Picture this - trains without strain

Travelling hopefully may be all well and good, it’s arriving to find you can’t get out of the station when you get there that can bring a journey to a sticky end. Cathy Reay reports on an online initiative that could keep you on track

Manchester to Penarth, Exeter to Carlisle, Winchester to Worcester: wherever you’re travelling for the winter holidays, which mode of transport will you be taking? Apparently not rail. Not knowing whether it’s possible to complete a journey is thought to be the main reason why millions, yes millions of disabled people across the country still don’t use trains.

Although still only a relatively small percentage of the disabled population are taking it up, the past few years have seen thousands of disabled people newly register for disabled persons’ railcards, a number that has increased parallel to the fantastically accessible new trains that have been rolled out across mainline networks across the UK.

But what about when you want to change trains, platforms, or access station toilets and facilities? London Kings Cross might be undergoing millions of pounds worth of renovation to make the entire station as accessible as it can possibly be, but the tiny two-platform stations in the Welsh valleys or Norfolk plains still have lots of catching up to do.

Help is now at hand: Stations Made Easy, a new £1.2 million scheme from National Rail, the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) and the Department for Transport (DFT), launched online this month and is designed to help disabled people plan their journey through stations.

Over the course of a year, 700,000 individually taken photographs were compiled for an exhaustively comprehen­sive step-by-step, photo-by-photo online directory of every rail station in the UK. Stations Made Easy offers everything from toilet accessibility information to whether the ticket office has low counters, to lots of photos of each section of a station from every angle so passengers can assess whether they can access the facilities they need as they plan their route, eliminating any chance of a mid-journey crisis.

David Sindall, head of inclusion and accessibility at ATOC, said: “This is about giving disabled people the opportunity to make an informed choice. We don’t want people to think, ‘oh I can’t possibly use that station, I can’t travel’; part of the debate is that a lot of stations are not [currently] accessible to people in wheelchairs but there are far more disabilities to consider.”

The Stations Made Easy website markets itself as a tool not just for those with mobility issues but for people with a range of disabilities, such as learning difficulties and visual and hearing impairments. For example, it shows where there are induction loops or visual aids inside station buildings. “We’ve been able to give people almost individually tailor-made information so disabled customers can work out what works for them and what doesn’t,” said Sindall.

Although it is an ongoing (and seemingly everlasting) project to make all stations in the country fully accessible, the good thing about the Stations Made Easy site is that it will continually update itself as and when a station’s accessibility is improved or gets new features.

As David Sindall says: “It’s about people getting more confident about using rail, about people being prepared to give rail a chance; what’s the point of having accessible trains and stations without being able to let passengers know about those benefits?”

• To access Stations Made Easy visit www.national rail.co.uk, click Stations and Destinations, input the station you’d like information for and click on the Stations Made Easy feature. It is also available on most local rail company websites.