Railway could provide the new world order of travel

Social distancing is going to forever change the way we travel in the future.

Gone are the days where we are all packed into a flying tin can owned by a company who’s margins are so tight that if the flight is less than 90% full they are not making a profit.

Rail travel has had a solution to this issue for over a hundred years.

Since the first days of rail travel in Britain the railway companies built passenger cars where the customer gets on and off the train into their own little cabin on the passenger car through their own door on the outside of the car.

This eliminates contact with others in the close confines of the car.

There are several possibilities for the design of the cars which could make life easy for the travelling customer and the train crews. A car for single travellers would have cabins on either side of the car with a door to the outside and a wall dividing the cabins in the middle of the car.

These cabins would be similar to the first class cabins on an airplane today. For family travel the cabins would be accessed from both sides of the car and have no wall in the middle of the car.

Ticketing would be all electronic and the train crew would be just there to remind people about the social distancing and taking ticket info would be done using an electronic reader which has been developed already for most kinds of public transportation.

If starting from scratch we have the opportunity to build the stations to meet the new needs of the travelling public. Passenger stations would be built so that the through mainlines would go right through the stations and there would be stopping tracks on either side of the mainlines where trains stopping at the stations would go off the mainline and not hold up traffic.

This is already being done is some places in Europe and works very well. The interiors of the cars would be made of modern easy to clean materials which would make cleaning between passenger occupancy easy.

It will be interesting to see is a private operator like Virgin or coach builders like Hitachi catch on to the new world order of travel and reconfigure their ways to attract the public back to a great way to travel.

Trevor Mills is a local railway historian