Support for the Cotswold Line

Wed 20 Oct 2021, 10:15

A few points related to things said below:

As Rod Evans notes, in Stratford the section of road built along the old railway formation is wide enough to accommodate a railway track alongside - the design concept here is to put the trains in a trench beside the road and use a cut and cover tunnel under the Evesham Road roundabout where the level crossing used to be. And the railway formation on the rest of the route has not been removed or built on, unlike much of the old branch to Witney and Fairford, so reinstatement would be much more straightforward.

Stratford has pretty much the lowest level of visitor traffic by rail of any major UK tourist destination - about 7% according to a district council survey in 2015 - in large part because the existing links are so limited, so anything that can speed up trains to London in particular will help address that. But the scheme would allow access by rail from the likes of Moreton-in-Marsh, Charlbury, Evesham, Worcester, Malvern and Hereford - and the south west, via a change of trains at Worcestershire Parkway.

The project is not just about serving Stratford - lots of new houses have been built already on the old Royal Engineers depot site at Long Marston, with a final total of 1,000 or so homes planned, and what is effectively a new town, with up to 3,500 homes, is now being built on the adjacent former airfield. All this with no transport connections other than roads at the moment. A rebuilt railway would give people living in these new communities access to the likes of Worcester, Birmingham, Leamington and Oxford. 

It was possible to get from Stratford back to London by a through train after the evening RSC shows from the early 1990s, when BR Network South East and then Thames Trains/FGW Link ran the London-Stratford service from Paddington via Oxford. The link was severed a decade or so later when the London-Stratford trains were handed over to Chiltern Railways. A remnant of the old service remained until last year, in the shape of a late-night Chiltern train from Stratford to Oxford, but this has been cut back now to terminate at Banbury.