Wheelchair user faces nightmare rail journey

A rail operator has apologised after a wheelchair user ended up stuck at Warwick Parkway station and unable to get to the platform because the lift was broken.

Sarah Hope, from Redditch, was travelling to attend a disability conference in London on Monday.

Passenger Assistance app showed the lift was broken, but an advisor told her in a follow-up phone call there was "step-free" access from the car park. However, she arrived to find that only applied to one platform and she would have been stuck on her return.

Chiltern Railways apologised and said it would work with the third party that dealt with her inquiry. Transreport, which runs the app but not helpline, said its information was correct.

National Rail, which promotes Passenger Assistance, said the service allowed travellers to request assistance in advance, meaning train companies could help them, depending on what was required.

'Ramp not possible'

Ms Hope, who has recently retired from professional sport, said she wanted to travel from Warwick instead of going via Birmingham, "to save a bit of time". She had used Warwick Parkway before, a few years previously.

The disabled advocacy worker was attending the Purple Tuesday summit, which promotes the Purple Pound, or the spending power of disabled households.

After she arrived at Warwick Parkway and discovered the accessibility issues, she said she called Passenger Assistance and was told she could travel from Dorridge, but would have to pay an extra £15.

As an alternative, Passenger Assistance offered a taxi to an accessible station, two stops away, but Ms Hope said that would add 40 minutes to her journey.

Instead, she drove to Dorridge and boarded the train, but at the conference received a call to say she could not have a wheelchair ramp from the train on her return, because of the gap involved on that particular platform.

They suggested she travel to Solihull and back to Dorridge to arrive at a different platform.

But after refusing to do that, a ramp was provided.

Ms Hope said the ramp was steep and a power wheelchair would not have been able to use it, but in her manual wheelchair, she could "pull a wheelie".

'Not asking for Everest'

Ms Hope said: "I'm spending my day at this disability and tech conference and we're talking about all these fantastic uses of AI - and it just comes down to can someone put a ramp down from a train to a platform that doesn't involve me adding hours and hours on to my journey."

Speaking generally about transport accessibility, she said there were still Tube stations she could not use, adding: "I'm not asking for Mount Everest to be made accessible.

"I just want to be able to move around a modern city with a sense of security that I can get to where I want to go in the time that I've got.

"In reality, what I'm still needing in this instance, is for one person to talk to another person, and the platforms being made accessible via ramp."

Ms Hope said the step-free access was only to one side of the station

A Chiltern Railways spokesperson said: "We are investigating the advice given on the status of the lifts and the alternative transport options."

The rail operator said staff should advise customers of alternative options, and it would not ask customers to buy a new ticket due to accessibility issues.

He said: "In this instance, the customer spoke to a third party to receive advice on accessibility at the station.

"We will speak to the customer to investigate this further and work with the third party who took this query."

A spokesperson for Transreport said the company was sorry to hear about Ms Hope's distressing experience.

A statement said: "After an internal review, we can confirm that the Passenger Assistance app provided the correct information sourced from the national rail database, showing that the lift at Warwick Parkway was out of service.

"Our app is designed to provide passengers with reliable information to plan their journey - in this instance, miscommunication with a third-party call centre unfortunately led to some confusion about the assistance provisions available."