Thameslink Ironing Board Seats Meet a Late Cushion Retrofit

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said more than 60,000 Thameslink ironing board seats will get new cushions from 2027, a decade after the trains entered service. All 115 Class 700 units are in the plan, with the work due to last two years. The Department for Transport specified that hard foam in the original contract, and ministers now present the retrofit as public ownership in action.

The published job is narrower than the “end” the department described. Standard class gets new bases and improved backrests. First class keeps its current backrests. Seventy trains that still lack a seat-back table will get one.

More Than 60,000 Cushions, Starting Next Year

Alexander announced the plan in late August, less than 100 days after Britain’s largest train operator moved into public hands. Govia Thameslink Railway, which runs Thameslink, Southern, Great Northern and Gatwick Express, transferred on 31 May 2026 and now operates as Greater Thameslink Railway, still using the GTR initials. The DfT said the cushion work was part of a drive to show Great British Railways can deliver “tangible improvements for passengers.”

THE FLEET IN THE PLAN

• The seats: More than 60,000 standard-class seat bases across the Thameslink Class 700 fleet.
• The trains: All 115 units, the eight-car and 12-car sets that work the north-south spine through London.
• The extras: Improved standard-class backrests, new first-class bases, and tables on 70 trains that do not have them.
• The clock: Work starts in 2027 and is scheduled to run for about two years.

GTR chief executive John Whitehurst said customers had told the operator that comfort matters, and that research with everyday commuters had shaped “the best possible solution for cushion comfort onboard our high-capacity trains.” Alexander went further, calling the seats “dreaded” and tying the announcement to the new public-ownership model. Passengers will still sit on the current foam through next year, and the last units are not due to be finished until 2029 if the two-year window holds.

The Department Wrote the Seating Spec

The Class 700s were not a franchise whim. A bidding process began in 2008, and in 2013 the DfT spent £1.6bn of public money for Siemens to build the fleet in Germany. The trains were sold at the time as state-of-the-art and a strong deal for taxpayers, then rolled out between 2016 and 2019. BBC reporting on the department’s own procurement guidance found a brief that stressed “high capacity” and “reduced weight,” a layout that “must cater for [about] 1,000 people to board or alight at one time,” and a 2+2 arrangement “to ease flow and provide standing space.”

A 2020 Freedom of Information trawl by The Spectator filled in the rest of the chain. The DfT bought and specified the train. Interfleet and First Capital Connect, later absorbed by GTR, wrote a detailed specification, and First Capital Connect worked with Siemens on the design. Three tests guided the seats, the department said: safety, seating capacity and comfort. Covering material met “minimum safety precautions.” Backrests followed interior crashworthiness rules. Seat size and pitch were set to guarantee a minimum standing load.

Operators spent years telling passengers the thin pads were a fire-and-vandalism requirement. GTR’s then spokesman Roger Perkins told RAIL magazine in 2019 that padding was “constrained by the latest fire standards” and that graffiti-proof material gave the seats “a firmer feel.” The Rail Safety and Standards Board, which keeps those standards, did not agree.

WHERE EXPERTS DISAGREE

• The operator line: Perkins said modern fire rules and vandal-resistant covers forced a firm seat, and that the chosen design met safety and capacity tests while offering the best comfort on the table.
• The standards body: RSSB rolling-stock head Hugh O’Neill told RAIL it was “absolutely not true that seat comfort is related to fire standards,” and that thicker foam could have been fitted.
• The passenger panel: Railfuture’s 2014 inspectors were told the hardness was fire-risk mitigation, and wrote that this was still unacceptable and “had as much to do with minimising cost at the expense of comfort.”

Stakeholder viewings in 2011 already flagged the foam. Minutes seen via the Spectator FOI show attendees preferred a “Supplier B” seat on style and grab handles, then asked for “significant” work on comfort, softness and cushion width. A member of the East Surrey Transport Committee said the seats “make me round-shouldered.” The Association of Public Transport Users and London TravelWatch both pressed for better cushioning. A later trip to mock-up carriages in Kassel in 2013 did not lift that verdict. Production went ahead on the hard design anyway.

A Mock-Up at Excel Already Drew Complaints

Two years before the first passengers sat on the new trains, Siemens and First Capital Connect showed a plywood mock-up at London’s Excel centre. Norman Bradbury and Keith Dyall of Railfuture’s rolling-stock design panel walked through it on 28 January 2014. Their 2014 mock-up visit report reads now like a punch list for this month’s announcement, because almost every item they marked is still on the train.

THE 2014 PANEL FINDINGS

• The foam: They found the seats very hard and expected complaints, including on runs of up to 130 miles that take more than two hours.
• The angle: Seats in both classes were “far too upright” and, in their view, built for short inner-suburban hops rather than Bedford, Cambridge or Brighton.
• The width: Standard-class seats were narrow and so close that contact with the next passenger was hard to avoid, with too much space given to standees.
• The tables: Standard class had no fold-down flaps or ledges for a cup or a laptop; tables were first class only.
• The plea: Comfort was “severely compromised,” and they “strongly urge reconsideration of the design before series production takes place.”

They also disliked the high backs, which they said felt claustrophobic for shorter passengers, especially beside a blank wall instead of a window. Airline-style rows dominated, even though a Passenger Focus survey they cited found 62% of travellers preferred bays. The 12-car mock-up, they noted, held no more seats than the old eight-car Class 319. Series production was not stopped. The DfT now says it could not reopen a private-sector contract until public ownership took effect this year, an answer that covers the years after 2016 better than the choice to keep the foam after Excel.

What the Two-Year Seat Job Covers

The August plan is a retrofit, not a new interior. Standard-class passengers are promised softer bases and a redesigned back, which matters because the nickname was always about shape as well as hardness: tall, thin, tapered, with little lumbar give. First class is a smaller job. Those travellers get new bases and keep the backrest they already have, so the upright profile that Railfuture called unfit for long trips stays in the premium saloon.

WHAT THE JOB CHANGES

The published list does not mention extra legroom or standard-class charging points, two of the other long-running gripes on these units. Current Class 700s have no at-seat plugs or USB sockets, and the 2+2 pitch was set to protect standing capacity. A cushion and a better back can change how the seat feels. They cannot invent space the original brief took out. Industry chatter after the announcement still reaches for fire rules in the Thameslink core tunnels as a reason not to go too soft, the same argument RSSB dismissed seven years ago.

Private Investors Still Own the 115 Trains

Public ownership of GTR changed who runs the service. It did not change who owns the metal. Cross London Trains, a private consortium set up for the Thameslink programme, owns a fleet of 115 trains, the Siemens Desiro City Class 700s that work Luton, Gatwick, St Pancras and Brighton. The project is logged at £1.6bn of capital cost, with a 20-year availability contract that began in 2016 and a revenue underpin from the Secretary of State for Transport. At the end of that term, ownership stays with the shareholders, who expect to lease the fleet on again.

Siemens still holds the long-term maintenance contract with the operator, which is why Three Bridges depot remains a Siemens shop even after the franchise transferred. Infrastructure fund HICL paid about £52 million in March 2026 for an extra 6.65% of Cross London Trains, taking its holding to 13.13%. Other stakes sit with Siemens, Innisfree and a joint venture that includes AIP Management and Dalmore Capital. Eversholt Rail took a 22-year asset-management role when the deal was signed. The operator can ask for new foam. The lessor and the maintainer still sit on the other side of the table, which is one reason the BBC was told that contract detail on the cushions will not land until the autumn.

That split is the model Labour chose. Operators move into the public sector as contracts expire. The trains stay with rolling-stock companies because buying them out would be expensive. A foam swap is one of the few interior jobs that can be sold as a passenger win without reopening who holds the assets.

Less Than 100 Days, and a 2027 Start

When GTR services entered public ownership at 02:00 BST on 31 May, the department published a 100-day plan that did not mention seats. It promised more Gatwick Express trains from December, 75 extra Thameslink and Great Northern drivers this year, toilet resurfacing on two trains a week, 110 Travel Safe officers, and a secondary signalling system between Farringdon and Blackfriars that officials said should prevent more than 1,000 cancellations a year. The operator, the department said, accounts for one in six passenger rail journeys in Britain. After the transfer, publicly owned operators would handle eight in ten of the journeys Great British Railways is meant to oversee.

FROM THE SPEC TO THE FOAM PLAN

1. 2008: Bidding for the new Thameslink fleet begins.
2. 2013: The DfT awards Siemens a £1.6bn contract to build 115 trains, financed by Cross London Trains.
3. 28 January 2014: Railfuture inspects the Excel mock-up and urges a redesign before series production.
4. 2016 to 2019: Class 700s enter service with the hard seats unchanged.
5. 31 May 2026: GTR transfers into public ownership under DfT Operator Limited.
6. August 2026: Alexander announces the cushion, backrest and table retrofit.
7. 2027: Work is due to start and to run for about two years.

The seat plan arrived as that 100-day window closed, which is why Alexander could say public ownership was already “in action” while dating the first new cushion to next year. The legal hook is the Passenger Railway Services Act 2024, which lets ministers fold operators into DfT Operator as franchises expire, without buying the trains. Chiltern is due next, on 20 September 2026, then Great Western on 13 December, with the full operator programme pencilled through the end of 2027, the same year the foam job begins.

Might have been wise not to frame this as ‘public ownership fixes private sector mess’ when it was the DfT which procured said trains.

Graeme Pickering, senior correspondent, Railway Magazine, on X

Shadow transport secretary Richard Holden, answering the wider nationalisation record rather than the foam itself, said promises of improvement on public services were turning into “fewer trains, fewer seats, and more delays.” Steve White, managing director of Southeastern, took the other side and said credit belonged to the GTR team, calling the news good. Both can be true in the same week: the engineering work is real, and the political wrap sits on a spec the same department signed.

The Two-Hour Runs Wait Until 2029

Thameslink is not only a metro hop under London. The same Class 700s still run Bedford, Cambridge and Peterborough toward Gatwick and Brighton, the 130-mile, two-hour trips Railfuture flagged when the seats were plywood. Those passengers get the new foam last, because a two-year rolling programme starting in 2027 reaches the final unit in 2029 on the department’s own clock. Until then the high-capacity layout does what it was built to do: move a lot of people, standing included, on a seat the original brief made thin.

The BBC says more detail on the cushion contract is due in the autumn. Passengers will be able to judge the foam when the first refurbished unit appears. The backrests, the pitch and the owner of the trains will look familiar.