A Railway for Everyone

Scotland’s Railway has an industry-wide strategy for improving accessibility called “A Railway for Everyone”.

It's aimed at removing potential barriers to passengers’ journeys, making it easier for everyone to use the railway, encouraging modal shift, supporting railway revenue generation, and contributing to Scotland’s climate change targets.

The vision of A Railway for Everyone is to make it easy for everyone to choose rail as part of a sustainable journey. To achieve this, we take a holistic view of passengers’ end-to-end journeys, not just at the station. We’ve developed four pillars of accessibility to help us identify the key elements in a journey using the railway.

The four pillars of an accessible journey we’ve identified are:

• Reaching the station
• Moving around the station
• Getting to your platform
• Finding your space on the train

By viewing accessibility through the lens of the four pillars, we’re better able to understand where we’re falling short and where we’re doing well. To back up this approach, we’ve developed three key sets of data that are helping us to prioritise improvements at stations.

In addition, we’re working with our local authority, regional transport partnership, and community colleagues to improve routes to key stations. We’ve identified three key distances people travel to get to the station: 500 metres for passengers with disabilities or with additional mobility needs, 1.6 kilometres, which is the average walked trip in Scotland and 5km, which is the target distance for a utility cycling trip and a common distance for bus travel.

While car parking and drop-off remain important, particularly in very rural locations, it's not the dominant mode of travel to stations.

We also now better understand how passengers get to the station. Our colleagues in ScotRail are surveying passengers three times a year, and from their work we can now see that walking is the most popular way that people get to rail stations.

To focus on the passengers' journey to the station - pillar one of the four pillars, we’ve developed a Sustainable Travel to Stations document, which is a practical guide for all statutory bodies and private developers planning developments on or near the railway. In addition, it’s written as a guide for communities served by Scotland’s Railway, where the station could be better integrated. It sets out three key outcomes and a series of practical recommendations.

You can download our A Railway for Everyone strategy (RfE) and Sustainable Travel to Stations (STtS) below, including easy-read versions of both.

If you would like to find out more about RfE, please do get in touch with John Lauder, programme manager at Scotland's Railway - John.Lauder@networkrail.co.uk