Platforms, crossovers and pipe trestles

Everything that lifts a person above the shop floor: a platform at a machine, a mezzanine over stores, a walkway along the wall, a trestle carrying pipes. Their shape answers to a standard rather than to taste — the handrail, the knee rail, the toe board and the pitch of a flight are written into EN ISO 14122, and the platform is accepted against them.

How a platform is put together

From the bottom up: columns with base plates on anchors, bracing between them, beams, decking, guardrail. It is worth being clear about what carries what. The deck passes load to the beams, the beams to the columns, the columns to the floor. The guardrail carries nothing at all: it takes a horizontal push, and that is why it fixes to the beam and not to the decking.

Platform height is set not by comfort but by what has to be reached. You measure down from the working point: the comfortable zone for hands is 700 to 1600 mm above the deck. That is where the familiar two to three metres of most access platforms comes from.

Where they go

A platform at a machine is the commonest and the simplest: two or three steps and a deck at 600–900 mm. A mezzanine over stores is already a structure — it carries storage rather than a person, so the load is calculated separately and the access is a proper stair, because things get carried up it.

A trestle differs from a platform in that nobody walks on it: it carries pipes, and what matters is not the decking but the frame spacing, four to six metres at ordinary diameters. A crossover is two short flights and a landing between them; it goes where a pipe can be neither stepped over nor walked around.

Decking

Decking settles two things at once: what falls through it and how much height it eats. Open grating passes water, dirt and light — it stays dry underneath, but anything dropped ends up on the floor. Solid plate passes nothing, but water stands on it and it has to be washed.

Expanded metal is about half the price of pressed grating, and that is where its merits end: under a point load — the foot of a stepladder, the corner of a crate — it dents and does not come back. For trolleys and drums the answer is flat bar on edge, which is also the heaviest.

Guardrails to the standard

The dimensions are not up for discussion: 1100 mm handrail, knee rail halfway, 100 mm toe board. Everything else is. A post on a base plate is fitted and removed without welding — which matters where the platform gets moved or relocated. A welded post is cheaper and stiffer, but it ties the platform to its place for good.

The opening in a guardrail is its most dangerous point. A removable chain is not a guardrail: it comes off and does not go back. There are two correct answers — a self-closing gate and a hinged section that latches in the raised position; both return themselves to the closed state.

Stairs and ladders

The angle decides what your hands are doing. Up to 45° a person walks facing forward and carries anything. Between 45 and 60° one hand stays on the rail. A vertical ladder is climbed facing in and with empty hands only — which means tools have to be hauled up separately.

Hoops are mandatory on a vertical ladder above three metres, and above ten they are no longer enough: there you fit a fall-arrest rail with a travelling device. Hoops, contrary to expectation, do not catch a falling person — they stop them building up speed and swinging out, but they do not reduce the drop.

Where to go next

Stairs and railings in a house rather than a shop have their own article, stairs and railings. The structure the platform stands inside is frames and halls. What makes up the price and how long it takes is in how ordering works.

Author: welder Updated: 21 August 2026