Left in the lurch by faulty lifts
Disabled rail passengers face ongoing issues
Freedom of Information request data has shown the number of hours that lifts have been out of action at railway stations in the area – and the impact this has had on disabled passengers in particular.
In November, disability advocates spoke out about the closure of a lift at Maidenhead railway station, planned to last until the end of summer/start of autumn 2024.
This closure, for ‘major improvement work’, caused disabled customers to feel ‘overlooked’, as it threatened to make travel much more difficult for them, without much mitigation in place.
Lift outages can greatly extend journey time, as it requires people needing lifts to get off a stop later than their destination and take another train back again, just so they can get to a working lift on another platform.
FOI requests made by the Advertiser have looked at lift outages in the Royal Borough, Slough and South Bucks in the past year – as well as how many accessibility complaints there were.
From December 2022 to 2023, more than 980 bookings were made at Maidenhead via Passenger Assist – a National Rail service which allows people to request aid from station staff in advance.
More than 1,350 bookings were made for Slough, 500 for Twyford, 100 for Burnham and about 125 across Taplow, Langley and Iver.
In this timeframe, Iver saw 35 lift outages across its three lifts – and the same for Langley. Burnham’s lift was out of action 18 times and Taplow’s three lifts went down a total of 31 times.
Lift outages can be long or short – Iver’s lifts spent a total of 783 hours out of service; Taplow’s spent 585 hours out; Burnham’s was down for 235 hours; and there were 197 hours of outage at Langley.
Maidenhead, which is run by Great Western Railway (GWR) saw 32 lift outages last year, with 10 at Slough and eight at Twyford.
Transport for London (TfL) is responsible for the lifts at Iver, Langley, Burnham and Taplow. A spokesperson said: “Lifts can go out of service for several reasons through normal use, such as a customer banging into the lift and causing a misalignment of the lift car doors that usually requires a lift engineer to attend the site.
“Changes in temperature can also affect the hydraulics in the lifts. The lifts do have summer and winter settings, however unexpected temperatures can cause an outage.
“We have a continual programme of maintenance and renewal of our lifts across our networks to ensure they are reliable and safe to use for our customers.
“We continue to look at ways to reduce the amount of disruption to our customers while we undertake lift works.
“For example, we will sometimes replace more than one lift at a time (when resources permit) to reduce the overall time they are unavailable when removing one lift makes the other asset redundant.
“We also continue to invest in vital improvements to the transport network including making more stations fully accessible.
In addition, there were 14 accessibility-related complaints about Maidenhead, Slough, Taplow, Burnham, Slough, Iver and Langley railway stations.
Three of five Taplow complaints occurred in a few short months towards the end of 2023.
There was one complaint from a customer stuck in a lift at Taplow, plus a staff complaint and safety complaint at Burnham. There was another safety complaint made at Iver.
Two cases related to ramps or their absence, and the remaining relate to staff, customer accidents, and the absence of staff to assist disabled customers.
Accessibility complaints vary and specifics were not provided in the FOIs, except for Langley, where the complaint was about the platform height and how it impacts disabled people and wheelchair users.
The TfL spokesperson continued: “Our accessibility champions, based in our contact centre, have an indepth understanding of accessible travel in London. They have received enhanced training.”
GWR provides some mitigation if lifts are out of order. Customers would be entitled to delay repay compensation. The company can arrange alternative transport for them from the nearest accessible station.
A spokesperson said: “GWR is committed to providing an accessible and supportive environment. Between April and January we successfully helped over 200,000 people with assistance at our stations.
“Unfortunately, sometimes equipment does let us down, and we are really sorry if anyone is affected by this. We will always take customers to the next accessible station or provide them with alternative transport.
“We continue to work with our partners at Network
Rail and are pleased to say that work to install a new lift and staircase at Maidenhead is progressing.”