Developing safety signs for children on board trains: findings from Great Britain

Every year a significant number of young children are injured as a result of accidents that occur on board trains in Great Britain. These accidents range from being caught in internal doors, slips, trips and falls and injuries caused by seats. We describe our efforts working with RSSB to design a new set of safety signs in order to help prevent such accidents occurring. The research involved running a set of workshops with young school children (aged 4-10, n=210) and showing them examples of existing train signs and gathering the requirements for new designs. A second set of workshops with these children was used to evaluate the new signs based on the outcomes from the earlier workshop. We describe our findings alongside a set of outline guidelines for the design of safety signs for young children. A final section outlines possibilities for future research.