Anybody concerned with Tourist and Heritage Rail will have been shocked to learn of the events that occurred at the MVHR on 2 April. This post is not about discussing that incident specificly, as this has been covered well enough elsewhere. This is more about any flow on actions that might arise from the incident,  together with the possibility of a requirement to review the security measures your operation has in place, assuming you belong to an accredited railway.

The need to address this issue should appear in an approved SMS under a heading similar to Security Management Plans, and is a requirement of the Transport (Rail Safety) act 2010. The Queensland Rail Safety Regulator provides guidance on this matter, through factsheet G13 which is available from their website (click the link).

In Summary, the security management plan will:

Set out what the transport operator will do to protect people from, and respond to security incidents. A security incident can be acts of theft, assault, sabotage, terrorism, other criminal acts and / harm

The factsheet goes on to describe the specifics of what the plan must contain.

Using the above guidelines, it is ATRQ belief that this would be a useful tool to review your organisations plan, and consider it against the events that occurred at the MVHR. The authors organisation did this and discovered a few flaws in rolling stock security that could have contributed to similar event.

It should also be noted that group and it’s representative that committed the fraud (Queensland Heritage Railways) is not, or ever has been, a member of ATRQ.