Abstract In Korean society, the theme of human errors in railway has been emerging as a critical issue. As far as human error studies are concerned, main trend has been inclined to be led by industrial engineering and systems science. Apart from those trends, this study empirically highlighted the relationship between depression, which has been a frequent research subject in the medical science and psychology, and accidents, with setting depression as an exogenous variable and cognitive failure and mistake as endogenous variables, respectively. Results of hypotheses test for the 204 respondents showed that driver's depression has a significant effect on accidents mediated by cognitive failure and mistake. This findings suggest the need for exploring the diverse latent factors causing human errors and for understanding the complex cognitive process as well as for establishing integrative countermeasures to mitigate human errors.