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High-quality engineering and operations management are key to meeting all the requirements of a successful railway -quality of service, reliable and safe performance, and maximum possible use of capacity. However, the railway is a socio-technical system and therefore has human factors at its core, which requires a strong integrated ergonomics contribution. Moreover, this contribution must be at a systems level rather than providing point solutions to particular equipment, interface, workplace, or job problems. This paper draws from the first two human factors projects in the EPSRC Rail Research UK programme, interpreting them for an engineering audience. The paper first emphasizes and gives examples of the need for a systems ergonomics contribution to engineering an improved railway. Then the available literature is summarized in a structured fashion. Finally, a short summary is provided of the research which has started to develop a distributed cognition model of work on the railways, especially across functional groups of signalling, control, and train driving.

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There is an increasing prevalence for work to be analysed through naturalistic study, especially using ethnographically derived methods of enquiry and qualitative field research. The relatively unexplored domain of railway control (in comparison to signalling) in the UK is described in terms of features derived from observations and semi-structured interviews. In addition, task diagrams (a technique taken from the Applied Cognitive Task Analysis toolkit) are used to represent controllers' core elements of work, i.e. to manage events or incidents, and to identify the challenging steps in the process. The work features identified, the task diagrams, and the steps identified as challenging form a basis from which future ergonomics studies on railway controllers in the UK will be carried out.

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