Are you sitting comfortably?
Are you sitting comfortably? PAUL CLIFTON looks at a new rail research project that aims to set a minimum standard for seating
THE new generation of trains is all about getting more bums on seats. High-density, airline or suburbanstyle seating is increasingly seen on long-distance services. That’s because every passenger survey comes to the same conclusion… getting a seat is a top priority.
The chairs on new trains are thinner, tougher and harder than those on older rolling stock. There is less padding. The cloth is not as soft.
Today’s seats are light years from the softly sprung mattresses of the slam-door era. They are even very different from trains built or refreshed only ten years ago. Design has moved on.
Partly that is about meeting the latest standards of crashworthiness, resistance to fire, and the ability to withstand vandalism. And partly it’s about getting more seats into each carriage, because people would rather sit than stand.
But there have been plenty of complaints about discomfort. Sore backsides at the end of a long working day. No space to relax. Stiff-shouldered, sitting too upright, unable to slump or slouch, elbows pulled in tight to avoid touching the stranger sitting uncomfortably close to you.
Even First Class passengers can no longer pinch the spare inch. On Great Western Railway, where premium-price travel has long set the benchmark for luxury, the latest seats are still a little more squashy than further back in Standard… but not by much.
Now the RSSB (Rail Safety and Standards Board) has stepped in, announcing a new scientific approach to measuring comfort in train seating.
RSSB will spend a year putting together an industry-standard minimum specification. It will take into account the shape of the seat, cushioning, choice of material, lumbar support, vibration, legroom, and length of journey. It wants comfort levels to be laid down in the same manner as fire resistance or crash performance.
RSSB Senior Human Factors Specialist Jordan Smith tells RAIL: “There simply aren’t any reliable industry-approved measures to quantify comfort. They don’t exist.
“We need a consistent approach. The industry has asked us to do this. The National Rail Passenger Survey showed that the passenger comfort score was lower than passenger scores as a whole. We want to enable procurement that is above a set level of requirements.
“Comfort is a complex issue. It covers the contours of material, its breathability and its interaction with many different variables - the type of train, whether the passenger is using a laptop or tablet, or charging a mobile phone.
“The outcome we are looking for is a comfort scoring system. It will possibly look like the star rating system used with car safety.”
The RSSB announcement followed an increasing volume of criticism of new Thameslink and Great Western Railway trains in particular.
The Class 700s operated by Thameslink have high-capacity seating designed to transport vast numbers of people beneath central London. They look like grown-up Tube trains, with open vestibules to hold a greater number of standing commuters.
But they also carry some passengers for much longer journeys: Brighton to Bedford, and later this year Bedford to Littlehampton, Peterborough to Horsham, and Cambridge to Brighton. In duration, these are routes comparable to major intercity trips on trains with greater levels of comfort.
When the BBC interviewed passengers on a Thameslink service, it was hard to find anyone with a good word to say about the seats. “Like a park bench” and “rough as a concrete chair” were typical responses.
A Thameslink spokesman responded: “Various seat designs were tested with passengers. The chosen design is the one that met all the safety and capacity requirements and offered the best comfort.
“Padding in the seats is constrained by the latest fire standards, which are very strict on modern trains, and is also vandalresistant. This does give it a firmer feel. The shape and size of the seats had to meet today’s extremely strict crashworthiness standards.”
Christopher Irwin, of TravelWatch SouthWest, said the new GWR Intercity Express Trains from Hitachi should prove popular on its longest route, linking Paddington and Penzance.
“The ride is smoother, and the carriages are noticeably quieter. They should be more comfortable as well,” he says.
“But the legroom is more limited than on the older trains. It’s actually only one inch more than on an easyJet Airbus A320 aeroplane.”
The Italian-built trains appear almost identical to the government-procured fleet from Newton Aycliffe. They will enter service in July.
GWR is robust in its defence of the new seats. Are they less comfortable than those on the old High Speed Trains?
“About the same, although the evidence we have so far is based on a small sample of about 50 people,” says spokesman Dan Panes.
“The seats were last tested in 2014 by East Coast and Great Western. That involved 300 people. An independent design agency commissioned research into what passengers thought, and 81% indicated they liked the seats.
“That is roughly what we are
seeing now. You would expect us to monitor this, and we are being cautious in these early days of the new trains.
“At the moment, the indications are that customers like the new trains more than the old ones, including the comfort of the seats.
“We believe the seats get more comfortable the longer the journey. Yes, there is an initial impression of hardness. But that seems to translate into greater comfort on journeys over an hour and a half.
“That’s not something we have been able to replicate in our research yet, but we have seen satisfaction scores on comfort rise over longer distances travelled.”
Don’t expect the RSSB study to bring any rapid changes. The results of a year of research will then be considered by a group called the Systems Interface Committee, which could choose to inform what are known as Key Train Requirements: the standards against which train builders create their designs.
RSSB’s research brief states: “This may offer guidance for train operators and rolling stock leasing companies to select cost-effective new and refurbished seats that may improve customer experience, and provide benchmark specifications.”
For a simpler explanation, here’s Maidenhead osteopath Robin Lansman, who frequently treats commuters: “It is about support and an even spread of comfort. If a seat is too hard, it invokes a force on your body. If it’s too soft, you sink into that surface, whether it’s a seat or a bed. We need the happy medium that lies in between.
“Our bodies are not very adaptable. Commuters are often sitting at a desk in an office all day, probably working at a computer. They may try to take exercise breaks. But if their commute is on a hard seat as well, it is adding more insult to injury.”
GWR’s Dan Panes says it is essential for the RSSB project to be research-driven, rather than based on anecdotal evidence.
“We are not saying the industry doesn’t know how to make comfortable seats,” counters RSSB’s Jordan Smith.
“Hitachi, Siemens and others have their own bodies of knowledge. But there is no consistent approach. And design effort is being duplicated. What we are looking for is industrywide. Comfort is part of a human factors approach that should be considered equally alongside crash safety and vandalism prevention.”
Smith concludes: “No, we are not suddenly starting this in response to recent comments about Govia Thameslink Railway.”
RSSB says its project has been in development for six months
already, and follows work published in 2016 entitled Measuring Rolling Stock Seating Comfort.
This looked at seat height, length, back rest angle, the size and position of lumbar support, pressure distribution and vibration characteristics, along with different anthropomorphic data from various ethnic groups. It also looked at comparable work by Boeing, which had established different comfort grades for different types of aircraft and journey length.
The RSSB announcement is a clear acknowledgement that seat design could and should be improved.
The bottom line… it is about much more than just bottoms. New, thinner seats with restricted legroom means more people can sit down. The railway is seeking to squeeze more and more passengers into finite space on board trains that are already as long as possible. In some cases, there is a sense that the trade-off must be seats that are a bit less comfy than before.
Or, more succinctly, passengers may have to accept a bit of a pain in the a**e.
“When the BBC interviewed passengers on a Thameslink service, it was hard to find anyone with a good word to say about the seats. ‘Like a park bench’ and ‘rough as a concrete chair’ were typical responses.”