{"id":750320,"date":"2026-08-26T12:52:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T12:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/750320\/"},"modified":"2026-08-26T12:52:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T12:52:10","slug":"thameslink-to-replace-over-60000-ironing-board-train-seats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/750320\/","title":{"rendered":"Thameslink to replace over 60,000 ‘ironing board’ train seats"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Ironing board” seats on some commuter trains will get extra cushioning, the transport secretary has said, more than a decade after the government spent \u00a31.6bn of public money building the fleet.<\/p>\n

Heidi Alexander announced that more than 60,000 seats on all 115 Thameslink trains would get new cushions and backrests, replacing much-criticised thin and hard seats.<\/p>\n

She said the work, set to begin in 2027 and last two years, was “public ownership of our railways in action” as part of the new Great British Railways programme.<\/p>\n

However, some have criticised how the Department for Transport (DfT) awarded a \u00a31.6bn contract for the trains despite being warned of the seat discomfort at the time.<\/p>\n

The seat upgrades are part of wider improvements planned for the Thameslink network after Greater Thameslink Railway came into public ownership in May 2026<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Other measures included an increase in Gatwick Express services from December and a programme to refurbish train toilets and remove graffiti across the fleet.<\/p>\n

Alexander said: “We’ll start getting rid of the dreaded ‘ironing board seats’ so passengers can enjoy comfier, more pleasant journeys on some of Britain’s busiest commuter routes.”<\/p>\n

She said wider rail reforms would continue under the planned Great British Railways organisation, which is intended to oversee rail services across England.<\/p>\n

The class-700 Thameslink trains were heralded by the DfT as “state-of-the-art” and “a fantastic deal” for taxpayers when they were rolled out between 2016 and 2019.<\/p>\n

That followed the DfT spending \u00a31.6bn of taxpayers’ money for German manufacturer Siemens to build the trains in 2013, following a bidding process which began in 2008.<\/p>\n

DfT’s own procurement guidance document for the fleet, seen by the BBC, stressed that they should be “high capacity” and “reduced weight”.<\/p>\n

It said the new electric fleet would have a design that “must cater for [about] 1,000 people to board or alight at one time” and a “2+2 seat layout to ease flow and provide standing space”.<\/p>\n

Some have claimed that this aim to maximise capacity and standing space for commuters led to the seats being so thinly cushioned.<\/p>\n

Responding to Alexander’s post on X praising the new re-cushioning project, Graeme Pickering, senior correspondent at Railway Magazine, wrote: “Might have been wise not to frame this as ‘public ownership fixes private sector mess’ when it was the DfT which procured said trains.”<\/p>\n

Two years before the Thameslink trains were rolled out to the public, a prototype was unveiled at London’s Excel centre in 2014.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Ironing board” seats on some commuter trains will get extra cushioning, the transport secretary has said, more than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":750321,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-750320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=750320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/750321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=750320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=750320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=750320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}