23.11.24
Northumberland Line Opening Date
At time of writing, the Northumberland Line is due to partially open at some point in December 2024. There has not been an officially announced date as of yet, with announcement from Northumberland County Council saying this will come in the next few days, whilst Northern has updated their website with a draft version of the N1 timetable covering the area, showing December 15th as the date the timetable starts from.
Timetables on Real Time Trains give an idea of timings, but are showing only Ashington, Seaton Delaval and Manors as potential stops at present, with Newsham, Blyth Bebside, Bedlington, and Northumberland Park to come later (as yet unconfirmed dates).
Hopefully an official announcement will come soon, and the whole scheme with all six stations being open by end of 2025.
Quietest Stations on ECML in Northumberland – Better Services Needed & New Station at Belford too!
Alongside the awaited opening of the Northumberland Line, is the recent release of usage figures for already open stations in North Northumberland, with the frequently featured stations at Acklington and Chathill having 550 and 1,264 passengers respectively between April 2023 and March 2024.
This is somewhat unsurprising given the only services to call at these stations is the so-called ‘Chathill Flyer’, which runs twice a day between Newcastle and Chathill (plus an empty run from Chathill to sidings at Belford and back to Chathill to form the return service to Newcastle).
There has been a recent call by the Chathill Rail Action Group (CRAG) to see Transpennine Express (TPE) to serve Chathill, offering potentially a major boost to services with an extra eight trains a day call at the station, putting Newcastle only 40mins away, and Edinburgh 55mins away.
A new station at Belford has also been announced with, ‘The North of Tyne Combined Authority’s Local Transport Plan proposes the station would serve the village of Belford and the surrounding catchment area of north Northumberland at a cost of £14,070,000, with an estimated delivery date of 2036.‘
Hopefully it’ll not take until 2036 for Belford Station to be opened, especially as plans for a station there have been mooted as far back as Alan Beith MP mentioning it in Parliament in 2007.
Both of these proposals, the first simply a timetable change, and the latter a new station at Belford, would go a long way to solving the ‘rail desert’ in this part of North Northumberland which is a major tourism hotspot with Bamburgh Castle, the Farne Islands, Beadnell and wider Northumberland Coast all being within easy reach of Chathill, and would complement other services calling at Berwick and Alnmouth stations too.
Book Review: How The Railways Will Fix The Future by Gareth Dennis
This book is an excellent read for anyone in the transport advocacy world, and while my reading time has been limited by work lately, it reaffirms the view that to meet multiple challenges at local, national and international scales, we need to invest in and plan for a much expanded rail network, to allow more people to travel car-free, reduce highly damaging carbon emissions and reduce road congestion and parking problems that are developing, if not already present, in Northumberland today.
Schemes like the Northumberland Line are a part of that picture, as is better services to small stations like Chathill, but there is a clear need to have a strategic, overall vision for what is needed in this area of Northumberland; is the ECML to be dominated by expresses between Edinburgh and London, or can a more balanced service exist where there are sufficient, good local services alongside these expresses?
Do we invest in schemes like a Morpeth Diversion to take the notorious Morpeth Curve off the ‘mainline’ and retain the old line for better local services and railfreight using the Morpeth to Bedlington or Pegswood to Bedlington routes?
We need to move people and goods by much cleaner and greener modes of transport than private car and HGV, and schemes like dualling of the A1, given the magnitude of climate change are ones we should perhaps permanently consign to the dustbin; but mobility is a right of people, so we must provide a viable alternative by much improving public transport, of which rail will be a definite major player.
2025 – The Year of the Northumberland Coast Loop?
All three of the above, I feel, link in nicely to the Northumberland Coast Loop, which would be a potential solution to many of the problems in this part of Northumberland.
This route connects the ECML between Morpeth and Pegwood to the Northumberland Line at Bedlington via the village Hepscott, the existing line primarily used for freight currently, but potentially a useful route for passengers, not before easily done in a northward direction before, as the Morpeth North Curve that enables the direct route wasn’t built until 1980, sixteen years after the closure of the remaining Blyth and Tyne Railway stations in 1964.
The Northumberland Line, while only partially opening next month, is seeing the return of rail services to the former Blyth and Tyne route, serving the most highly populated areas of Northumberland (about 50% of everyone in N’land lives in the South East corner of the county) after a little over 60 year absence.
This places major towns like Bedlington and Blyth, major conurbations like North Tyneside, as well as smaller settlements like Seaton Delaval back onto the national network, initially with a service into Newcastle Central Station, but the Hepscott Line offers an additional option to travel directly to or from North Northumberland, the Scottish Borders, Edinburgh or even places beyond; why not use it to offer those connections as soon as possible?
The stations in North Northumberland, while remaining open have been quite poorly served for far too long, stopping trains such as TPE will go a long way as an initial step to improvement, but a more comprehensive range of services could make better connections possible, for example a N.C.L route, alongside those on current mainline via Cramlington, would offer a near direct connection from Blyth to Bamburgh Castle, or from Belford to events at Blyth Battery (WW1 & 2 Coastal Defences).
Northumberland Specialist Emergency Care Hospital (NSECH) in East Cramlington is another good example, where the NCL route to/from North Northumberland could hold advantages over the present mainline via Cramlington; as Seaton Delaval Station is only approx 1.8 miles away from the hospital, whereas Cramlington Station is approx 2.6 miles away, not worlds of difference, but illustrates that both routes would offer good options for travel.
Utilising this existing rail route could allow many more journeys between SE Northumberland, North Tyneside, North Northumberland and Scotland to be done by public transport, travelling via Newcastle, while always an option, is a bit strange when a direct route is already possible via Hepscott. You wouldn’t drive south to head north, so why would you do this on a train when looking out the window at Bedlington the route to Morpeth and Pegswood is clearly there?
The Northumberland Coast Loop route from Newcastle to Berwick via Bedlington isn’t to replace other services, but to complement them by offering faster, single seat rides to, from, or within Northumberland.
If you’d like to support this proposal, please put it forward to your local elected representatives (County Councillors, MP’s etc), contact local rail campaign groups, or submit to to the Local Transport Plan Consultation by the North East Combined Authority.
Thanks, RH.
The Northumberland Coast Loop 