On 25/02/2016 22:00, NY wrote:
wrote in message ...
Why is it in this country - and elsewhere in europe it has to be said
- that
we really don't like building platforms that are level with the train
floor?
There's always a step up. This is understandable on curved platforms
where
the gap would be an issue, but on dead straight ones there is no
excuse yet
they're still lower. Only recently have we started building them
level. Even
the 1960s Victoria line tube suffers from platforms lower than the
train floor
other than on short sections where LU has raised them.

At least in the UK we don't *usually* have to have a little set of steps
on the platform by each door, or a mini-step ladder built into each
doorway on the train; I saw plenty of instances of the latter on Michael
Portillo's Great American Railroad Journeys programmes.

You'd think it would be fairly obvious from the early days of railways:
decide on a standard floor height above the tracks for all trains, and
built all platforms at that height +/- a small tolerance to allow for
the problem of curved platforms. Certainly putting platforms at rail
level is never going to be right! Especially now rail companies need to
cater for people in wheelchairs, who tended to get forgotten about in
bygone days.

In the early days of the railways wheelchairs in the modern sense didn't
exist. Though bath chairs have been around since the mid 18th Century
when they slowly took over from sedan chairs, another example of a more
modern technology destroying a traditional form of transport :-)

--
Graeme Wall
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