Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Indian Railways is one of the world’s largest rail network with a significantly large number of users. The overnight express trains have two–three berths for sleeping, aligned one over the other with vertical spacing. Presently, instead of proper steps there are only horizontal bars on which the passengers have to balance to stand and climb up. It poses severe difficulties on the users those who are not physically fit for this kind of activity. For the old, it is horrifying that what if they have assigned a berth other than the lower one. The same is true for Indian women with traditional attire. However, for anyone, it is not comfortable to climb up and down with the present design, which does not even have any far resemblance with the conventional stair. Though physical agility has a direct relation to age, however, the correlation is not that predictive and has influence of several factors like obesity, weakness or injury. This paper depicts the design of a novel retractable stair system for Indian Railway to facilitate ease to the passengers to access the middle and upper berths. In this design, we have introduced three retractable steps, one at the level of the lower berth, one at the level of halfway between the lower and middle berths and one at the level of the middle berth. The final model is conceptualized and tested with a set of users from different age groups and validated with experts.