Q&A: DAVID SINDALL
Following the recent article in Edition 3 of RailCONNECT, written by Margaret Hickish on Equal Access, what were your initial thoughts?
David Sindall
Head of Disability and Inclusion
Words: Jade Byrne
In our last edition of RailCONNECT, Margaret Hickish, Inclusive Design Director at Movement Strategies, penned an article describing the experiences she has as a disabled passenger travelling on the railways. In the feature, she covers some of the less convenient aspects of disabled passengers’ rail travel and presents suggestions of how they could be resolved. (To read Margaret’s article, visit
www.railconnect.co.uk). After reading the article, David Sindall, Head of Disability and Inclusion at ATOC, got in touch with RailCONNECT to give our readers an insight into the work being done to improve accessibility across the network.
I think what Margaret covers in her article are some of the frustrations that disabled passengers have but also, and more importantly, a sense that we need to better inform disabled passengers about what is on offer to them. We have done a great deal of work over the last five years to improve access to the rail network and improve the quality of the services that we offer, with a coherent strategy aiming to improve services for older and disabled passengers. But we know that we can do more.
So what improvements are being implemented at the moment to improve accessibility?
One of our priorities is to improve Passenger Assist, which is a pre-booking system we started developing about two years ago. The new system utilises the latest technology and means that passengers can book assistance online, get an email confirmation of the assistance and can repeat regularly made journeys as well. Previously, booking assistance was much less effective and the system only ever recorded individual journeys; passengers didn’t get confirmation of their bookings and had no clear idea as to what was supposed to be happening. The new system is also more effective at getting information to rail staff. Instead of generating a fax every day, now the system emails staff directly. It’s much easier to manage, much more efficient and is a real improvement for passengers.
Margaret mentions that you have to book 24 hours in advance in order to book both assistance and wheelchair user space on the train, is this still the time frame that is in place?
At the moment, it is. But what we have learned is that the vast majority of passengers who book assistance do so 8-10 days in advance of their journey. So far, since the new system went live we’ve had about 850,000 individual assists booked, which is roughly 250,000 passenger journeys. There will always
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