Date revealed for opening of delayed Cambridge South
Cambridge South station will open to passengers on 28 June, the Department for Transport has announced. Trains will start calling then at the 250 million pound station, and there will be an official opening ceremony the following day. As many as 20 trains an hour will be calling during the peaks, and the DfT is predicting that it will attract 1.8 million users a year.
The Department for Transport has revealed that it will set up a new publicly-owned railway operating company before Great British Railways has taken over. The new company will be a subsidiary of DfT Operator Limited, which has been taking control of operators as they are renationalised.
FirstGroup’s National Rail Contract for Great Western Railway will be renationalised on 13 December, after Chiltern Railways has returned to public ownership on 20 September.
Class 175s will be running on a Cornish branch line from later this month. The units, built by Alstom some 25 years ago and cascaded to GWR from Transport for Wales, were already planned to be used on services on the Devon and Cornwall main line, and also on the branches to Barnstaple and Okehampton. But GWR has now announced that the units will be used for the first stage of Mid Cornwall Metro, which goes live on 17 May and will mean a doubling of frequencies to hourly between Newquay and Par.
The Government has rejected concerns voiced by the Commons Transport Committee in its report on skills in transport manufacturing. The Committee had warned that skills gaps are posing ‘significant challenges’.
David Statham is leading the new FirstGroup TfL concession for London Overground, which started on 3 May. He was most recently commercial director for First Rail, and before that was managing director of Govia’s Southeastern until it was renationalised in 2021.
The RMT has claimed that Network Rail’s ‘Modernising Maintenance’ programme and reductions in staffing were the real cause of major disruption at Manchester Piccadilly after 400m of overhead wires on the station throat had been damaged earlier this month. Services at Piccadilly had to be suspended after a wire had broken on the morning of 16 April, and did not return in full until 11.00 on the 19th, after engineers had worked day and night to repair the damage.