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Rising passenger figures: This is one of the reasons

It was my first visit for a few years and I distinctly remembered the drab, graffiti-daubed, run-down condition it had been in on the previous occasion. What passed as its car park had been a rough piece of wasteland, unlit and full of potholes. It was the sort of place you’d hesitate to leave your vehicle in for a whole day. Youths were yawping outside a nearby pub and the atmosphere was frankly rather intimidating.

Hardly surprisingly, I was the only passenger.

Imagine my surprise then, when I swung into the car park the other day to find a lovely smooth surface, neatly marked out with spaces and ringed by floodlights and CCTV cameras. The surface and the platforms of the station boasted smart ‘herringbone-pattern’ brick paving, there were help-points, cycle racks, new signs, security monitors… and a brand new real-time passenger information system, installed on both platforms just a couple of weeks earlier.

Most remarkable of all, though, was the healthy number of people waiting for trains in both directions. It was mid-morning but there were more than 30 intending passengers and what struck me particularly was that several were young mums and dads with children.

There was a uniformed official in the ticket office (the station is manned in the mornings) and I learned that the local district council had put up £40,000 to help pay for the car park and other improvements.

Die-hard rail enthusiasts often curse the forest of CCTV cameras that have sprung up on our railways in recent years (and I have to admit I’ve sometimes felt that way myself), but if they help keep at bay the undesirables in society and send the message to decent folk that it’s OK to use partly-staffed or unstaffed halts, they can’t be a bad thing.

Coupled with bright comfortable new trains and increased frequency of services, such developments are encouraging us to become a nation of train travellers once again – as shown by the revelation, reported in our Headline News section this month, that some branch lines in the UK are showing year-on-year passenger
figure rises for the first time in living memory.

Community Rail Partnerships and Network Rail must take a lot of credit for this boom, but what cannot be overlooked is that under privatisation, a small station is now focused on by its TOC as a medium-sized fish in a small pond rather than as a minnow in a vast sea, as was the case under British Rail. No wonder they were neglected.

I just hope that constantly-rising fare prices don’t begin to drive the new-found passengers away again. That would be the utmost folly.

FOLLOWING my comment last month, in which I broached the ever-worsening problem of metal theft from heritage railway sites, I’ve been heartened to learn of the remarkable steps taken by the Electric Railway Museum at Coventry.

As described on page 11 this month, their staff and volunteers have embraced new webcam technology to such an extent that they now have the ability to spot intruders, photograph them and audibly warn them off – all from hundreds of miles away if necessary!

It is, of course, sad that people should have to go to such lengths to protect their own property in a supposedly civilised society, but at least it is safeguarding the trains and it’s a system that’s worth considering by other heritage groups.

Nick Pigott
Editor