Travellers World

Travelling with a wheelchair — the good, the bad and the not-a-chance

Tag: rail

  • Booking rail assistance: what actually happens

    Rail travel in Britain can be genuinely good or genuinely awful, and the difference is rarely the train. It is whether the person with the ramp turns up.

    How the booking works

    The scheme is called Passenger Assist, and it covers every train operator in Britain through one booking. You can arrange it by phone, online, or through the Passenger Assistance app. The required notice period was cut to two hours before travel a few years ago, which was a real improvement — it used to be a full day, which made spontaneous travel impossible.

    You can also simply turn up and ask. Staff are supposed to help on the spot where they can. In practice, at a big staffed station in the middle of the day, turn-up-and-go usually works. At a small unstaffed halt on a Sunday evening, it will not.

    What actually happens on the day

    1. You go to the assistance meeting point, usually near the main ticket barrier, and give your name.
    2. Someone escorts you to the platform and waits with you.
    3. When the train arrives, they put a portable ramp across the gap and you board.
    4. They radio ahead to your destination station, and — this is the important bit — to any station where you change trains.
    5. Someone meets you at the other end with another ramp.

    Four of those five steps are usually fine. Step four is where it breaks.

    What we do to protect ourselves

    • Arrive earlier than they tell you. If they say twenty minutes, we make it thirty. It costs us a coffee and saves us a panic.
    • Get the name of the person who helped you board. If nobody is waiting at the other end, you have somewhere to start.
    • Ask the boarding staff to confirm they have radioed ahead, out loud, in front of you. Not because they are lying, but because saying it makes it real.
    • Avoid tight connections. A twelve-minute change looks fine on paper and is not fine with a ramp involved. We will take an hour’s longer journey for a half-hour buffer every time.
    • Know the guard is your fallback. If you are stuck on a train and nobody has come, find the guard. They can usually get a ramp out themselves.

    If it goes wrong

    Being left on a train past your stop is not a minor inconvenience and you should not treat it as one. Every operator has a complaints process, and failures of booked assistance are taken more seriously than most complaints because they are reported to the regulator. Write it down at the time: train, times, station, what happened. It is worth doing even when you are tired and just want to go home.

    Your turn: if you have experiences of your own — the places that got it right, and the ones that got it badly wrong — tell us in the comments below. Every report helps the next traveller.

  • LNER, the wheelchair spaces are not spare seats

    Let us start with the compliment, because it is genuine: LNER is our preferred way to travel to London. Over the years they have mostly done the things this site keeps asking train companies to do — the assistance turns up, the staff know their jobs, the journey works. When we have a choice of route, we choose them.

    Which is why this post exists. A policy we only discovered by arguing about it has left us, more than once, unable to travel comfortably or at the times we wanted — and the problem is not rudeness or a broken lift. It is arithmetic.

    What we kept seeing

    On the 12:10 London to Leeds, the wheelchair space — seats 18 and 19 — showed as reserved. No wheelchair arrived. The space held luggage, and the passengers sat in the ordinary seats beside it. On other recent journeys the wheelchair area has been reserved by passengers with crutches, with a pushchair, and once with just luggage. And when we have tried to turn up and go, we have been refused travel because the wheelchair space was in use by a non-wheelchair passenger.

    So Steve asked LNER directly, on X, why able-bodied passengers are able to book the wheelchair space at all.

    The policy, in LNER’s own words

    Credit where due: their social media team engaged properly, over several days. This is the policy as they stated it to us:

    “The seats you are referring to are not solely for the use of wheelchair users — they are for those with reduced mobility and their companions. This means they are open for booking by anyone who contacts the Passenger Assist team and states they require assistance.”

    LNER, via X direct message, February 2026

    They also told us the numbers: two wheelchair spaces on a five-coach Azuma, three on a Mark IV, four on the longer nine- and ten-coach Azumas. And they said this: “we always prioritise passengers using a wheelchair and their companion, if there are any travelling on that service.”

    Hold that last sentence next to being refused turn-up-and-go because the space was occupied by someone without a wheelchair. Prioritisation at booking time is not prioritisation on the platform. Once the space is sold, it is gone — and we are the ones left behind.

    The arithmetic

    A train has two, three or four wheelchair spaces — LNER’s own figures — and ten or more priority seats spread through the carriages. If passengers who can use an ordinary seat are booked into the wheelchair spaces, a handful of spaces absorbs the demand of both groups. One of those groups has somewhere else to sit. The other does not.

    And to be clear about who is saying this: Steve broke his spine in 2014 and has reduced mobility himself. When he travels alone, he books a priority seat — that is what they are for. This is not a complaint about hidden disabilities. It is a complaint about the only two spaces Bev can physically occupy being open to people who have another option, on a train that is roughly one per cent wheelchair-accessible by seat count.

    What it costs us

    • The cheapest trains are usually fully booked for wheelchair spaces — and in our experience, the more expensive the train, the more likely the space is free. The policy quietly prices wheelchair users onto dearer services.
    • Turn-up-and-go has failed us more than once — refused because the space was occupied by a non-wheelchair passenger. LNER themselves acknowledged that some passengers book multiple journeys as a “safety net”; their safety net removes ours.
    • Luggage and pushchairs in the space is, in LNER’s words, “an ongoing issue” — their advice is to speak to the Train Manager, who is responsible for keeping the space clear.

    What LNER say is coming

    LNER told us they are installing more than 36,000 “SeatSense” sensors above every seat and wheelchair space, showing in real time whether each is occupied rather than relying on reservation data. That is genuinely welcome — it should help with the luggage-in-the-space problem and with finding a free space on the day. But a sensor cannot fix the core issue: it can tell you the space is taken; it cannot make the person taking it someone who had no other choice.

    What we would ask LNER to do

    Keep solving the findability problem — but not with the only spaces wheelchair users can occupy. An assistance passenger in an ordinary reserved seat has a coach letter and a seat number; staff know exactly where they are. Meet them at the coach door. Seat them in the priority seats nearest the doors if that helps.

    • Hold the wheelchair spaces for passengers who cannot transfer to any other seat, releasing them only when no wheelchair user can still book that service.
    • At minimum, require evidence — a disabled railcard, or a conversation with Passenger Assist about why the space specifically is needed — before the space can be booked in advance by someone without a wheelchair.
    • Let on-train staff move a non-wheelchair passenger from the space to a priority seat when a wheelchair user needs it — on the day, not just in the booking system.
    • Answer the complaints form. Ours went unanswered until we chased it on social media.

    We say all this as customers who want to keep choosing LNER, and who will happily update this post the day the policy changes — or the day SeatSense proves us wrong.