“Having an integrated railway will help the sector play a bigger role in Australia’s national transport system, reducing emissions while supporting our growing cities, regions and ports,” he said.
National Network Rules project
Over the past 12 months the NTC has been consulting with industry and undertaking a line-by-line comparison of nine current rule books to understand the differences and similarities that currently exist.
An initial set of four safe working rules and five actions have been identified for standardisation. These align with the Rail Industry Safety and Standards Board’s (RISSB) existing national rules framework.
Work is now underway with industry and unions to measure the cost, benefit and human factor impacts of these changes, and to develop an implementation plan.
Comparing the countless different rules, roles and responsibilities across rail networks is a massive, complex task. Specialist technical advice is being sought to determine how artificial intelligence
technology and tools such as Large Language Models (LLM) can be used to accelerate the process in the future.
The project is also learning from the experience of railways overseas and across Australia.
“What we’re seeing is that some rules are bespoke to infrastructure and necessarily different,” Hopkins said. “However, many differences, including forms, terminology, roles and approaches, are creating unnecessary confusion and complexity.
“Across the sector there are roles that have different names and roles with the same names that do different tasks. While everyone is used to this scenario, it creates a lot of inefficiencies.
“Having workers qualified to work in specific areas creates a huge training burden and means organisations have extra competencies to maintain.”
At a time when rail urgently needs an additional 70,000 workers to build, run and maintain networks, the complexity around training and maintaining competencies is affecting the sector’s ability to grow its workforce.
“Organisations are telling us that it’s a barrier to people entering the industry – they see it as too hard to get the qualifications.
“Meanwhile people already in the industry are leaving because of the difficulties in maintaining their qualifications,” Hopkins said.
One organisation that is taking positive steps to address this situation is the Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC).
The ARTC was established in 1998 from three interstate and regional networks and has continued to operate under three rule books.
“We want to support our customers and those that work on our network to be able to work across the whole network,” ARTC’s General Manager Technical Services and Assurance, Safety and Systems, Melanie Mackie said.
Right now, the organisation is focused on aligning its network rules and procedures as much as possible. This includes terminology, forms, role titles and responsibilities.
“We’re not actually changing the way people are working,” Mackie said. “It’s about consolidating the rules over time and having consistency in language, whilst being clear on the controls that manage risk.”
Over the course of 2025, ARTC is introducing its National Safeworking Framework, which will provide a place where ARTC can consolidate all its rule books under a similar format over time. This will allow ARTC to easily introduce new rules as new technologies are introduced and remove rules as they are replaced with national rules that align across the network.
“This will give us flexibility, and future-proofs ARTC for the change that’s coming through increased adoption of digital technologies and the work of the NRAP.”
Momentum for change
Early engagement through NRAP has shown strong industry support for a national approach to rules and the development of a set of standardised safeworking rules and practices to be adopted by all industry stakeholders.
A recent review of Australia’s Rail Safety National Law (RSNL) found that consistency of rail skills and training is critical to improving safety and interoperability across the rail system.
The review found that previous attempts by industry to harmonise operating rules had limited success due to their voluntary nature. It recommended that changes be made to the law to establish a national set of rules and competencies.
This includes:
- Mandating and awarding of qualifications and units of competency for nationally recognised training.
- Mandating a national competency management system to support mutual recognition.
“If we have a streamlined network rules arrangement, removing differences between networks, we’d have significant safety improvement overnight because we won’t have people trying to remember which network they’re on and what rules they need to apply,” Angelos said.
“The second improvement would be rail is more competitive with road.”
Mackie said that safeworking is probably one of the biggest challenges facing the rail industry.
“It’s not an easy nut to crack in that people are very attached to their set of rules.
“When you try to understand why things are the way they are and what they could be, it’s quite an emotive topic for some people.”
However, she feels that as an industry, it’s possible to align more on the requirements – the operating rules and how people are trained – and simplify that.
“With everything that’s happening in the sector right now, it’s a good time to make some of these changes.
“There’s a real shift in the industry, not only in innovation and technology, but how the industry works together.”
