Solutions for wheelchair access to trains

[Pigeon]

What that says to me is the doors are not strong enough. It's not like a wheelchair is a BRUTE tractor...

(pauses to imagine wheelchair powered by six-cylinder Daimler-Knight engine, with the user carrying a huge bundle of sticks on their lap to fill in the gap...)

It has to be said that the controls on my mobility scooter could do with improvement. They are designed so that someone who can barely make the thing work at all can still manage to use them and not get themselves into too much trouble, but what that ends up meaning is that there is a considerable delay between moving the throttle control and the scooter either speeding up or slowing down. So you press the throttle and nothing happens for a bit, then it does start moving, you immediately let go of the throttle, and it carries on moving for a bit before it deigns to stop. This makes manoeuvring it in confined spaces very awkward; wriggling it into and out of the designated space and getting it lined up with the doors very often ends up involving a certain amount of contact shunting, no matter how careful I am.

On the other hand there would seem to be a need to make the doors able to withstand unexpectedly severe impacts in any case. One of the examples cited in the report on slam doors coming open on moving trains involved someone with a remarkable excess of curiosity over common sense repeatedly taking running jumps at the door across the vestibule to see how hard it was to burst it open, until he found out. I reckon it would be pretty infeasible to hit it that hard with a mobility aid even if you were trying to repeat the experiment, so we're still within existing bounds on that one.

 

[BayPaul]

The ultimate goal needs to be that wheelchair users and other disabled people can use the train without any more assistance than they need in their normal life. OK, that'll take 100 years to achieve, but it doesn't mean we can't start now.

An obvious start would be to say that all new stock needs to have at least one carriage with level and gap-free boarding to a 915mm platform. Stadler have done it, so its achievable, so other manufacturers can make it work too.

Would it be impossible to adjust existing trains and stopping locations so that the accessible doors are almost always in the same place, allowing the use of Harrison Humps (perhaps even with a built - in ramp to bridge the gap to the door) to provide a decent solution. For example, on full length stations, position the humps at the 3rd carriage from the front, meaning the middle carriage of a typical modern 5 car train, or allowing a smaller train to stop further down the platform. On longer trains there would obviously be multiple disabled areas, but passengers would be directed to the forward one.
OK, it would take 10 years to get every train and station fitted, and there would be issues on short platform and journeys where a train divides or reverses mid-trip, and manual ramps would then be needed, but if it could work for 75% of journeys that would be a massive step forward.

 

[Haywain]

Would it be impossible to adjust existing trains and stopping locations so that the accessible doors are almost always in the same place, allowing the use of Harrison Humps (perhaps even with a built - in ramp to bridge the gap to the door) to provide a decent solution. For example, on full length stations, position the humps at the 3rd carriage from the front, meaning the middle carriage of a typical modern 5 car train, or allowing a smaller train to stop further down the platform. On longer trains there would obviously be multiple disabled areas, but passengers would be directed to the forward one.

Most of the reasons for not doing this have already been explained earlier in the thread. But, in brief, a Harrington Hump is designed to bring a low platform to standard platform height, not to level boarding. The latter would foul the loading guage or create an unacceptable gap between platform and train.

 

[BayPaul]

Most of the reasons for not doing this have already been explained earlier in the thread. But, in brief, a Harrington Hump is designed to bring a low platform to standard platform height, not to level boarding. The latter would foul the loading guage or create an unacceptable gap between platform and train.

Why not a Harrington hump on a platform that is already at around 915mm, but set back from the platform edge, with a mechanical gap filler between the train door and the hump, either on the hump or the train (probably on the train) which only deploys when it has detected that there is a hump adjacent to the door.
It could have a manual crank to avoid blocking the line if it fails.

 

[Haywain]

Why not a Harrington hump on a platform that is already at around 915mm, but set back from the platform edge, with a mechanical gap filler between the train door and the hump, either on the hump or the train (probably on the train) which only deploys when it has detected that there is a hump adjacent to the door.

That may be possible but until we have trains thus fitted it is just a wish. It would also create problems if only some trains were fitted with such a device.

 

[Ken H]

That may be possible but until we have trains thus fitted it is just a wish. It would also create problems if only some trains were fitted with such a device.

Of course any device would need to fail safe. We dont want one going out of gague on a moving train, and we dont want one stowing itself while in use.

 

[BayPaul]

That may be possible but until we have trains thus fitted it is just a wish. It would also create problems if only some trains were fitted with such a device.

True. It would need an integrated plan for any route. Routes with just a few types of rolling stock would be easiest and could be prioritised.
The trains would need to be fitted first, then the humps could be added to the stations. It'd need some planning and organisation, but it sounds far from impossible to get level boarding to a decent number of stations without having to rip up the whole network. Not cheap, but perhaps not insanely expensive either.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

I suspect a big part of this is that we need to massively reduce the numbers of different types of stock on the rail network. So no more, one TOC ordering 10 trains to some design that they think they want but which doesn't exist anywhere else. That seems desirable in any case, but allowing things like wheelchair access being in a more predictable place, making it simpler to provide for some means for wheelchair users to board/alight without assistance must surely be an additional reason for moving towards fewer train classes.