Bedford-Cambridge Rail Link - need to get Tempsford right and the rest of it! Over to you!

Update 30-10-24

BRTA are nationwide in aspiration. We rely on the public to join and offer to assist/volunteer to help and enable us to do more and better.

Good news from the budget is Government support for East-West Rail, Oxford - Milton Keynes Central from August 2025 (we are told), which means Bedford people will be able to get an X5 to Milton Keynes Central for a train to Oxford and connections or indeed, use the current Bedford-Bletchley shuttle rail service (sometimes bustituted) and change at Bletchley to the new flyover station. Bedford-Oxford 2030 ish. So given we are yet to await a route confirmation for Bedford-Tempsford area-Cambridge (which has a new Cambridge South Station being built for Addenbrookes Hospital area) could be 2040! 

BRTA has always said and supported a 'route east of Bedford via St John's' and 'physical rail connectivity with the existing north-south main line (ECML) at Tempsford, not just 2 interchange stations.

We need elected leaders of Bedford Borough Mayor, Cllr. Tom Wootton, MP Bedford and Kempston Mohammad Yasin and North East Beds MP Richard Fuller, to get together, sing from the same hymn sheet and support our rail route suggestion. Not every inch of old Varsity Line, but first 4 miles east of Bedford is rebuild trackbed for rail use, Willington can be bypassed with 2 new river bridges and a slower speed, and instead of going south of Blunham go north towards A1/Tempsford on an embankment to avoid flood plains and clear the trunk road to head off to the Tempsford plains north of south of Station Road, Tempsford. Thence onwards via the route suggested by East-West Rail itself, serving the Cambourne area and Cambridge for East Anglia et al and those audiences to the Oxford and Bedford corridors and other rail connections. 

Our route with physical rail linkages at Tempsford, would enable north of Stevenage, East Bedfordshire and south of Peterborough to access rail services from where they live without having to change at Tempsford and what goes out, comes back!

We have floated the idea, it is now incumbent of our elected leaders to study, work up and engineer a railway and get it underway and delivered in a 10 year timespan now, not after Oxford-Bedford trains bay at Bedford Midland Station! If they don't, they let Bedford and shire down, traffic congestion is rising, pollution is exasperating health and well being and filling NHS waiting lists as well as taking a toll on wildlife and ecological matters, bird count, butterflies and more, down!

The fact is, these patterns, trends and challenges repeat nationwide. It needs local people to be organised and find the rail alternative. Dualling trunk roads or building motorways, delivers ever more urban congestion and squalor as well as land take which could otherwise be used for farming, wildlife, housing or employment for example. We should not waste our green spaces, countryside and should ensure quality of life in urban areas, retain green spaces, not build avarice every piece of land without thinking about what people want, need and balancing competing issues. 

BRTA needs your support and our umbrella for those who support, enables saving the need to organise a new organisation, but rather get to the proverbial coalface and start campaigning for more and better local, conventional rail link solutions x every region x nationwide! Could you be part of that? Be the answer to whether something will or may happen, as with enough people and funding, we can make even more of an impact together!

Work it up and out!

https://brtarail.com/our-campaigns/

The BRTA approach: re: https://www.biggleswadetoday.co.uk/news/politics/council/tempsford-new-town-flooding-fears-raised-as-central-bedfordshire-council-voices-concerns-over-proposal-4762186 It is BRTA's contention that all development should be curtailed until the route of the new rail link between #Bedford and #Cambridge via the #Tempsford area is settled once and for all. We have our views of a preferred route, not Northern Route, but 'east of Bedford via St John's' is the flattest, quickest and easiet to recover and do if a determined political will can be achieved? The local MP for Tempsford is Richard Fuller, who seems bent on outright opposition to the rail link, even our route, and yet the equivalent road A421-A428 is being dualled as we write, with no objections except belatedly! The penny drops these roads will deliver urban congestion, air pollution, ill-health and blight, yet with a rail link traffic proliferation on the back of regional development 'happening now' will be held in check and balance. #Oxford-Bedford 2026 onwards, Bedford-Cambridge 2035 is lucky. I may not live to see it, but is the government in a listening mood? If so, local politicians need to grasp our rail route now and promote it. Failure to sing from the same hymn sheet, means investment that may be done, going elsewhere and East Anglia remaining virtually an isolated rail network with existing links via North London and #Peterborough being overheated and defaulting more to roads like gridlocked A14. Join BRTA and add your voice: richard.erta@gmail.com