Whittlesea Station to get £3million upgrade
The council vows to ‘fight for more trains’
Whittlesea Railway Station is due to get a £3million upgrade which a council is hoping will assist in its fight to get more trains to stop there.
Fenland District Council has accepted the funding from the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority to move forward with work to improve the station.
Councillor Chris Boden, leader of the district council, said he hoped the improvements would help encourage more people to use the station, which in turn he said might encourage train operators to stop more trains there.
The district council’s cabinet agreed at a meeting this week (May 20) to move forward with the delivery of a “£3million programme of enhancements” for the station.
The authority has been hoping to improve the station for a number of years, with a masterplan created back in 2013 setting out the ambition to create a new station car park, extend the platforms, and build a new pedestrian footbridge.
When the Combined Authority agreed to provide the £3million of funding for the station in January this year it said the improvements that would be considered included automation of the road gates, elongation of the platforms, and the provisions of a footbridge to link the two platforms.
A report presented to the district council’s cabinet said “smaller projects” had been completed at the station, including providing a second ticket machine and two new waiting shelters.
Councillor Alex Miscandlon said he supported the new funding for the station saying it had “suffered for a number years of underinvestment”.
Cllr Boden said the station was facing a “chicken and egg situation”.
He said: “The poor facilities and the short and disjointed platforms at the station discourage people from using the station, therefore additional trains are not put on, because there are so few trains that are put on and the service is so infrequent, people do not tend to use the station.
“It is important that cycle is broken and one of the ways of breaking that cycle is through initiatives such as this to enable specific improvements to take place at the station to encourage more people to be able to use the station, which may be able to be used to encourage the train operators to stop more frequently at the station.
“It is not that we lack trains passing through the station, the problem is too many passenger trains do exactly that, they pass through and they do not stop.
“That will be a big battle ahead, a battle we have been fighting for some time, but these proposals will assist in ensuring that battle is eventually won.”