Wheelchair users need staff to lay a ramp to allow them to get on or off trains. This doesn’t always happen, often leaving them stranded on the platform or carried beyond their station.
Closing this gap will help others - pushchairs and prams can be wheeled to and from trains. Luggage too. Closing the gap will put an end to staff heaving ramps along platforms. No longer will they struggle to push wheelchairs into trains.
Bridging the gap needs two things - no vertical difference between trains and platforms and no horizontal gap. Today most train floors sit around 1,100mm from the rails while the standard platform height is 915mm. One needs raising or the other lowering. Meanwhile the platform edge needs to be closer to the train by moving one or the other. But there must be a gap, a lateral offset from the nearest rail, to allow trains to pass curved platforms.
So why not raise platform heights? It’s a question RSSB Principal Infrastructure Engineer Bridget Eickhoff has considered. “The main line rail network in Britain has more than 2,500 stations and around 6,000 platforms. In an ideal world, all platforms would be on straight track and all would be at the standard position. In the real world, many British stations are historic buildings and the platforms were built by different companies to different standards,” she says.
“Around 30% of the existing platforms conform to current height standards, and about 20% conform for lateral offset – only 7% conform to modern standards for both height and offset. Train vehicle footstep heights and positions are similarly variable due to their historical introduction, with earlier rolling stock often tailored to specific routes, while more modern stock is specified and designed to go anywhere, to meet the requirements of today’s railway.
“Any increase in the platform height, to reduce the vertical step to the train, would require an increase to the lateral offset, increasing the gap to be crossed by passengers,” says Eickhoff. “Evidence to date suggests that a larger gap would be an increased risk for the majority of passengers and so the target height remains 915mm.”
Crossrail exemplifies the problems of platform heights. Its Class 345 trains, built in Derby by Bombardier, come with the usual floor height. Thus, Crossrail built the platforms in its new central London stations with a height of 1,100mm, rather than the 915mm national standard contained in Railway Group Standard GIRT7020. This allows it to boast of providing level access for passengers. But only at those central stations. Travel east or west and Crossrail’s trains no longer match the platforms they serve.
RAIL magazine reported the problems last year. It explained: “The issue is further complicated because current national rail stations have legacy platforms in place with varying heights. In order to board the trains at the western section of the line passengers will face an average 250mm step up, while those joining at the eastern section face an average 100mm step up. The average platform height on the western section is 850mm, while platforms on the eastern section are 1,000mm above the rail line.”
The news prompted London Assembly Transport Committee Chairman Caroline Pidgeon to comment: “It is a huge disappointment that there will be no consistency in platform heights along the whole of the route, making journeys for people with disabilities unnecessarily complicated and burdensome.”
It’s situations such as Crossrail’s that make the case for having standard platform heights. Indeed, RAIL reported that Crossrail had to seek and receive a dispensation from the Department for Transport to allow it to build new platforms that didn’t comply with interoperability regulations.
High Speed 2 also plans to use non-standard platform heights, in its case 1,115mm. Its specification to train builders calls for no more than a 40mm vertical distance between its external footstep and the vestibule floor. At HS2 platforms the vertical distance between platform and step must be less than 30mm. Its preferred distances are 20mm in both cases.
Around a decade ago, RSSB looked at the cost of raising platforms to 1,115mm (notwithstanding the increased risk to passengers that came from the resulting wider horizontal gap) and estimated the bill to be between £2.9 billion and £6.3bn. It concluded: “There is no overall benefit to be obtained from raising the standard platform height to a uniform height of 1,115 mm above rail level.”
Merseyrail took a different approach. It has a concession to run third-rail services in Liverpool and its surrounding areas from Merseytravel. Managing Director Andy Heath told RailReview that his fleet of Class 507 and 508 EMUs was old, becoming less reliable and was too small to cope with his network’s overcrowding.
He explains: “Ours is a concession, not a franchise, a 25-year concession from 2003 to 2028 that DfT devolved down to Merseytravel on behalf of the Liverpool City Region, the combined authority. With the challenge with the trains came the client, Merseytravel, on behalf of the combined authority (the six parts of the city region which are Liverpool, Sefton, Wirral, Halton,
St Helens and Knowsley) decided to procure new trains, taking a loan from the European Investment Bank.
“It’s about a £700 million project but £460m is linked to the procurement of the trains and the change to the infrastructure needed to operate the new trains. So the trains, when they come, will be owned by the people of Liverpool and one of the proposals at the start of this was basically to design the trains from scratch.”
Heath continued: “In terms of the train itself, there was certainly a view of involving the people of Liverpool in the design. A large number of roadshows took place involving a real cross-demographic of people, including visually impaired as well as less-abled people. That train design ranged from the size of the seats, the width of the seats, the lighting on the train to all the components of the aesthetics of the train from a passenger perspective. Linked into that was the aim to ensure full compliance with the accessibility regulations.”
This was important because Merseyrail currently relies on staff at stations to deploy ramps to let wheelchair users on and off trains. Although the current trains have guards, they are busy with door controls and with frequent station stops have little time to help.
Heath contends: “I think it’s fair to say that if you or I went to a station at 1000 to get the 1005 train, we would just go to the station, buy our ticket and get on. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen to be the case with people with restricted mobility. You can turn up at the station at 1000 but the booking office member of staff might be serving somebody or have to shut down their machine to close the booking office temporarily to come out to the platform. Invariably, that means that they may not get the train they wanted to catch.”
The answer for Merseytravel and Merseyrail was to buy trains with floors lower than on today’s stock, at a height to match the network’s platforms. Coming from Stadler in Switzerland, these 50 four-car Class 777s will have space for wheelchairs in their two centre coaches (and bikes in the leading and trailing coaches). Crucially, the trains have a step that slides outwards to bridge the gap between train and platform.
Back to Heath: “So, there are two key elements to this. There’s the train and there’s the platform as well. While the trains will come at a standard height, we’ve got a challenge on our platforms because the issue then becomes about how we make sure that while we’ve got the sliding step, how is it going to marry up to the platform itself? What we have in terms of the platforms is, starting in October last year, £33m invested by Merseytravel in platform train interface (PTI) work.”
“The first stage started in October 2018 and phase one was Ormskirk to Walton. There are 11 phases and the project is due to finish in June this year – an eight-month rolling programme. What Merseyrail agreed with Network Rail was that, rather than do these under the normal rules of the route, which is night-time possessions, there would be line closures of a week to three weeks on some lines, depending on the number of platforms.
“Over the course of the eight months, 102 platforms needed interventions which was the platform itself, changing or realigning the copers, or lifting and canting of railhead, depending on the characteristics of each particular station.-”
What resulted was a network of platforms that matched the national standard of 915mm height and 730mm offset. Although Merseyrail is a closed network without other operators, it opted to match the standard platform and use trains with a floor height that matched.
“The body of the train has a low-slung floor. When the train comes to a stand a sliding step comes out and it will be a gap of no more than 30mm,” says Heath. “That means there will no longer be a requirement for people in wheelchairs to go through the rigmarole of before. They can just get on and off as easily as you and I.”
“That would be really cool,” says Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, when asked about the prospect of unaided access to and from trains for people in wheelchairs.
The cross-bench member of the House of Lords and paralympian champion then pauses and adds: “You’ve got an issue about whether you need a wheelchair space so you probably need some way of guaranteeing you’ve got one.”
Grey-Thompson travels on between 100 and 160 trains every year so she has plenty of experience of using them. She says: “Actually, all I want is to get on and off a train in a timely manner. As I jokingly said , I just want the same miserable commuting experience as everyone else. I don’t want special treatment. I don’t know any disabled people who do.”
That’s the nub of the challenge for the railway: “I just want to get on and off.” So simple and yet so difficult. The railway has put vast effort into finding alternatives to aligning the height of platforms and train floors.
Consider a 2012 report from RSSB titled Improving the methods used to provide access to and from trains for wheelchair users. It runs to 182 pages and goes into immense detail about ramp design, their problems and possible alternatives. A good part of it focuses on hazards and risks.
Its introduction notes: “The vast majority of wheelchair users board and alight from trains via a portable manual boarding ramp. These folding ramps are not the only method of providing level access to trains for wheelchair users: raised platform areas, powered lifts, fixed boarding ramps integrated with the train and wheeled ramp assemblies are alternative methods. However, these appear to be less feasible solutions for most of the rail network in Great Britain, primarily because none provides a more cost-effective solution than folding ramps for boarding and alighting from the variety of rolling stock and platform configurations that exist.”
It noted that many buses and taxis have ramps that deploy to allow wheelchair users on and off. “Several train operating companies were interested in a future train design that could incorporate the ramp within the train step,” the RSSB report stated.
“During the industry consultation, it was suggested that such ramps could be similar in design to those used on buses and licensed taxis. As well as the benefits of reduced manual handling risk, improved stability, a higher SWL and faster deployment, it was suggested that customer perceptions may also change if such a system were available. Improved confidence in the boarding equipment among wheelchair users would raise the profile of the TOC and encourage repeat travel by wheelchair users.”
Almost a decade further on, and with thousands of new rail vehicles being brought into service, the railway remains wedded to staff deploying manual ramps with wheelchair users facing a lottery of whether there will be someone to help them.
Grey-Thompson explains the value of independence: “Huge. And what you feel if you’re stuck on a train and you can’t get off, you have liberty removed from you. I’m not sure it’s understood enough – there was a case of someone coming in from Clapham failing to be aided off in London and ending up in Gatwick. Lots of stuff like that happens. You’re not talking hundreds, but more than it should.”
From anecdotal evidence, Grey-Thompson reckons that booked assistance fails between 30% and 50% of the time. “Network Rail has been very positive and supportive. In many cases the train operating companies I’ve spoken to didn’t realise the scale of the problem. One of the stations that was pretty bad started measuring it, and put something in place. They were really shocked that they were missing so many customers, but it was just that they hadn’t thought to measure - and that’s when you feel a bit forgotten.”
Merseyrail is confident its new trains with their sliding step and standard platforms will remove the need to book assistance or wait for help at a station if assistance can’t be booked beforehand. As Grey-Thompson notes, disabled people are no different to many others in not always knowing what time they’ll be catching a train.
“On a Thursday I rarely know what time I’m travelling because it depends what happens in Parliament. I try to book, but that can take 15 minutes and the system is harder than it needs to be. But I know the Rail Delivery Group is looking at the booking system, which is great.”
Andy Heath reckons he will have a turn-up-and-go service, but there’s more work needed to make stations accessible. Merseyrail has just received funding for lifts at another four stations – Hillside, St Michaels, Hunts Cross and Birkenhead Park as well as money for a larger lift at Liverpool Central. “We’ve now just got 12 stations that are difficult for people with reduced mobility to get onto platforms,” he says. “As we’re moving along more and more, this is an absolute game-changer. It puts us at the head of the pack.”
Asked what the wider rail industry could learn from Merseyside’s experience, Heath is clear: “It’s about having a joined-up approach. The train operator, the infrastructure provider and Merseytravel were quite clear on what they wanted.
“If you get all parties involved, committed to what you’re delivering, and working together - I won’t say there wasn’t some tension in terms of when work was going to take place with Network Rail… is that you can get things done.
“If any other operator was going to do this, or indeed the DfT, it’s about collaboration. It’s about the customers as well. We got a lot of involvement from the city region on this – the business leaders understood the work that was taking place and it was as simple as ‘you will have disruption to your journey to work for x weeks but then the work will be done and we can move on’.”
Merseyrail is bringing level access because it’s what Merseytravel wants. Grey-Thompson believes that the DfT could do more: “It’s not beyond the wit of man to solve,” she says. “I recognise there’s not a bottomless pit of money but, you know what, it could be better than it is. We’re an ageing population and we need to look at that as well.”
But look through recent invitations to tender from the DfT for franchises and there’s very little about accessibility. The ITT for West Coast in 2018 ran to 293 pages in which the word “accessibility” appeared five times. Within bidders’ customer experience plan they had to explain “how the franchisee will work with passenger representation groups and/or organisations that represent a range of accessibility needs to co-design, test and implement solutions”.
The ITT gave one example of how bidders might exceed the DfT’s requirements: “Specific initiatives to deliver a transformation in the end-to-end passenger experience to improve accessibility for persons with physical, mental, sensory or cognitive impairments, enabling such passengers to plan their journey and travel by train confidently and independently (should they wish to do so).”
The DfT also wanted bidders to create an accessibility panel to provide advice about how to make facilities and customer services more accessible.
While there’s nothing in the ITT that prevents bidders putting forward the equivalent of Liverpool’s network, there’s nothing to say that the DfT is driving the railway towards offering passengers in wheelchairs a network they can use independently.
But this general ambivalence from the DfT didn’t stop Abellio in its bid for East Anglian railway services in 2015. It won with a plan that proposed sweeping away the entire current fleet in favour of new trains from two manufacturers, Bombardier and Stadler.
Greater Anglia’s first Stadler trains are now being tested and, like Merseyrail’s, they come with low floors that bring the potential for level access for wheelchairs. GA’s Stadler fleet will operate Stansted Express, rural and London-Norwich inter-city services. Bombardier’s new fleet will run suburban services into Essex and Cambridgeshire.
Greater Anglia Accessibility Manager Rebecca Richardson told RailReview that the new Stadler trains would mean that “a lot more people will have much more independence but we’ll still help others”. She cautioned that the new fleet, even with its sliding step, would “not be a panacea but will significantly improve people’s experience”.
Greater Anglia’s work merits mention in the DfT’s 2018 The Inclusive Transport Strategy: Achieving Equal Access for Disabled People, which says: “Under the Greater Anglia franchise, new trains being delivered in 2019 will have automated platform gap fillers fitted. These will be operated by on-board staff and have the potential to provide reliable alternatives to the need for a manual boarding ramp to bridge the gap between the train and the platform. The Department will work with the operator to promote and share its experience of using this technology to inform the wider industry perspective on tackling the challenge that steps/gaps from train to platform present to passengers.”
That’s about as far as Inclusive Transport Strategy goes in addressing the gap between platforms and trains that prevents wheelchair users travelling independently.
Richardson explains that Greater Anglia would still have ramps with its new trains but with the Stadler sliding step, they become more of a bridge and less of a ramp. She says that she saw persons of reduced mobility (PRM) standards as a minimum: “We wanted the best we could.”
Even with the gap closed as much as possible, some wheelchairs might not be able to cross it. Chairs with small wheels are less tolerant of gaps than those with bigger wheels. Richardson notes the tolerance of +/-50mm on what’s defined as level access which was something the RSSB report Platform train interface strategy from 2015 also mentioned. It said: “Some studies suggest that small vertical steps such as the ±50mm of the PRM, while capable of negotiation by a wheelchair, can actually constitute a trip hazard for other passengers and this is certainly not ‘level boarding’ as it is sometimes termed.”
This report puts more emphasis on safety rather than accessibility with the first sentence of its executive summary saying: “Incidents at the platform train interface (PTI) account for almost half of the total passenger fatality risk on the main line railway network, and about one-fifth of the overall passenger fatality and weighted injury (FWI) risk.”
However, it goes on to recognise that the PTI affects many areas of the railway that are not always compatible: platform clearances for passenger, freight, and plant vehicles; platform and passenger vehicle floor heights; optimal step and gap configurations for passengers with and without mobility problems and those using wheelchairs; and passenger train designs, including door configurations, train capacity, provision for luggage, and how these might affect overall performance.
While placing strong emphasis on preventing slips, trips and falls, the report acknowledges the benefits that reducing the platform-to-train gap could bring. These include reducing the risks of trips and falls, reducing delays caused by helping wheelchair passengers board or alight (which it estimated at 47,000 minutes’ delay and £1.5m in financial penalties annually), improved boarding and alighting speeds and reducing injuries to staff helping wheelchair passengers.
Yet none of its suggested short, medium and long-term actions for enabling wheelchairs (and mobility scooters) to board and alight trains include providing train floor heights that match platforms. It suggested investigating deployable ramps as an alternative to manual ones, investigating how to provide wheelchair users with real-time information and assistance and, in the long-term (Control Period 8 and beyond, so in a decade’s time) having a consistent approach to PRM and using real-time data to provide individual tailored experience.
At Network Rail, Access and Inclusion Manager Lorna Brown-Owens says there are “all sorts of ramifications in making platform heights standard”. She confirmed that it was possible to alter platforms to the standard height and offset but added: “And then you have services with the existing rolling stock that still have, say, a 15-year life-cycle so even if you put in the legislation height and offset you will still have a definitive stepping distance in terms of platform and train interface.”
That’s classic ‘chicken-and-egg’. Network Rail could be reluctant to spend – or DfT to fund – to provide platforms to a standard height and offset until the operators use compatible trains. And operators could be equally reluctant the other way.
So why is it so hard to provide a low-floor train that matches the standard 915mm platform? That Stadler provides such a train for Britain shows that it’s possible.
It’s taken a very different approach to building diesel trains with low floors because squeezing the size of a diesel engine under a train with a low floor is difficult. Greater Anglia’s bi-mode (electro-diesel) four-car units will have two passenger vehicles on either side of a short diesel power car. This car will have a central corridor to allow passengers to move from one end of the train to another.
Stadler reckons that having the central power car will cut noise and vibration but, crucially, removing diesel engines from under the floor allows it to produce a train with a 960mm high floor. It says the train “complies with the new technical specifications for interoperability including the legislation for persons with reduced mobility. Its low floor design enables a level boarding on every passenger door and therefore optimises the passenger flow and minimises the dwell times.”
Bombardier has several trains that offer low floors to provide level access. Its Omneo range offers floor heights between 550mm and 920mm. However, Omneo is an electric double-deck train, too big for Britain but now running French regional services. Bombardier’s Talent 3 regional train comes with floors to match 550mm or 760mm platforms and is set for use in Germany, Austria and Italy.
For Britain, Bombardier offers its Aventra EMU which will be coming to Greater Anglia, South Western Railway, c2c and West Midlands Trains, is just entering service with London Overground as Class 710 and has been carrying Crossrail passengers since 2017.
Asked why trains could not have lower floors to match a standard platform height, Aventra Interim Chief Engineer Ben Parry told RailReview that Britain had no such thing as a standard platform height.
“Nominally all platforms in the UK should be 915mm above rail level, but much of the network does not meet this standard,” he says. In addition, curved platforms meant that train steps had to be higher than platforms to prevent the two striking each other or the gap between the two was wider.
He adds: “The unique challenges of the railway mean that it needs to be treated as a whole system in order to fix some of the key interface areas, such as the platform-train interface. Modifying infrastructure to make it significantly more standardised would greatly aid in this regard.
“From the onboard perspective, deployable steps and ramps are available and we use these as required. In general, though, these systems are expensive, heavy and challenging to integrate - especially for existing train designs where the carbody structure would need to be significantly modified. The addition of new mechanical systems can also have an adverse impact on the overall reliability and availability of the train.”
Siemens’ current EMU for Britain is its Desiro as recently introduced on Thameslink as Class 700 and Moorgate services as Class 717. It has a floor height of 1,100mm which contrasts with the various heights offered on other Desiro EMUs in the rest of Europe. In Austria, OBB’s Desiro fleet has floors 600mm above rail level and the trains have sliding steps and a lift to cope with lower platforms. With these lower floors, much of the equipment that would be under them in a British train is placed on the roof instead.
Abellio’s Rhein-Ruhr Express has recently introduced another Desiro variant from Siemens. It too has lower floors, 800mm in the end cars and 730mm in the double-deck centre cars of these four-car electric units.
This suggests that it’s clearly possible to provide trains in Britain that have floors to match Network Rail’s standard platform height. It might not be as easy as in Continental Europe with its more generous loading gauge providing space above passengers for equipment. But it’s not impossible.
Recent franchise competitions have placed great emphasis on providing as many seats on a train as possible. This actively works against easy provision for wheelchair users. They need space to manoeuvre their chairs, universal access toilets take more space and, if floor heights are to vary, then the gentle gradients necessary for wheelchairs take more space than steps.
This contrasts with the priority for some inner suburban trains where space to stand takes over. With seats arranged longitudinally down the carriage sides in a style more usually associated with Tube trains, there is greater freedom for passengers in wheelchairs. If only they could board and alight without assistance.
What’s missing from much of Britain’s railway is any drive towards improving wheelchair access. Rather than insisting that Network Rail’s 915mm platform is the standard and that trains should match it (as Merseytravel has done), Britain’s funders and service specifiers have opted for indifference followed by frantic compromise.
Hence Crossrail and HS2 deciding on different platform heights (despite both planning to call at NR stations), the plethora of different ramps that staff are expected to manhandle into position, and the apps and helplines that let wheelchair users book help.
These mitigations would not be needed if Britain enforced a standard platform height and standard floor height. This would need careful planning as Merseyrail has shown. And it wouldn’t solve the access problem at every station because the geometry of the gap between platform and train becomes very complicated at curved platforms with tracks canted to allow trains to pass at speed.
Merseytravel shows what can be done when a funder becomes interested in solving a problem. Greater Anglia shows that it’s possible to improve access even without such direction. Had Britain not ordered so many thousands of new rail vehicles with high floors, it could now be embarking on a radical journey to open rail travel to many more passengers in wheelchairs. As Tanni Grey-Thompson told RailReview: “I just want to get on and off.” Not too much to ask, is it?
- During RailReview’s interview Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson said she was very happy to hear from rail companies and others about travel for passengers in wheelchairs, using her Parliamentary email address which is [email protected]
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