A
lthough a number of new train fleets have been introduced onto the British rail network in recent years, with more
still to come, they haven’t all met with universal passenger approval. Some have described the seats as “ironing
boards”, a reference to their comparative hardness. Others have observed that the initial impressions might lead
one to think that the seats are hard, but in fact they remain comfortable after a long journey.After a safe and punctual train, seats are probably the most
important customer requirement, but, with people coming in all
shapes and sizes, and journeys being for a variety of purposes,
customer requirements for seats would not come into the
category of “one size fits all”.
In days gone by, the importance of seats would be inferred
by a requirement that seat comfort be judged by the managing
director and his (in those days it was inevitably a man) directors - a
process that survived until at least the 1990s.
More recently, enlightened project directors have organised
customer clinics and provided the seats that the customers
liked most. Less-enlightened project directors have bought the
cheapest seats compliant with the various requirements (that do
not include comfort).
Then there must be a special mention for project directors who
organise a customer clinic but then buy the cheapest compliant
seat, irrespective of the result of the clinic.
Compliance is everything, and modern trains must comply
with the interoperability regulations. In the case of seats,
train buyers have to ensure that the seats meet some pretty
basic ergonomic requirements, show they are strong enough
in service and in a crash, and meet stringent fire safety
requirements.
Moreover, a train operator’s franchise agreement might require
a particular number of seats to be operated into and out of key
nodal points at specified times. Comfort might be an objective,
but without means of measurement.
Claims have been made that compliance with fire safety
standards leads to hard seats, others disagree.
The result has been a large number of complaints about so-
called “ironing board” seats, and recent customer satisfaction
scores show seats (at 67 per cent) fall a long way short of overall
passenger satisfaction (at 83 per cent).
All this led to RSSB commissioning research into seat comfort,
with the aim of producing objective criteria for assessing seat
comfort and, hopefully a standard against which compliance
may be measured. If customers dislike the seats on a new
train when this process is in use, it will be easy to see whether
the specifier has been too undemanding or whether the seat
supplier has failed to comply.
Comfort factors
RSSB Research Project T1140 “Defining the requirements
of a seat comfort selection process” was initiated in February
2018 and the final report was delivered in May 2019. The work
was carried out by Arup and the Furniture Industry Research
Association (FIRA).
The report highlights that “quantifying seat comfort is a
complex area that depends on the human, the product and
the environment...comfort can be defined as ‘an absence of
discomfort’ and so discomfort is sometimes easier to quantify”.
Putting this into a mouthful of other words, the different shapes
and sizes of passengers, and the activities they perform whilst sat
in the seat, together with the shapes and sizes of seats, seat pad
compression, variations in journey length and train vibration, can
and do affect feelings of comfort.
The project set out with a literature review which was used to
help define minimum seat comfort requirements, to develop a
seat comfort test methodology and seat comfort scoring system
and, finally, to test and validate the proposals.
The report identified ten factors; seat dimensions, passenger
anthropometry, passenger activity, train seat arrangements, static,
dynamic and temporal factors of comfort, psychosocial factors of
seat comfort, seat durability, international best practices regardingSeat properties affecting comfort.FE ATURE 23