Bicester Town 1988

(Both 4.8.1988 copyright Steve Sainsbury/Rail Thing)

FACEBOOK - RAIL THING - BEECHING REVERSED

Back in August 1988 I stopped off at Bicester Town station to take a couple of photographs.

Back then station reopenings were rare, line reopenings even rarer, so this was something of a novelty. And now the line is being developed further and will eventually form part of an east-west link between Oxford and Cambridge, a line that was stupidly closed back in 1968. Back then planners thought that we'd all just travel from our backwards little towns to London and never go anywhere else. How wrong they were!

EastWestRail website

More information (from Wikipedia)

Bicester Town is the smaller of two railway stations serving the town of Bicester in Oxfordshire. (The larger is Bicester North.) It is 12 miles (19 km) miles north-east of Oxford at the terminus of the Oxford-to-Bicester branch line. Major engineering work to re-double the track and reconnect the branch line to the Chiltern Main Line caused the station to close in February 2014. The new station will open on 26 October 2015 with trains running to Oxford andLondon Marylebone. All trains serving it were operated by Chiltern Railways, which will resume running trains to the reopened station.

History

Bicester London Road with two platforms in 1961

The Buckinghamshire Railway, which already had a route between Bletchley and Banbury, had powers to build a line to Oxford. The first part of this line, from a junction to the west of Winslow (at a point which became known asVerney Junction) to Islip, opened on 1 October 1850, and this included a station at Bicester.^[1][2] Originally named "Bicester", the station was renamed "Bicester London Road" in March 1954, although the nameboards were not altered until 20 September 1954.

The station was closed, along with the rest of the Oxford – Bletchley section of the Varsity Line, on 1 January 1968. However, the station was used by several excursion trains through the 1970s and 1980s.

Network SouthEast reopened the station as "Bicester Town" on 11 May 1987, as the terminus of the Oxford to Bicester Line. From May 2009 First Great Western and Oxfordshire County Council branded the line "The Bicester Link". Since then operation of the line has been transferred from FGW to Chiltern Railways.

Since 1987 the frequency of trains has varied and passenger numbers have fluctuated accordingly. In the four years 2007–11 more frequent trains increased the total number of passengers using Bicester Town by 258%.

The station closed on 15 February 2014 (the last trains having run late on 14 February in order to allow upgrade of the line between Oxford and Bicester. The reopening, first planned for May 2015, will be on 26 October 2015.

On 12 March 2015 Chiltern Railways announced that it will rename the station Bicester Village after the nearby designer retail outlet.

Facilities

Bicester Town station in 1992

Until it closed in 2012 the station had one platform, a covered waiting area, seats, a clock, help point and public address. There was a number of cycle stands but no ticket facilities. Passengers could buy these on the train instead.

The line to the east is used only by freight. The East West Rail Consortium of local authorities plans to extend the Oxford – Bicester service to Milton Keynes Central via Winslow and Bletchley.

There was another track in front of the platform, beside the passenger and freight running line. This was the long reversing siding for the Bicester Military Railway, serving the local MOD depot.^[14]

In August 2008 Chiltern Railways announced a proposal to build a ¹⁄₄ mile (400 m) link between the Oxford to Bicester Line and the Chiltern Main Line to carry a new service between Oxford and London via High Wycombe. The single line between Bicester Town and Oxford will be doubled and a new station is being built at Oxford Parkway. Approval was granted in October 2012.

The Department for Transport has approved the Western Section of the East West Rail Link to link Oxford and Bicester Town with Milton Keynes and Bedford, as part of CP5. It was intended that trains to Bedford should start running by 2017, but on 31 March 2014 Network Rail announced that this had been put back to 2019.

The station will have two car parks. Between them they will provide 230 standard spaces, plus 18 spaces for passengers with reduced mobility. The station will also have parking for 60 pedal cycles and 18 motorcycles.

Services

From December 2008 the service on Mondays to Saturdays was improved with an evening service and a doubling of the service on Saturdays. The service was increased to 11 trains (12 on Fridays) on weekdays and 13 on Saturdays. From May 2009, further improvements saw extra trains in the daytime on Mondays to Fridays and a new all-year round Sunday service, with trains every 90 minutes.

On 22 May 2011 Chiltern Railways took over all passenger operations from this station ahead of the new service between London Marylebone and Oxford that was due to start in 2013. It was later amended to 2015.

Tavistock Ho!

(Bere Alston 29.8.1972 copyright Steve Sainsbury/Rail Thing)

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News just in is that the Bere Alston to Tavistock line will now be rebuilt. ('And about time'!) I suspect most of you are thinking.

Take a look at the rather dire picture illustrating this piece. I'd only just passed 16 and had only been taking photos for a year is my excuse, but in a way it captures everything about this line. It was a snatched shot taken from the Gunnislake train as it reversed at the station. There are a few passengers on the platform, which shows that even in the nadir of rail travel in the UK this line was still fairly well used.

There's a very evocative final paragraph in the seminal work on these routes - The Withered Arm by T E Roche. The book had described this network of routes, and the sense of shock that a MAIN line could be closed. The author takes a little walk beyond Bere Alston, just a short while after closure, and almost talks himself into believing the line is still open, because the exit to the north is on a curve (as can be seen in the photo above) and nothing seems to have changed. And then he suddenly chances upon the buffers and stares in disbelief at the empty trackbed beyond.

Like the Waverley route the main SR route to Plymouth once boasted a network of branches off it, and these all needed to be closed before the final axe could be yielded. But the Callington branch was different, road services could NEVER replace the trains because of the way the Tamar cut a meandering course, isolating village en route from easy road access. So the line remained, though spitefully the last few miles from Gunnislake to Callington WERE closed. What it meant was that a good few miles of the old main line, from which the Gunnislake line branched off also had to be kept open. Six miles north of Bere Alston was the large and important town of Tavistock, which once boasted two stations, but this short piece of the line also had to close, so fanatical were the axemen of the time. Further on, at Meldon Viaduct, the main line reappeared, freight for a few miles, then Okehampton was allowed a passenger service - but even this was closed (to passengers) in 1972. I was there a few weeks before this stretch of line also closed to passengers, approached from Exeter of course. Freight kept going, and in recent years passenger services have been reintroduced on a few days a year. The line lives on here as well, if currently truncated!

Of course back in 1972 many people seriously believed the railways were finished, a withering rump remaining for those too poor to afford cars. Things have changed completely now, with rail in the ascendent and busier than it's been for almost a hundred years. We feel sorry for those people that are still tied to their cars, and now it's roads that are in decline (terminal this time).

Yet we're stuck with a fragmented rail network, designed for a world that's gone, and we need to get our railways back as quickly as we can, before the roads fail completely. There is the additional problem of climate change or, as it's now being rebranded, climate chaos. We all saw the terrible scenes at Dawlish last winter, when we were hit by ten storms in three months thanks to the stuck jetstream, directly caused by rapidly rising temperatures over the Arctic. We may find that many future winters are as extreme or more so, coupled with rapidly rising sea levels this spells the slow end of the 'alternative' route between Exeter and Plymouth via Dawlish, and the rapid rise of the Okehampton 'alternative'. Whilst we may get away with closing the ONLY route to Torbay, Plymouth and resurgent Kernow for now, and for a few weeks, that won't be acceptable in years to come when the road option is no longer available.

This is the REAL agenda behind the reopening of Tavistock. It may be dressed differently for public consumption, but I think we all know what this is really about. With Tavistock back on the network that gap to Meldon will seem tiny - smaller than the Borders Railway that will reopen next year for example (and through more challenging terrain!) Within a few years no doubt a solid and financed plan to close the link and give the west a second route to Plymouth, Torbay and Kernow will emerge. 

But this is just one reopening. To build resilience and keep our economy moving as the oil age ends we'll need a thousand .....

Waverley - the next step

WAVERLEY FACEBOOK GROUP

Alex Salmond, First Minister of Scotland, gave a speech at Carlisle on 23 April addressing Scotland's future. He believed the Borders Railway will be profoundly successful and said that its success will 'calibrate' any feasibility study on further extension to complete the connection between the Borders, via Hawick, and Carlisle. Simon Walton, the chairman of the Campaign for Borders Rail, told the First Minister this unfairly means the economic prospects for those communities depend on the patronage of the line between Tweedbank and Edinburgh, rather than their own merits. Mr Walton said "The First Minister spoke at length about harnessing the potential of communities on both sides of the Border, but the Central Borders communities are being missed out. We still lobby for the reinstatement of the remainder of the line, because we believe that the Borders communities deserve their economic regeneration as soon as possible, and the railway would be a direct, tangible and effective means of doing so." A reopened line from the Borders to Carlisle would give an important link, initially to the West Coast Main Line through to the North West, Midlands and London. It would subsequently allow High Speed Rail services running through onto HS2 south of Crewe. The benefits of this link to the Borders' economy are there and must be explored and identified sooner rather than later.