The existing HS services will now run until the end of 2014 but we have a fight on to secure the promised improvements.
Don't bank on a new train set from the rail Santa quite yet
Trains 4 Deal demands that the Government and Kent County Council stick by the agreements in the Kent Rail Action Plan and expand the skeleton Javelin service to include all-day and weekend trains for Deal and Sandwich.
First things first. Without all day HS services for Deal and Sandwich we say:
No to Manston Parkway (a waste of money and threat to the Sandwich/Deal line)
No to a 500 car multi-storey car park at Dover (a distraction)
No to the plan for half-hourly services to Folkestone and Dover (a fantasy)
No to Canterbury/Ramsgate line improvements (a £50 million waste)
It will cost less than £100,000 a year to pump-prime our modest proposal for a more robust and convenient fast train service for Deal and Sandwich.
Trains 4 Deal has already worked out the basic service and costed it (see here). In a short period the train operating company will make that money back in extra revenue.
It is a service that will get London-based commuters to work at Discovery Park in the morning via St Pancras.
It will get occasional Deal commuters who buy Network Rail card cheap tickets a couple of times a week into St Pancras by 10.30am, on the days they travel. Absurdly they can't use these tickets on any HS train that gets to London before lunchtime at the moment.
And it will get tourists down over a weekend boosting local businesses, guest houses, shops and restaurants.
Yet local politicians in Dover and Maidstone insist on chasing after impossibly expensive and exotic plans for new airports served by new train lines, wildly frequent services requiring multi-million investments in additional HS1 Javelin trains, huge new station car parks and a quite unrealistic wish list of line improvements and tweaks.
Not only are they unlikely to get any of this multi-million fantasyland investment but by asking for it they distract from our sensible, cheap, carefully costed case of a decent HS1 rail service for Deal and Sandwich.
Trains 4 Deal will be holding a protest meeting early in the New Year.
Once again we need your support. With your help we fought before and won and with your help we can do it again.
Details will be published shortly.
Click on the article (RIGHT) to read the full story in the local "East Kent Mercury"
|
Click image to read story
|
Packed meeting shows support, concern and determination...
Tom Rowland; "It would be an outrage if this service weren't kept and expanded..."
|
Ian Killbery: "We have a strong case, but we must make sure we are heard..."
|
Click below to lobby, vote, join and donate.
In each case you will be directed to a new page where all the proposals are explained.
In each case you will be directed to a new page where all the proposals are explained.
Vital service improvements on ice for at least 4 years
Promised upgrades to the HS1 service to Deal and Sandwich have been put on ice while Kent County Council has decided to spend £10 million on a new parkway station near Minster that nobody wants.
Deal and Sandwich will be left without any high speed trains from March 2014 because nobody is prepared to support them.
The new station is supposed to serve Manston airport and Discovery Park, the rebranded Sandwich site formerly occupied by Pfizer. But this proposed white elephant station is four miles from both and according to Southeastern Trains there is no business case for building it while residents in Ramsgate and north Thanet are strongly opposed to the proposed expansion of the airport the rail station is supposed to herald.
Meanwhile, Southeastern refuses to either implement the improvements that are so vital to the future expansion of Deal and Sandwich or to guarantee the existing service, despite the massive success the service has been over the past two years.
And while the train operator sits on the sidelines and the county council rushes around on a doomed and costly wild goose chase to build an unwanted new station, the Government does nothing.
This inaction is quite shameful. The whole mess is squarely a consequence of the disaster the Coalition has made of its Rail policy. All of the new franchise bids have been delayed as a direct consequence of the West Coast Mainline fiasco and the longest delay of all hits us with Southeastern’s franchise extended by a massive four years.
The longest train delay in history.
Click the image to see how we spend donations