Whilst desirable, the problem is that making the railway fully disability compliant is frighteningly expensive. This makes the railway as a whole requiring even more subsidy and the cost of say a new small station with ramps, lifts etc means hardly any come to fruition. Disabled access is no problem at major stations which likely have a fair number of disabled users. However, how many disabled people actually use medium and small stations - anyone with figures on this? The issue is one of how much money do we spend on expensive railway disability measures. A taxi would be much cheaper and potentially give a door to door service (or to nearest disabled access station) which is surely better for the disabled.
Whilst I believe that disability costs come at least partly from a separate budget, it's still part of the whole government expenditure and is clearly related to rail. A balanced view would make stations with a good number of disabled passengers,or where there is no other compliant station within X miles, compliant. This would mean money is available for improved services for the vast majority but disabled access is realistically provided. Eg would it be sensible to consider full disabled access, lifts etc at a station like dent?
There's a lot of people who benefit from easier access to trains (the elderly, small children, those with buggies, etc.).
Many smaller stations do provide platform access by providing a second access point.
The big cost is likely to be getting level access at stations, for example my local station the station building limits the potential for this all the way along the platform. However even having a hump for 50m would give your access to at least 2 (if not 3) coaches. The problem is that different stations have their buildings in different places, making level access to any one coach at all the stations hard to deliver without at least some stations having problems with their buildings getting in the way. One option could be a step up from the building, but enough of a walkway to allow a ramp up a short distance away (i.e. not where the buildings are) although this may require the station canopy to be extended, although this would only really work where there's a reasonable platform width and passenger numbers aren't very high (probably comfortably sub 1 million per year with a 3m wide platform), which would limit the number of places where this could work
Whilst there would be costs with such works, once in place they cost very little extra in upkeep. If the humps are done as part of the general maintenance of the platform surfaces at least some of the costs are shared with existing costs. It's also the sort of works which can be carried out whilst other line closures are in place, which further reduces the costs.
However by making it level access (or even just a 50mm step rather than a 200mm step) it would likely enable a few more to use that station and with a 60 year payback period you wouldn't need all that many each week using it for it to be viable to do.
Yes you still need lifts and ramps at larger stations, however many of these already have them. However do a few a year and your gain the incremental benefits. However you also gain some extra passengers who otherwise would have been unable to use the railways.
Of course, whilst passenger numbers are still growing, but below pre Covid levels, we could afford to be more selective in which stations were enhance to limit the current level of support. However, such enhancements have always been a fairly limited part of the overall railway budget (£0.4bn between 2006 and now, so averaging £25 million a year vs the total railway spend of £25,000 million), so any reduction is likely to have a very limited impact (especially given the fact it atracts more people to use the railways).
My local line in the 1990's had major stations at least 25 minutes apart from each other which had lifts, however none of the 5 stains between had even a second (ramped) access, now 2 have lifts, and 2 more have a second access (one was paid for by a developer, so didn't even cost the railways anything). The 5th is going to be hard to deliver, but with a circa 5 minute journey time to a station with lifts (both have at least 4tph in each direction for onwards travel) doubling back isn't too bad (or too expensive if you buy a return to/from that next station rather than the correct station - even if that's not strictly allowed within the rules as your break in journey isn't in the right part of your trip).
