Considerable progress has been made in Europe over the last decade in improving disabled people's access to rail services. Conventional or heavy rail systems suffer from the problems of having been designed and built, for the most part, in times when no thought was given to enabling disabled people to use these services. This legacy of inaccessibility presents a huge problem to the rail industry but as the first section of this paper describes, progress is being made. Light rail and tramway systems are also well established in some countries in Europe, but recent years have seen the construction of quite a large number of new systems where it has been possible to design in accessibility from the start. There are examples of accessibility from the start. There are examples of this in Great Britain including Docklands Light Rail, Manchester and Sheffield. CCLT was involved in the design of the Sheffield Supertram and the second part of this paper describes how the ergonomic work was carried out and what design recommendations were made as a result of it. (A)
Abstract