Flip-up train toilet seats aim to please

Toilets are one of the main sources of complaint about railway travel.

Engineer Darren Wright noted that even in new trains, complaints about toilets outnumber those about WiFi and other aspects of the service. The issue, he says, is simple… dirty seats.

One of the most common issues is (to put it delicately) a failure by men to lift the seat and their inability to aim properly. And it’s not only men that are the problem. Apparently, women - not wishing to sit on dirty seats - ‘hover’ and therefore often end up missing as well.

So, being a self-declared ‘nerd’, he set about inventing a device that would solve the problem -a seat that flips up automatically, making its default position up rather than down.

There are three possible solutions: getting men to lift the seat (which clearly does not happen); creating some sort of complex cleaning device (which is technically difficult); or creating a pop-up seat that uses a simple spring mechanism to ensure it lifts up automatically (which he has done).

Unfortunately, although train leasing company Porterbrook was ready to trial the idea, the train operators were uninterested. And then COVID intervened, which means that the seats are still down.

However, Wright is not giving up and he hopes to convince the industry that this is a simple, safe, innovation that meets industry standards.

“Once the first ones are installed, Flip Up Seats will become the norm,” he says.

“But finding the first train operator to take Flip Up Seats, for all the industry talk about innovation, has been really hard. The reality is that there are few real decision-makers in rail that can or will authorise change outside of a very limited orthodoxy.”

As someone who for more than a decade has used a Japanese-type toilet, which uses a jet of water for cleaning purposes, I can say that we are way behind toilet technology. This could get us ahead of the curve.

So, now that the franchising process is dead and the Department for Transport is in charge, it’s time that this type of seat is specified for all new and refurbished trains.

And incidentally, that would mean the rail industry was leading the way, as there is a huge market out there for such a simple device that would ensure cleaner toilets in pubs, restaurants and stores. It is an opportunity for the rail industry to show the way, but so far Darren has come up against brick walls. Let’s knock them down.