Well; slightly nearer the mark. But seeing that for all intents and purposes the whole 'Blyth & Tyne' area remained very busy with freight for many years and I doubt that the total rail passenger usage needed more than about one bus per hour to take it on, I'm not sure how much of an orgy of road building was triggered by the withdrawal.
Indeed - though I was only commenting on the personalities and their conflicts of interest, not on whether this specific case was at all influenced. Many lines would have closed in any case, regardless of Beeching or Marples.
I think it was luck more than anything that kept what we have left of the Blyth and Tyne open, after the pits, power station and smelter closed. The two main users of the line were Lynemouth Power Station for Coal / Biomass from Tyne Dock and Blyth Docks for Alumina to Scotland and a little coal to Yorkshire. All these flows happened to be at the extremities of the line as it is now so kept it open however there are some tales tell it wasn't kept in the best condition. Even after the pits closed it was heavily rationalised losing the lines to Butterwell and the ECML to the north, the branches to South Blyth docks and the extensive Depot / sidings area at Cambois as well as lots of single track sections that have had to be addressed between Blyth and Backworth to allow passenger trains to return. No doubt if the alumina traffic and Lynemouth power station had gone at the same time as the smelter the whole thing would have been left to rot or ripped up and reopening to passengers would have either been much harder or off the cards completely.
Interesting that there’s still an ancient 25 mph speed restriction sign for the upcoming curve, that must have survived recent track works.
It's probably also fair to say that in that era most people living in the Blyth/Ashington area worked locally, and the bus into Newcastle was probably much quicker than it is today. Loss of local jobs and increase in commuting and traffic congestion has created the conditions for re-opening that did not exist when it was closed.
But there was "the Ministry" at Longbenton!
Would many people living in Ashington and Blyth have worked there in the era when there was a passenger train service? If so then I assume a bus would have been provided, considering it's near one of the main roads from Blyth area into Newcastle. The new rail service will allow commuting by interchange with the Metro at Northumberland Park when that opens, but according to Wikipedia the government site is closing in 2027 and remaining jobs moving into central Newcastle.
They probably did but the passenger service of that time didn't go near. There were fleets of dedicated buses lined up outside to all parts of Tyneside timed to leave within minutes of finishing time, usually a few minutes earlier on Fridays. A site full of clock watchers because if you didn't catch the special buses to places like Winlaton or Spennymoor it would be a very long trek home.
Its still in use in fact I used to work there. Mostly by HMRC & DWP but there are other government departments present. HMRC intend to move out in 2027 to the city centre and DWP have not made their plans known but the future of the site looks uncertain.
At one time, the Teesside Oil Refinery was owned by ICI. One of the fractions of Crude Oil is Asphalt and Bitumen.
Thanks for the replies. It doesn't look anything like that now based on Google - it looks considerably smaller and presumably some of the site has now been developed into housing...
www.northumberlandline.uk
My dad spent almost his entire working life there, other than a few years in the RN just after the war. In the late 40s he lived in a single men’s hostel somewhere on the site, and travelled home to Alnwick at weekends.
The Park and Ride section showed a total 37% increase in 2023 over the 2022 figures, with only two of those sites showing a reduction.
Q paths now showing in Real Time Trains. No distivction made between those stations due to open in summer and those that are delayed.
That should be a good marketing point, probably the easiest timetable to learn…
Thanks. I lived and worked in Durham 1975-80, all a long time ago. More recently I struggled to find Manors National Rail station from the Metro station - perhaps signing has been improved now, although interchange with the Ashington trains will be at Northumberland Park.
Manors station is badly in need of resuscitation, but it was running down in the early 1960s. It could be an interchange point for a small number coming from the North Shields direction going to or from the Northumberland line. It's a bleak place to do that today, although I note Google maps give the time to walk between the two stations as 2 minutes for 0.1 miles. The immediate vicinity has been very much improved in recent years.
I do note though that the Freight (Biomass/Alumina0 trains that use the line are not in the timetable so these will need to be woven in. The alumina will be pretty fixed timings I would imagine as retiming it will have lots of knock on effects especially between Glasgow and Ft William but I would imagine there will now be potential to run some of the biomass overnight once the line is resignalled and not having to work around signal box closure times.