Our work with Network Rail and the Design Council as part of their Explore Station team has continued. We spent the Spring working alongside our partners and developing unique virtual reality experiences to engage people with the next round of the consultations. This vital project will help to shape the future design of thousands of local stations.
Image credit: National Railway Museum/Jason Hynes.
We held immersive VR experiences in York, Shildon, Manchester, Hereford and Paisley where over 500 people had a chance to experience what new modular train stations of the future could look like. Wearing headsets, visitors had the chance to test out what it feels like to move around a new station with luggage and to pull up in a train alongside the platform. They were able to hear train announcements and experience the new design right down to the detail of how the design concept will respond to local communities and the character of different places.
The VR experiences were supported by more traditional forms of public engagement at the events, including asking people to complete post it notes with their thoughts and views.
We are thrilled with the feedback from the events and how they enabled Explore Station to reach out to a demographic traditionally under-represented in more traditional forms of engagement. The consultations have now closed and we look forward to making more announcements soon about the impact of our work as part of the Explore Station project.
In the meantime, we are busy working alongside a number of councils around the country to develop VR experiences as part of their Summer consultations.