Latest Rail News

Graham Nalty   28/07/2017 at 12:33

After the depressing news about cancelling electrification north of Kettering, here is a breath of fresh air when East Midlands Airport say they want direct through trains to Birmingham, Stoke, Coventry and Nuneaton. Having a change of train when catching a flight does not encourage motorists out of their cars. I am pleased to read that they envisage high quality reliable transport between the station and airport. Well done.

Jaz   29/07/2017 at 16:50

The parkway station and car park are excellent. However, the transport to the airport from the parkway is ridiculously expensive and patchy even when pre-booked. I've used it twice but will not do so again unless it becomes comparable with Luton or Birmingham - both being excellent

Andrew Gwilt   29/07/2017 at 21:43

Whilst at London Luton Airport. 30 miles from Central London. There are plans to connect Luton Airport Parkway railway station and Luton Airport main terminal with a brand new "Airline" Transit Light Rail that is scheduled to be completed sometime in 2020 and will end the shuttle bus services as the journey from the "parkway" railway station to the main terminal takes about 8-10 minutes depending on the traffic heading to/from the airport. The new light rail transit will take roughly 5 minutes and will be non-stop between the station and the main terminal at Luton Airport.

Roger Capel   31/07/2017 at 07:48

As Jaz rightly says, transfer from East Midlands Parkway to the airport is way overpriced. Competition from Kinch's (part of Trent-Barton) "Skylink" bus, running 24 hours a day from Derby, Loughborough & Leicester isn't going away. Lots of my fellow railwaymen use it to go on hols!

J, Leicester   31/07/2017 at 10:14

East Midlands Parkway has always been a white elephant since it opened - passenger usage figures are paltry, and that's largely due to awful connectivity between the station and the airport itself. As others have alluded to, service is patchy, with the local councils refusing to boost bus service provision to the station as the business case isn't there. It's a vicious cycle - no connecting services mean nobody uses the station, which means no business case to introduce new connecting services, either to the airport or elsewhere on the rail network. There are next to no taxis in the rank 95% of the time either, because they get no custom, so you have to privately hire one to have any hope of being picked up. In fact, the only reliable connecting services at the station are long-distance services like Megabus, which don't even serve the airport and treat it as a minor stop-off along the M1 corridor! Worth noting, too, that the councils in question are holding out for Ratcliffe Power Station to close to allow major development on the site adjacent to the station, but that's not going to happen until 2026 at the earliest, with many suggestions it could remain in use as a biomass-burning station, a la Drax. So in other words, their "business case" for future passenger growth is based on a pipedream assumption that they probably know is never going to happen, but makes them look more competent rather than admitting that they have no prospect of providing real growth-based support for the station. As such, for the foreseeable future it will remain an oversized commuter halt for a handful of people from Kegworth to trundle to Nottingham and Leicester from. This is a step in the right direction, but it's typical that the airport itself has had to foot the bill because local government has refused to back a station they asked for in the first place. It's endemic in this part of the world, I'm afraid, and I'd be very angry if I was on the East Midlands Airport board to have had to endure the sheer lack of faith in the operation shown from the three nearby counties.