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There is an increasing prevalence for work to be analysed through naturalistic study, especially using ethnographically derived methods of enquiry and qualitative field research. The relatively unexplored domain of railway control (in comparison to signalling) in the UK is described in terms of features derived from observations and semi-structured interviews. In addition, task diagrams (a technique taken from the Applied Cognitive Task Analysis toolkit) are used to represent controllers' core elements of work, i.e. to manage events or incidents, and to identify the challenging steps in the process. The work features identified, the task diagrams, and the steps identified as challenging form a basis from which future ergonomics studies on railway controllers in the UK will be carried out.

New train stock or train services are continually being added to the network in the UK. Their design, in conjunction with European Regulations on train floor and rail height, means there is often a gap between train and platform necessitating at least one physical step. This paper presents the results from a series of experiments testing the time required to board or alight a train across three different gap heights. The experiments were designed to test for the effect of age and luggage type on the time to board or alight. As expected, more steps result in a longer time required to board or alight. More interesting is the effect of age and luggage on time to board and alight with younger people being relatively unaffected by the presence of steps and luggage, whereas both these factors hinder elderly people. The quantification of these effects has implications for accessibility of train services and for train dwell times and can be used by others in the design and planning stages of rail projects.

The work reported in this article was completed with the active involvement of operational rail staff who regularly use automated systems in rail signalling. The outcomes are currently being used to inform decisions on the extent and type of automation and user interfaces in future generations of rail control systems.

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