Dark Territory is an area of railway operations that doesn’t have signals or track circuits to detect occupied sections of track. Dark territory accounts for large parts of the rail networks of many countries (including the USA, Canada & Australia) and carries some of the largest passenger trains in the world. While there have been a number of accidents in dark territory that have caused multiple fatalities the safety of dark territory operations has so far not been considered in the safety literature. This paper is an initial exploration of how safe the railway dark territory system is and whether effective teamwork is able to help people identify and recover from error. Nineteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with network controllers and locomotive drivers who operate in dark territory. These interviews revealed that the safety of dark territory railway operations was almost totally reliant on the agents involved with few effective mechanisms available for detecting and resolving potential conflicts between trains and between trains and other network users. Further, the current structure and nature of interactions between network users provides little opportunity for the team to identify and recover from errors. To improve safety in dark territory operations we suggest that the network controllers need to share more information, locomotive drivers need to communicate more with each other and the network controller, and that open radio communication systems with a specific geographical focus be considered for implementation.

黑暗领地是一个铁路运营区域，没有信号或轨道电路来检测被占用的轨道部分。黑暗地区占许多国家（包括美国、加拿大和澳大利亚）铁路网络的大部分，并承载着世界上一些最大的客运列车。虽然在黑暗领域发生了许多事故，导致多人死亡，但迄今为止，安全文献中并未考虑黑暗领域操作的安全性。本文是对铁路黑暗区域系统的安全性以及有效的团队合作是否能够帮助人们识别错误并从错误中恢复的初步探索。对在黑暗区域运行的网络控制器和机车司机进行了 19 次半结构化访谈。这些采访表明，黑暗区域铁路运营的安全几乎完全依赖于参与其中的代理，几乎没有有效的机制可用于检测和解决列车之间以及列车与其他网络用户之间的潜在冲突。此外，网络用户之间交互的当前结构和性质为团队提供了很少的机会来识别错误并从错误中恢复。为了提高黑暗区域操作的安全性，我们建议网络控制器需要共享更多信息，机车驾驶员需要与彼此以及网络控制器进行更多通信，并且考虑实施具有特定地理焦点的开放无线电通信系统。