Train crew fire training in the EU is governed by two separate regulations that get confused constantly. TSI SRT — Commission Regulation (EU) No 1303/2014 on safety in railway tunnels — sets what train crew must know and be able to do when a train stops in a tunnel with a fire on board. TSI LOC&PAS — Regulation (EU) No 1302/2014 — sets what the train itself must be built to withstand and detect. One is about people, the other about hardware, and a compliance programme that only covers one of them has a gap.
That split matters in practice. A rail operator can buy rolling stock that meets every TSI LOC&PAS fire requirement and still fail an audit because the crew running it has never rehearsed the evacuation duty TSI SRT actually assigns to them. This post separates the two, quotes what each one requires, and covers where realistic rehearsal — including VR — fits the gap between reading a regulation and acting on it with smoke in the carriage.
What TSI SRT requires from train crew
Clause 4.6.1 of TSI SRT is specific about competence, not just awareness. Train crew "shall have knowledge of the appropriate safety behaviour in tunnels and in particular be able to evacuate the people on board a train, when the train is stopped in a tunnel" (TSI SRT, Commission Regulation (EU) No 1303/2014, clause 4.6.1(c)).
The same clause spells out what that competence looks like in action: crew must be capable of "instructing the passengers to go to the next coach or to exit the train, and to lead them outside the train to a safe area" (clause 4.6.1(d)). It is a training requirement written as an operational outcome, not a course topic — regulators are asking whether the person can do it, not whether they attended a briefing.
The obligation does not stop at the driver or conductor. Auxiliary train staff — catering, cleaning, anyone on board who is not part of the train crew as defined in the Operation TSI — "shall, in addition to their basic instruction, be trained to support the actions of the train crew" (clause 4.6.1(e)). Operators sometimes exempt contracted catering staff from safety training on the assumption it is the crew's job alone; the regulation does not allow that assumption.
Where TSI LOC&PAS fits — the vehicle, not the person
TSI LOC&PAS addresses the same risk from the other direction: it minimises the impact of a fire on passengers and crew through the rolling stock itself, covering fire prevention, detection and extinguishing measures, and evacuation route design, all specified through the EN 45545 series of fire-behaviour standards for materials and components (Radziszewska-Wolińska et al., "European Approach to Fire Safety in Rolling Stock," Applied Sciences, 2025).
What TSI LOC&PAS does not do is train anyone. Its scope is the certified vehicle: what it is built from, what it detects, what it carries to fight a fire. A train can be fully LOC&PAS-compliant and still put an untrained crew in front of a real evacuation, because the two regulations were written to cover different halves of the same incident.
Rolling stock categories A and B
TSI SRT sorts passenger rolling stock into two categories that decide which tunnels it may run through. Category A covers rolling stock "for operation on lines within the scope of this TSI, where the distance between fire fighting points or the length of tunnels does not exceed 5 km." Category B covers rolling stock "for operation in all tunnels on lines within the scope of this TSI, irrespective of the length of the tunnels" (clause 4.2.3(a)).
The practical difference shows up in what happens to passengers during a fire. For Category B rolling stock, "the passengers in the affected area will move to a non-affected area of the train where they are protected from fire and fumes" (clause 2.2.1(b)) — a manoeuvre the crew has to direct, in a moving or just-stopped train, potentially in a tunnel tens of kilometres from the nearest exit. Category A rolling stock, running shorter tunnels, relies less on that internal relocation and more on a faster route outside.
An operator buying or leasing Category B stock for a long-tunnel route is signing crew up for the harder version of clause 4.6.1's evacuation duty. That is a training decision as much as a procurement one, and it is worth making at the same table.
Why classroom instruction stalls here
Nothing about this duty is easy to rehearse for real. Running an actual fire in a tunnel to train for it is not an option, and even a staged, smoke-machine drill in a real tunnel needs the line closed, the fire service involved, and a dozen or more crew rotated through a single expensive session — the kind of exercise most operators can run occasionally, not on the schedule a genuine skill needs. What gets trained instead is often the theory: clause numbers, a diagram of the evacuation route, a slide on "stay calm."
The gap between knowing the clause and doing the manoeuvre is exactly where evacuations go wrong — hesitating over which direction is safe, under-communicating with passengers who cannot see the driver, losing track of who has and has not moved to the unaffected coach. None of that shows up in a multiple-choice quiz on TSI SRT.
Rehearsing the scenario in VR
This is the part a live drill can supply once a year and VR can supply every week: repeated, first-person practice at the specific decision TSI SRT requires — reading the situation, choosing the direction, instructing passengers, and leading them to the unaffected coach or the exit, with visible smoke and time pressure and no real train taken out of service.
Our Train Fire Emergency scenario is built around that clause directly: crew practise the evacuation call and the passenger-instruction sequence TSI SRT describes, as many times as it takes to make it automatic, before they ever need it on a real service. It sits alongside the wider VR course catalog for operators who need to cover confined space entry training or other high-risk-work scenarios in the same programme, and it follows the same logic covered in why VR training is more effective than traditional training.
Be honest about the boundary. VR does not replace the physical fire service drill, the real evacuation route walk-through, or the annual full-scale exercise regulators expect for high-risk lines. What it replaces is the gap between that one annual drill and the next — the weeks where crew memory of the procedure would otherwise fade untested.
A compliance checklist for rail operators
| Requirement | Where it lives | Who owns it |
|---|---|---|
| Fire-resistant materials, detection, extinguishing equipment | TSI LOC&PAS, via EN 45545 | Rolling stock manufacturer / owner |
| Rolling stock fire category (A or B) matched to the route's tunnels | TSI SRT clause 4.2.3 | Operator, at procurement |
| Crew competence: tunnel safety behaviour, evacuation, passenger instruction | TSI SRT clause 4.6.1(c)-(d) | Operator, training department |
| Auxiliary staff trained to support crew | TSI SRT clause 4.6.1(e) | Operator, incl. contracted staff |
Treat the four rows as one programme, not four separate boxes to tick. The vehicle can meet every material standard in EN 45545 and the operator can still fail the part that determines whether people get out: whether the crew standing in the corridor has done this before, even if only in a headset.
