The majority of US fatal injuries incurred by on-duty railroad personnel occur during switching operations. The US Federal Government formed a group comprised of railroad industry representatives who studied all the 179 cases involving fatally injured railroad employees from 1975 thru 2009 while in switching operations. The study is called the Switching Operations Fatality Analysis (SOFA). This paper discusses the premise for the SOFA study and reviews two of the findings from the report dealing with injuries incurred while switching in an industrial area and being struck by a main line train.
