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.”
