Assisted Travel (Accessibility)

Upgraded help point units, more frequent inspections, and improvements to connectivity at unstaffed and remote stations are among the changes being delivered following the Office of Rail and Road’s 2024 report, which identified weaknesses in reliability and inconsistent monitoring of service quality across the network.

Passengers who rely on assistance when travelling with Northern Trains should see improvements to the service over time, after the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) secured commitments from the operator to ensure staff receive disability awareness training and to provide a £550,000 additional package of measures.

The Office of Rail and Road has today published its first annual benchmarking report on train and station operators’ delivery of passenger assistance. The findings highlight that while passengers are generally satisfied with the standard of assistance when it is delivered, delivery itself can be unreliable with 11% of passengers reporting that they received none of the assistance they booked in