Only in Western Australia could we reach the year 2026 and suddenly “discover” that trains need lights. Not because someone had a brainstorm in Perth, but because enough people have been killed at level crossings over the years that regulators have finally decided visibility might matter.
So now we have a draft standard — AS 7531 — and the public is invited to make submissions, as if the laws of physics are up for consultation.
This consultation follows a long campaign by safety advocates and regulators after a series of tragic accidents at railway crossings around the country. These incidents are always described as “rare” right up until the moment they happen again. And when they do, it is never abstract. It is a family. A truck driver. A farmer. A school bus route. A community left asking how something so basic went wrong.
So yes, it matters that trains are visible. And yes, the public should engage with this process.
Submissions on AS 7531 close later this month, and rural Australians — the people who actually cross these tracks in dust, fog and darkness — should have a voice.
But Western Australia should also feel a certain sense of déjà vu. Because we have been here before. Quite literally.
Following a spate of serious crashes at railway level crossings in WA in the mid-1960s, the Cabinet of the day — under Premier Sir David Brand — appointed an inter-departmental committee to review safety requirements for level crossings across the State.
A 109-page report, Railway Level Crossing Protection in WA, was released in December 1968. And what did it talk about? Painting rolling stock. Rotating beacons. Reflectors and lights on trains. In other words, nearly sixty years ago Western Australia was already asking: can motorists actually see the train?
Fast forward to 2026 and we are back here again, consulting on the same question with newer fonts.
This is not progress. It is policy amnesia.
Out in the Wheatbelt and the South West, level crossings are not tidy metropolitan interfaces with boom gates, flashing lights, underpasses and maintenance crews nearby. They are often passive crossings. Narrow approaches. Dust haze. Fog. Harvest traffic. Road trains. Oversized machinery. Long days and tired drivers trying to get home before midnight.
In those conditions, visibility is not a “nice-to-have”. It is the difference between stopping safely and not stopping at all. And yet we still have freight trains moving through the countryside like dark ships of the night — long, low, snaking across country roads with minimal side visibility.
It is a strange thing.
A locomotive might have a headlight, but the rest of the consist can disappear into the grey — a moving wall of steel, side-on, poorly contrasted, detected too late.
A train that blends into dusk is not a driver failure. It is a system failure. Other places have worked this out.
Canada mandates auxiliary ditch lights. Europe treats rolling stock visibility as basic safety and interoperability. They do not rely on vague language about “adequate conspicuity”.
They mandate performance because they understand a simple truth: you cannot avoid what you cannot see.
Australia is now trying to tidy up its own approach through AS 7531. Fine. Better late than never. But in Western Australia, it raises an obvious question: why are we still reinventing the wheel — or in this case, the train light?
The answer is the same as the answer to almost every rail question in this State. Fragmented responsibility. Under-enforced standards. A system where rural crossings remain stuck in time while the paperwork continues to multiply.
Perth can spend billions on grade separations — flyovers, underpasses, urban rail projects of extraordinary ambition. But beyond the suburbs, it is as if time has stood still. Passive crossings. Minimal modernisation. Minimal urgency. We have invested heavily where risk is already managed, and accepted “good luck” where conditions are most unforgiving.
Lighting upgrades are not glamorous. They don’t come with ribbon-cuttings. But they are among the simplest and cheapest safety improvements imaginable — far cheaper than rebuilding crossings, and far cheaper than the cost of another tragedy.
So this consultation should not be treated as a box-ticking exercise. Train visibility should not be optional. And Western Australia should reflect on the deeper lesson: we have known about this problem since 1968.
Some things never change in politics. But surely, after sixty years, the train lights should have.
Steve McGuire is President of WAFarmers.
