Railwatch 075 - April 1998

South Wales

By Julian Langston

Railway line to stay Plans to close the branch between Cardiff Queen Street and Cardiff Bay have been scuppered. Cardiff Bay Development Corporation wanted to remove the rail embankment to make way for their grand boulevard, linking Cardiff city centre with the Bay. However, they were apparently unaware of the procedures necessary to close a railway (one wonders what they're paid for). Negotiations with Railtrack and Cardiff Railway Company broke down and CBDC has been forced to keep the railway in their plans. Unfortunately, these include a number of high capacity roads and roundabouts.

Initially, it was intended to replace the line with a light rapid transit link to the city centre and beyond, but various excuses have been quoted as to why the LRT can't go ahead when the boulevard is built. "Fine," we said, "leave the railway in place until you are ready to build the LRT". Which is what is going to happen.

Pontrilas station RDS corporate member, Kentchurch parish council, has been pressing for reopening of Pontrilas (between Hereford and Abergavenny). Matters were taken forward in January with the formation of a steering group representing a number of parish and community councils in south Herefordshire and north Monmouthshire. Funding is now being sought for a feasibility study.

Meeting the manager Four RDS South Wales members recently met Chris Gibb, Operations Director (Wales and North) of Wales & West. Although he was keen to point out a number of initiatives of Wales and West, such as information systems at unmanned stations and refurbishment of the class 158 fleet, he was negative about a range of issues brought up by RDS. He was not hopeful about prospects for reopening the Vale of Glamorgan Line or for running more trains west of Swansea. He was also defensive about the national telephone enquiry service.

The bottom line with Chris Gibb is that Wales & West is a business - he won't initiate anything unless he is reasonably sure that it will make money. He will, however, take local authorities' money to provide services they request.

Rails to the Vale Sales of the RDS South Wales book advocating the reopening of the Vale of Glamorgan line have been extremely buoyant with three-quarters of the print run of 1,000 being sold between the launch in mid-November and the end of January. This interest in the book is very welcome and we are using it to put pressure on the Vale of Glamorgan council.

Ghost engineering works Works in Dinmore Tunnel between Hereford and Leominster, scheduled between Christmas and the New Year were cancelled at the last minute. Unfortunately, the replacement timetable that had been planned for the works was not cancelled, despite having been poorly advertised in the first place. Even rail workers were often unsure about what times trains were running. The replacement timetable made no attempt to preserve the connections between trains from Hereford and beyond into Great Western trains to London at Newport. Indeed, they managed to just miss connecting, entailing a wait of almost an hour for the next service. So passengers had plenty of time at Newport to reflect that they were paying more (as Super Savers are not available over the Christmas period) for a seriously degraded service. We have complained about this fiasco to the RUCC.

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