Councillors have authorised £25,000 to prepare a major consultation exercise on a possible new railway station at Bathampton costing up to £30m. This will serve a park and ride car park, according to the plans seen by The Journal, located in the fork of the railway line where the Westbury route branches from the main-line to Paddington, a couple of miles outside Bath. Leader of the Council, Lib-Dem Paul Crossley, believes the consultation will take place this autumn.
At this stage, the Council has decided to go just for a park and ride project to serve Bath and Bristol, rather than a full parkway station which would serve London-bound trains as well.
The car park would accommodate as many cars as were to be housed on the previously-rejected, conventional east of Bath park and ride schemes.
Without London trains, it is difficult to see how there would be enough trains each hour to make a rail-based park and ride system really attractive to motorists. There would also be the risk of serious overcrowding in the rush hours. Peak-hour trains to and from Westbury are usually standing room only, at least from as far as Bradford-on-Avon. There are proposals under the Avon Metro project to run some extra trains between Bristol and Bath, which if extended to Bathampton, would alleviate the crowding situation. Putting around 1,000 extra commuters on this service each peak period will involve extra carriages etc.
The design of the scheme would reduce conflicting train movements when trains leave the main line to join the Westbury branch.
The scheme is innovative, workable and if carried out in conjunction with these other railway works, will probably represent good value for money. It is, unfortunately, a scheme of limited ambition.
If electrification delivers its four trains an hour from Bristol to London in place of the current two, there will be lots of extra seats on the London-bound trains to fill. With the very fast trains going via Bristol Parkway, trains via Bath can afford extra stops and would benefit from extra passengers. Making Bathampton a parkway station would involve extra car parking and to be fully utilised, require a single carriageway link road to the A36. With joined up thinking and extra cash from the Department for Transport, this new road could also provide an extra benefit in the form of a bypass for the Cleveland Bridge for north/southbound traffic.
Any changes that Bath and North East Somerset Council wants to propose to the railway authorities must be made quickly, as plans are advancing a pace for an agreed resignalling and electrification of the main line due to be completed by 2016. The key date will be in 2014 when Box Tunnel is likely to be closed for electrification works which would present the ideal opportunity to build the new station. If this opportunity is missed, the railway layout at Bathampton will almost certainly be fixed for at least one generation.
Parkway stations for London trains are very much the stations of the future. There are over twenty genuine parkway stations already, with at least a dozen more at various stages of planning. They are expensive, but then so is building new roads. Funding, not value for money, is the difficulty.
Value-for-money projects like this will create and sustain employment. Just as importantly, they will make an important contribution to keeping the area attractive for inward investment by reducing congestion in Bath and reducing journey times. Located, in Bathampton, they will be of little benefit to most Journal readers if the project is only for a park and ride station, unless, of course, some trains are extended to the Frome to Radstock line, but that seems totally unrealistic in the present economic climate.