Mr. Billy Gilpin:

I will comment on the new cross-Border fleet and the new Alstom fleet. The cross-Border Enterprise is a jointly operated service between Translink and Iarnród Éireann. It consists of three common trains. The service presented to the user is exactly the same. We do want to move to an Irish service. Shared island funding is being made available towards the end of this year. This means that to deliver an Irish service we will have to utilise some of our current intercity rail car fleet, which is accessible. Northern Ireland Railways will have to deploy its car fleet, which are modern trains.

The committee members may have seen last week there was funding announced from the Special European Union Programmes Body, SEUPB, to fund a new Enterprise fleet. We are currently going to market and part of the specification for that fleet is a fully accessible fleet across the entire length of the train. God willing these trains will enter service in 2028 and 2029.

On our new Alstom fleet, the trains all consist of five carriages and there are four designated wheelchair spaces. These trains would normally be coupled as ten cars, which means there would be eight wheelchair spaces. They are high-capacity vehicles so there is more room for wheelchair users to access the trains and to travel than just the bespoke wheelchair places. I will now ask Mr. Murphy to comment on the platform issue.