The level of automation in transportation systems is steadily on the rise, particularly in railways. However, this increase in automation implies a review of the previously established safety assessments, safety cases, and safety principles. Concretely, to ensure the overall safety of automated systems, it is crucial to provide conclusive assurance not only for their functional systems but also for any potential operational interactions that may arise unexpectedly. In this paper, we propose a risk assessment method to deal with the operational safety of the remote driving of freight trains. The established approach is based on the GAME principle (i.e. the French safety principle ‘Globally at least equivalent’), which tends to assure the non-regression of the railway safety level. Firstly, the approach aims to perform a risk gap analysis with respect to driver’s handbook procedures to identify the (operational) hazards and dangerous situations/scenarios generated by remote driving on the rail system. This analysis is completed by the identification of hazards due to the fact that the remote driving is not able to fully comply with the requirements of the driver’s handbook. Then, the methodology is used to identify the risk control measures and the safety requirements to meet safety targets (i.e. maintaining the safety level at least equivalent to that obtained so far with in-cab driver). The obtained results are presented and structured in a table inspired by the preliminary operational hazards analysis (P-OHA) process.