News Desk

Stations Champions Appointed to Suggest Improvements

25th August 2009

Another significant move to push station services up the political agenda is that Transport Minister Lord Adonis announced on 5th May that he has appointed two stations ‘champions’ with a remit ‘to conduct a review of station standards’ and to advise the government about how stations and the services they provide can be improved. The 6-month study will be looking both at the immediate practical issue of setting service standards appropriate to stations within different categories of usage, and also at the bigger picture of the future of stations as transport interchanges and community institutions. The champions are rail professional Chris Green and Architect Peter Hall.

The work was precipitated by a recent week long rail tour undertaken by the Minister (as he then was) which clocked up 2200 miles of train journeys and involved the use of 51 stations covering all categories. He was able to see at first hand what the issues were and felt that some kind of action was needed to get them into a more coherent state.

He described his journey in a speech at a recent event and his observations struck a chord.

The low point was my inability to buy so much as a cup of tea at Southampton Central at 8pm on a cold Tuesday evening while stopping there for an hour before embarking on the two hour coastal service to Brighton (where the station's M&S was still open at 11.20pm, showing how major station retailing can be franchised better). If motorway service stations are required to be providing drinks and hot food until late evening, why not major stations?

I could add a litany of toilets closed or uncleaned, tales of the shortage or inconvenience of cycle parking, ditto car parking (where there is often available station land to expand parking which is now fully occupied by 9am), great variability in the quality of bus interchanges, the unavailability of local transport information – even of basic local street maps and bus route diagrams, which are of course standard features in London Underground stations.
The issue here is not only the physical state of station buildings - which in many cases will of course cost a small fortune to transform – but more immediately the services provided by stations, which need not be expensive to provide, and in many cases could be cash generative.

I think we need to consider further how station service standards are set, and whether more exacting minimum service levels, and station by station improvements, should be specified. As well as getting these basics right, there is also room for fresh thinking about the role of stations as transport interchanges and community institutions in an age of rapidly growing rail travel. Our best modernised stations – like St Pancras, Liverpool Street, Manchester Piccadilly and Sheffield - are not simply Victorian shells with modern retailing: they are fundamentally reinvented transport interchanges designed for the present day.

In addition, the champions will review how existing station initiatives are getting along (such as ‘Access for All’) and looking at future station investment. Adonis has already made additional money available for cycle parking, having noted Britain’s paltry provision compared to some other countries, especially the Netherlands.

Chris Green is currently a non-executive director of Network Rail and this work is being taken forward with the full support of Network Rail and ATOC. Peter Hall is President of the Town and Country Planning Association; in times past he was a special adviser to Michael Heseltine and a key influence on the decision to deploy transport infrastructure, including what is now called High Speed One, to help regenerate the Thames Gateway. We need a similar breadth of vision in planning stations of the future.