Why do railway workers wear orange

Food Hygiene. Forestry Workwear. Excellent all round service. Wednesday, 20 October Nia. The workers who were in fluorescent yellow high visibility safety apparel blended into the green background. Until the vehicle was within 50 yards they were not even noticeable.

Orange against the green grass median created a high contrast for easy detection. A subconscious response to color is a form of recognition. Colors can help drivers and equipment operators recognize workers. Orange has been widely used in road construction signs, cones, barrels and delineators. Orange is also featured in the auto warning triangle. In road construction, orange may be the color of recognition for a driver because it is associated with roadside work.

Orange also has a strong position in identifying humans while hunting. Orange is the required safety color to allow hunters to be recognized by one another in complex backgrounds that are often green or brown.

Because this man-made color does not occur naturally in the forest, it is easier for the human mind to recognize fluorescent orange as marking a human figure. For hearing protection, we have used the traffic light system for uvex K family earmuffs, with green for low noise insulation, amber for medium and red for high.

In certain areas of application, the colours used tend to be inconspicuous — have you ever seen a flight attendant wearing bright green hearing protection?

For these purposes, the uvex range includes special skin-coloured products that are generally more or less invisible. Admittedly, all this colour coding is not necessarily self-explanatory, but once understood, it really does simplify and expedite the choice of the right PPE enormously. The PPE colour does not always just highlight the function or purpose of the PPE concerned — in fact, sometimes it also says something about the wearer. Have you ever wondered why so many different coloured helmets are deployed on a building site?

Although there are no universally valid regulations, on larger building sites, it is usual to identify the different qualifications, functions and trades of the wearers by the colours of their protective helmets. In general, the colours identify the functions of the workforce, with yellow, blue, green and orange respectively signifying membership of a particular trade: bricklayers and depot workers usually wear yellow helmets, blue helmets protect the heads of plumbers and metal workers, while carpenters and electricians most often wear green helmets.

Health and safety officers are identified by their orange helmets, although these can also be worn by lumberjacks and reinforced concrete construction workers. Visitor or architects, in general people who will not spend hours and hours at a site, usually wear white helmets, with red helmets often worn by supervisors, foremen or electricians with a management function.

There is another area of PPE where colour plays a role: in the case of protective eyewear, it is not only the colour of the frame, but often the actual lens that comes in a different tint. Is there any significance attached to these tintings? A large majority of construction and utility industries have workers that wear yellow high-vis clothing.

So why do rail workers wear orange high-visibility clothing? Is there a difference? The most obvious reason is that the colours yellow and green are used for train signalling, so rail workers wear orange hi-vis in order to not confuse the train drivers.