Basil Jet wrote:

No-one has mentioned the fact that LU has turned Greenford from a
two-escalator station into a one-escalator station and dressed it up as
an enhancement that no-one can object to without being called a
cripple-kicker. I hope this practice doesn't spread to deep stations.

I would imagine lengthy staircases are inherently more dangerous than
lengthy escalators. How many people will become permanently disabled
through falling down the stairs, who would have been fine if the station
still had a down escalator?

A triptych platform which folds vertical when not needed and manoeuvres
itself up and down the central fixed staircase when needed is not hard
to imagine. Some sort of gates at the top and bottom would be needed to
stop people trying to walk down when the lift was coming up.

Incidentally, if this lift is as slow as people say, it would be a nice
trick if people could summon it up or down with a phone app while they
were on the train or in the street.

When did Greenford last have two working escalators? It must have been
quite a while ago. For as long as I can remember, there has only been one.
It's now one of very few step-free stations on the western Central line.

The Greenford lift is slow, but not so slow that you need any special
technology to summon it. In fact, most LU station lifts are slow. What's
slightly annoying is that it crawls almost to a stop near the ends and
inches to the stop, then pauses for seconds before the doors open. Probably
most lifts do the same, but you're very aware of it with glass doors.

Most above-ground stations don't have any escalators or lifts. One that
did, Alperton, lost its single escalator many years ago, and it's now
bricked up. For another example, the busy six-platform Harrow-on-the-Hill
station has no lifts or escalators. You have to walk up the stairs outside
the station, and then walk down to the platforms.