The Northumberland Coast Loop petition is now finished as of this morning, Sunday 6th October 2024 and has gained the support of 742 persons in the last 12 months.
With the fantastic support of 742 persons, we would like to call upon Glen Sanderson, leader of Northumberland County Council, as well as other elected leaders such as Kim McGuinness, Mayor of the North East, and Louise Haigh, Secretary of State for Transport, to respond to this petition publically.
This route, using the existing freight-only railway between Bedlington and Morpeth/Pegswood could offer direct northward connections from South East Northumberland, and North Tyneside to North Northumberland and Scotland (Edinburgh).
Such a link could bolster the opportunities for places in this area by providing much more direct connections to economically thriving areas such as the Scottish Central Belt, and recognising that areas such as the Blyth Estuary are nationally important by giving them national connectivity.
Sites such as Cambois, whilst not directly on the route, are hopefully going to become home to very serious big investments, such as the £10bn Blackrock investment into a datacentre campus, with work beginning in 2025, alongside many other established firms in Blyth such as Dräger, or Cobalt Park, all of these being sites near to Blyth Bebside and Northumberland Park stations, which would see these long distance services connecting to.
This route doesn’t require any additional stations to be built for it to work, simply using those already existing, or currently under construction as part of the Northumberland Line project, itself being completed in less than a years’ time (final stations due for completion in 2025).
That being said, services along the Hepscott Line would support a new station at Choppington, an area seeing a great deal of new housing development with sites such as Longridge Farm in Bedlington and Willow Farm at Choppington, as well as a large, established population in Bedlington, Guide Post and Stakeford who’d be more easily connected via a new station on this route.
This route also ties in extremely well to the heritage of the railways, with the Blyth Valley being where Huntingdon Beaumont introduced the waggonway to the North East 200 years before the Stockton and Darlington, starting a chain of developments that led directly to the development of early railways by George Stephenson and many others; for example John Birkinshaw who developed the malleable iron rail in 1820 in Bedlington Ironworks, which was used for two thirds of the Stockton and Darlington’s track.
This route would make enormous sense to showcase as part of the Railway200 celebrations in 2025, as it would show Britain as the technological leader of the past, with the development of early railways in this region, but also heading the Green Revolution with the renewable energh sector centred around the Blyth Estuary and rail investment in modern railways to drive modal shift to greener and cleaner modes of transport.
Let’s see this route happen in 2025?
The Northumberland Coast Loop 