NSW Independent Transport Safety Regulator

The NSW Independent Transport Safety Regulator (ITSR) was the state's rail safety regulator until its functions were absorbed into a national regulator in 2013. The ITSR website, hosted by PretaGov, continued to publish historical reports and educational material to operators, the public, media and academics through to its formal decommissioning at the end of 2017.

Background

Rail safety regulators publish for a varied audience: rail operators who need to understand their compliance obligations, the general public who want to understand incident response, the media reporting on transport safety, and academics researching the sector. Each group's information needs are quite different, and the platform had to serve all of them without becoming a generic content site.

Solution

We delivered a Plone-based platform with the editor-experience and add-ons appropriate to a regulator publishing in mixed-audience mode. Features included a rolling news carousel for the public-facing top of the site, three-level navigation supporting deep regulatory content without losing wayfinding, RSS distribution for media and operators tracking publications, an interactive rail map giving spatial context to incident and operator information, last-updated content timestamps so users could trust currency, and enterprise search across the published material.

The platform was fully compliant with the NSW Government web directive — covering W3C accessibility standards and the branding guidelines applicable to NSW statutory bodies.

Decommissioning

When the regulator's functions transferred to the national Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator (ONRSR), we delivered the orderly archival of the ITSR website — content captured for long-term archival access, the live site decommissioned, the domain wound down per the transition plan. The same hands that built the platform also brought it down at the end of its useful life. It's not a glamorous part of the work but it matters: a regulator whose statutory existence ends shouldn't leave a poorly-curated digital trail behind it.

Why this is here

The ITSR site is now historical — but it represents a complete arc of regulator-grade publishing that's instructive for any agency considering a similar platform. From a standing start in the early Plone years, through years of operational publishing, to a clean structural transition. That's the kind of long-life software work we keep doing.