For the lifties and non technical readers out there who don’t work on escalators the comb plates are found at the ends of the escalator where the steps disappear under the fixed landings at either end.

They play a very important safety role as their purpose is to protect passengers from an open gap that would otherwise exist under the landing plate and present a risk of entrapment by items such as shoes, fingers, foreign objects etc. The absence of comb plates could have seen the whole shoe in the photograph below being drawn into the machine.

In the days prior to what we now know as the common escalator some designs had shunt landings where you had to step to the side to step off rather than the conventional straight on and off designs we are familiar with today. In those days no comb plates existed and entrapments were common.