The Test Solutions “Rail Track Safety Personnel – Supervisor” and “Rail Track Safety Personnel – Operator” serve for aptitude testing of personnel in the track area who are either responsible for the planning, coordination and monitoring of track works or for the operational safeguarding and monitoring of the track section.
While binding minimum requirements for psychological fitness exist for train drivers under EU Directive 2007/59/EC and several concrete standards are established internationally, the requirements for safety personnel in the track area are considerably less explicit at the international level. The EU Directive merely states that the psychological basic principles defined for train drivers may serve as guidance for other safety-relevant activities in rail transport (see Train Drivers). International regulations such as the Australian National Standard for Health Assessment of Rail Safety Workers or the Canadian Railway Medical Rules for Positions Critical to Safe Railway Operators prescribe standardized, safety-related selection of safety-relevant personnel, but do not specify concrete psychometric ability or personality requirements.
Germany represents a special case in this context: In addition to the general DGUV regulation 77/78 “Arbeiten im Bereich von Gleisen” (UVB, 2025), a concrete recommendation for aptitude testing of track area safety personnel was already published in 1994 by the Research Society for Applied System Safety and Occupational Medicine (FSA), showing that management and operational personnel in track safety are highly relevant for the prevention of accidents in the track area (Müller, 1994). This study formed the basis for systematic and comprehensive aptitude testing of safety-relevant personnel within the area of responsibility of Deutsche Bahn. The FSA guideline was recently revised and expanded on the basis of an empirical requirements analysis and validation study (Manteuffel & Kutschbach, 2020). The updated guideline forms the central conceptual basis for the selection of diagnostic dimensions of the Test Solutions “Rail Track Safety Personnel – Supervisor” (corresponds in Germany to: Sicherheitsaufsichtskraft, SAKRA) and “Rail Track Safety Personnel – Operator” (Germany: Sicherheitsposten, SIPO). Due to the lack of international research, the use of these Test Solutions for similar occupational groups beyond the German national context is recommended by the authors of this document as evidence-based procedures for aptitude testing of safety-relevant personnel in the track area.
The findings of the new FSA study show that the requirements for management and operational personnel in track safety differ with regard to cognitive complexity, responsibility and scope for action (Manteuffel & Kutschbach, 2020). The safety management (Supervisor) bears overall responsibility for planning, coordination, monitoring and situational adaptation of safety measures and makes independent decisions. Accordingly, this activity requires not only alertness and attention, but in particular divided attention, logical reasoning, memory performance and verbal ability. The safety lookout (Operator) implements the safety measures operationally; this activity is more strongly standardized and characterized by longer phases of uniform observation. Central requirements here are pronounced sustained attention (vigilance), high resistance to distraction and reliability. Common to both occupational groups are selective attention (concentration), memory performance, and alertness. In the present Test Solution, reaction speed in the sense of pure reaction time measures is deliberately not assessed. Instead, in accordance with the recommendations of Manteuffel and Kutschbach, general alertness (phasic alertness, operationalized as the difference between reaction times with and without a cue) is assessed as a requirement-relevant aspect of attention, since for the activities of safety personnel it is not millisecond differences that are decisive, but rather timely perception, correct assessment and situation-appropriate reaction to relevant signals.
Regarding personality, the requirements profile by Manteuffel and Kutschbach is based on the facet model of the Big Five personality. The facet model postulates that each of the Big Five personality dimensions comprises six facets, i.e., subfactors. Empirically, it shows low incremental validity in predicting occupational success compared to the broad Big Five factors (cf. Judge et al., 2013). In the requirements profile of safety-relevant personality traits, the FSA study describes the following facets (dimensions) as relevant: sociableness (extraversion), assertiveness (extraversion), stress tolerance resilience (emotional stability), diligence / persistence (conscientiousness), reliability / sense of responsibility (conscientiousness), as well as rule and sense of duty (conscientiousness), whereby conscientiousness and emotional stability were assessed as the most important factors. However, Manteuffel and Kutschbach found no robust relationships between self-reported personality facets and safety-relevant work performance in the FSA validation study. The authors attribute this to response distortion in terms of social desirability and conclude that rating scale procedures in the context of high-stakes assessments may be less suitable. They therefore recommend “For determining the aptitude characteristic ‘personality’ […] a narrow measurement instrument that is directly derived from the requirement area ‘personality’.” (Manteuffel & Kutschbach, 2020).
In terms of content, the personality assessment of the Test Solutions “Rail Track Safety Personnel” therefore focuses on the dimensions conscientiousness and emotional stability, which have been identified both in the occupational requirements profile and in the empirical literature as central for general work performance (cf. Barrick et al., 2001; He et al., 2019). Extraversion is deliberately not assessed, as empirical evidence here is less consistent and it was identified as safety-relevant in the requirements profile only at the facet level, not at the dimension level (cf. Manteuffel & Kutschbach, 2020). To reduce socially desirable responding in the high-risk context of aptitude testing, a forced-choice response format is used in the present Test Solutions (FCB5, test form S1), which can reduce response distortion due to social desirability (e.g., Cao & Drasgow, 2019; Wetzel et al., 2021).
The Test Solutions “Rail Track Safety Personnel – Supervisor” and “Rail Track Safety Personnel – Operator” therefore comprise the following dimensions:
Rail Track Safety Personnel – Supervisor
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Alertness (RT)
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Ability to concentrate (TACO)
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Divided attention (TACO)
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Logical reasoning, long-term memory and verbal ability (INT)
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Personality: conscientiousness and emotional stability (FCB5)
Rail Track Safety Personnel – Operator
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Alertness (RT)
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Ability to concentrate (TACO)
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Vigilance / sustained attention (VIGIL)
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Long-term memory (INT)
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Personality: conscientiousness and emotional stability (FCB5)
Aptitude assessment is not based on a cross-dimensional weighting, but follows the minimum requirements according to the FSA guideline. This approach reflects the safety-critical nature of the activity, where deficits in individual central ability areas should not be compensated by strengths in other areas. Therefore, a minimum level of percentile rank (PR) > 15 is required for all cognitive ability dimensions as well as for exclusion-relevant personality traits. This threshold corresponds to a convention established in traffic psychology for distinguishing below-average ability and is based on the definition of the below-average range as a deviation of more than one standard deviation from the mean of the norm sample. For vigilance, an increased minimum value of PR > 32 is set for the Test Solution “Rail Track Safety Personnel – Operator”, in line with the emphasized importance of sustained attention in the requirements profile (cf. Müller, 1994; Manteuffel & Kutschbach, 2020). The overall assessment is based on fulfillment of the minimum requirements in the individual dimensions as well as on a professional psychological overall interpretation of the result profiles.
The test duration is approximately 77 minutes for the Test Solution “Rail Track Safety Personnel – Supervisor” and approximately 73 minutes for the Test Solution “Rail Track Safety Personnel – Operator”.
References can be found here: Literature