Railways – Guidelines on Standard signage at stations on Indian railways

Railways – Guidelines on Standard signage at stations on Indian railways

Indian Railways has established comprehensive guidelines for standard signage at stations to ensure consistency, accessibility, and ease of navigation for passengers.

Signages act as a guide to visitors of Railway Station premises and assist in making cognitive decisions related to their journey and other needs. A good signage conveys its message swiftly and unambiguously often without need to read the complete contents of a signage. Signages serve as a medium of communication with a wide variety of station users with varied mindset and varied needs. Accelerated way finding helps achieve the ultimate motive to reduce the anxiety of all concerned in transit and help people catch their trains. Signages also play a vital role in safety through orderly evacuation of passengers during emergencies.

Well-designed signages use simple and easily decipherable language, easy to read colours and fonts, intuitive pictograms and convey their message quickly and unambiguously. Signages should ensure that anyone can navigate around the station and use its facilities, minimising the need to ask station staff, coolies, or vendors. These guidelines aim to gradually phase out the wide variety of designs and patterns currently in use across India with broadly similar look and feel. The principles for design and planning of the signages aim to provide consistent wayfinding across Indian Railway Stations.

Objective

The Signage Plan for a Railway Station should aspire/achieve the following objectives: –

• To provide a uniform rationale for locating signages, considering how the signage will be read, by whom, from which direction, at which height, and in relation to other elements that exist or will exist within the space so that they serve maximum volume of passengers/general public
• To provide a basis for aesthetically designed signages well integrated with station architecture
• To plan and design the signage such that the station is easily accessible even to a first time visitor
• To ensure standard signages suitably formatted (font, font size, colour, background, etc.) with specified design/materials
• To ensure that information on the signage is precise & uniform, accommodating essential information
• To achieve continuous directional signage, with repeaters at junctions, to lead the user to their destination
• To restrict redundant signages and avoid visual clutter for better visibility;
• To ensure use of uniform language/legends across India to ease the learning curve for the visitors to Indian Railway premises;
• To ensure that the signages are accessible to the maximum extent possible to the Divyangjan users at Railway stations.

Please refer the following document for the further details