A WARWICKSHIRE town which has been on the edge of regaining a rail service for years has been given funding for its station at last. Trains should start calling at Kenilworth in late 2016, after a gap of more than half a century.

The £11.3 million station will receive £5 million from the DfT's New Stations Fund, following confirmation that the station can be built without reducing the effect of other network improvements.

The DfT said construction will pave the way for new local services to start running between Coventry, Kenilworth and Leamington Spa in December 2016, and direct local electric trains could be running via Kenilworth to Birmingham in 2019. However, it has not yet said who the operator will be. An extension of the present London Midland shuttle between Nuneaton and Coventry is unlikely because local trains between Nuneaton and Leamington regularly crossing the West Coast Main Line at Coventry would take up too much capacity.

The line through Kenilworth is used by CrossCountry and freight trains, but the town's station was closed in 1965.

Transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin had announced in July that he was 'minded' to approve the bid for Kenilworth from the project's sponsor Warwickshire County Council, but this depended on further research by Network Rail which has now been completed.

The £5 million award for Kenilworth is the biggest single allocation since the launch of the New Stations Fund in January, and £13.6 million has now been allocated altogether from a pot of £20 million. The other successful bids so far have been for new stations at Lea Bridge in east London, Pye Corner west of Newport in South Wales, Ilkeston in the Erewash Valley in the East Midlands and Newcourt on the Exmouth branch in Devon.