Will Newcastle-under-Lyme ever get a station again?

[thenorthern]

After the general election I was talking to a Labour activist in Staffordshire where all 12 seats in the county are now Conservative for the first time ever (bear in mind in 2005 9 of the 12 seats were Labour). One of the things we were talking about was what went wrong for Labour in the county and the main thing was that all 12 seats in the county voted leave which put Labour at an automatic disadvantage.

One of the things we did discuss though was that Labour's transport policy didn't appeal to voters in Staffordshire as the county itself is very car dependent and public transport usage in the county is very low. It was no secret that Labour was going to raise fuel duty.

One of the conversations we had was about Newcastle-under-Lyme however as of course the town has a population of around 75,000 but no station and the constituency is also one of the few with no stations within it. Also the nearest station to the town Etruria closed in 2005.

He mentioned how Labour would have reopened the station there but I said I thought this was wishful thinking given that there have never been any serious plans to reopen the station since it closed in 1964 and it was unlikely that it would reopen anytime soon.

It made me think though will Newcastle-under-Lyme ever get a station again? It is one of the largest places in the United Kingdom without a station and many other large places that previously didn't have a station such as Mansfield, Corby, Cannock and Livingston have all had stations reopen but it seems Newcastle-under-Lyme has been forgotten about.

 

[AndrewE]

Given that there is no active railway through the town, let alone an easily reinstated disused line anywhere nearby, I would have though it was a no-hoper. Compare it with Skelmersdale which has a branch line (with a good suburban service) almost pointing at it and a protected heavy rail corridor waiting to be used. That one should have been done years ago, and if it had been in Greater London it would have been.
Newcastle is part of a conurbation which needs a good bus network and maybe better services on the railway lines which are still running.
It's like asking whether the Potteries Loop line should be reopened to provide a station for Hanley! If you were looking at re-using disused railway corridors as part of a light rail network you might get more support...

 

[Glenn1969]

Kidsgrove is in Newcastle under Lyme Council's area so the borough does have a railhead

 

[thenorthern]

Kidsgrove is in Newcastle under Lyme Council's area so the borough does have a railhead

Indeed although Kidsgrove is within the Stoke-on-Trent North constituency rather than the Newcastle-under-Lyme constituency.

 

[Baxenden Bank]

No, it won't. Just as Hanley won't.

What would be the point of a stub branch, essentially a copy of the Stourbridge Town shuttle.

Stoke-on-Trent serves the conurbation, and is easily served by buses from either town. Improving the frequency and quality of the bus service would be a far better use of resources ie direct buses rather than round the houses, at an intense frequency, operating through to the last trains of the day, and using high specification vehicles.

If you believe the spin, in a few years you will be able to summon a driverless pod to do the 'final mile' of most urban journeys anyway.

 

[tbtc]

will Newcastle-under-Lyme ever get a station again? It is one of the largest places in the United Kingdom without a station

It's a large place to be without one (but then we could get into arguments about places that appear to be large but are actually effectively part of of a larger conurbation - e.g. whilst some people worry about various rural villages that lack stations there are fifty thousand people in Leith with no heavy/light rail service but the old port of Leith is just part of the city of Edinburgh nowadays as far as the way that political boundaries are drawn).

The question for me is what kind of service would there be? Sometimes there's an obvious extension of an existing service (e.g.the Borders line was an extension of the Waverley - Newcraighall service, the proposed Skelmersdale route will be a diversion of existing Kirkby services...). The only service terminating in Stoke is the Manchester stopper but that's only hourly - and it comes from the north, so it's coming in the wrong direction (it could reverse, but it'd be quite slow from Newcastle to Kidsgrove due to the reversal.

So, whilst it's a big place, it'd probably just be a box ticking exercise by spending tens of millions of pounds on something like the Stourbridge example that @Baxenden Bank mentions above - a bit of a vanity project when you consider all of the other things you could spend it on in the Potteries.

Is the vanity of "putting the town on the map" worth more than the practicalities of improving public transport for everyday passengers? In the eyes of some politicians, I guess the answer is yes!

 

[thenorthern]

Rail transport in Stoke-on-Trent is good to get in and out of the city but other than that its rather poor. When privatisation happened it had 8 open stations now it has 5 as Wedgwood and Etruria have closed and Barlaston still hasn't reopened. The local stations in the city are rather underused.

With HS2 I was hoping there would be a Staffordshire Hub near Junction 15 on the M6 but its unlikely to happen although given that the Conservative party will want to hold onto seats in Stoke-on-Trent anything could happen.