“It has been painful and torturous,” said Dennis Fancett, reflecting on a 19-year battle to bring back trains to overlooked communities in south-east Northumberland.
“It is a working freight line. It should have been the easiest rail reopening in the country and it hasn’t been. It has been painful and stop-start for years.”
Barring a last-minute crisis, the pain will soon be over. The new Northumberland Line from Newcastle to Ashington will this summer restore passenger services 60 years after they were axed as part of the Beeching cuts.
The passenger trains were cut but the freight continued, meaning a working line has been retained.
The Guardian joined a special test run of the service on a two-carriage 158 Express Sprinter, travelling through a landscape once dominated by coalmines.
It is not the most spectacularly scenic line. Bar a great view of the ailing Tyne Bridge, it is mostly housing estates and green fields soon to become housing estates.
But the economic and social benefits of having two trains an hour will be huge, supporters say. The county council, which has driven the project forward, said it would be a “gamechanger”. It will make commuting to Newcastle quick and easy compared with a reliance on buses and congested roads, which now make it anything but.
It is costing an estimated £180m, which, campaigners say, in the bigger scheme of transport infrastructure projects is peanuts.
Fancett said every time a roundabout was updated on one of the county’s major roads it cost £50m. “They keep doing it again every four or five years. I see the price of the line as four roundabouts.
“But there is this total inequality between road and rail … with road they just get on with it.”
Fancett, the chair of the South East Northumberland Rail User Group, was accompanied on the test run by Ian Brown, a rail industry veteran at the heart of some of Britain’s biggest infrastructure schemes, including the London Overground.
He said it was important not to repeat the mistakes of Beeching, which was “just about the narrow balance sheet”.
Brown added: “I had to write the business case for Crossrail and that was having the nerve to go to the Treasury and call it a cost-saving initiative … just spend £20bn.”
The Northumberland Line scheme is a good case study for the power of persistent grassroots campaigning. It has also long had cross-party support both locally and nationally, with a string of transport secretaries visiting to express their backing, including Labour’s Geoff Hoon in 2009 and for the Tories Chris Grayling in 2019, Grant Shapps in 2020 and Mark Harper last year.
The bulk of funding of the line is coming from central government, the remainder from the county council, the private sector and the North of Tyne combined authority, giving £10m.
Jamie Driscoll, the North of Tyne mayor, was on the test run and said he had spoken to many young apprentices from the area who turned down or did not apply for good jobs simply because they could not get to them.
“Public transport in the north-east is really bad,” he said. “It is such a barrier to economic development here.”
Most of the new stations still look like muddy building sites and various problems mean the line will initially open with only three stations: Ashington, Newsham and Seaton Delaval. The remainder will follow when finished.
It has been torturous but the end does appear to be in sight.
Making his way though the test run carriages is Barry Graham, a senior adviser to Northern Rail who still works, aged 77, and has been involved with the new line for six years.
“It is a very exciting project,” he said. “It should make a massive difference to people’s lives, that’s why it has had the political support it’s had. It is the right thing to do.”
Graham has worked on the railways since 1965, two years after Beeching’s report, The Restructuring of British Railways, outlined plans to cut more than 5,000 miles of track and more than 2,000 stations. “
At that time there was not the dimension of wider economic benefit and social value that now is very influential in how decisions are made. The Conservative government then saw the railway as a significant cost burden … but the solution was too draconian.”
Most of the passengers on the test run are Northern Rail staff, which means an announcement cautioning on how to properly pronounce Newsham, always News-ham, never New-sham.
But the thrill of the railways lives on and Geoff Marshall, a trains, buses and trams YouTuber with more than 350,000 subscribers, has travelled up from London to be on the train.
He would not have missed it. Incredibly, Marshall visited every station in Britain in 2017, more than 2,500 of them.
“This is exciting because it will be six new stations, which is a great number to bring to Britain’s total,” he said. “People often say exciting and don’t mean it, but six stations, a new line … it is proper exciting.”
