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Rail Safety Week

rail safety campaign in Australia and New Zealand

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 21, 2025
Entity authorityQ121484403
Source-derived summary

Rail Safety Week is an Australasian (Australia and New Zealand) public safety campaign held every year on the second week of August. It raises awareness on how to stay safe near level crossings and has been run since 2007. The New Zealand campaign is run by KiwiRail and TrackSAFE New Zealand.

History

New Zealand

The campaign first started on 23 July 2007, a Monday, after growing concerns about safety on the rail network. It made its debut with advertisements on major television channels (which were developed in Australia). The advertisements featured Chris Cairns, detailing his sister's death to a level crossing in 1993. The advertisements received numerous complains about being "too shocking" and "too graphic". In Auckland, the campaign included school programmes and prints.

The 2008 campaign included the same advertisements shown in 2007, and were also run in sporting functions and stadiums throughout the country.

The 2009 Rail Safety Week started on 25 July 2009 with a new television advertisement.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Rail Safety Week” as rail safety campaign in Australia and New Zealand. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Rail, Safety and Week.

Editorial reviewMost valuable as an event-and-institution map that identifies actors, dates and record creators for deeper historical inquiry. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2007, 1993, 2008, 2009—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2007-07-23. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Rail, Safety and Week providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Rail Safety Week”, the useful work is to connect “rail safety campaign in Australia and New Zealand” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 21, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q121484403. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2007, 1993, 2008 and 2009.

Critical limits

Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Rail Safety Week”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Rail Safety Week primary sources, Rail Safety Week archive and Rail research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Rail Safety Week”?
  2. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
  3. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Rail Safety Week” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.