Stations should be ideal places to base community car projects. For a few years the Penistone Line Partnership ran its own feeder bus service, staffed by volunteers. The basic concept worked, but fell down because of lack of funding and volunteer drivers.
This approach needs to be re-visited, although CRPs could also look at linking up with community car schemes and other forms of innovative provision as the traditional rural bus becomes little more than a memory.
Staff involvement
Railway employees are a vital part of the ‘community’ in community rail, although their contribution is often under-valued. The Penistone Line Partnership is chaired by Northern driver Neil Bentley, while several Northern drivers and guards are often found on the famous Penistone Line music trains.
Many station staff play an active role in working with station friends groups, but there is scope for doing so much more, in co-operation with the train operators, Network Rail and the railway unions.
After more than 20 years’ experience, it is clear that volunteers have no interest in (or intention of) taking over paid railway jobs. It is about ‘additionality’, doing things such as station gardens and artwork and local promotion of the railway, that simply wouldn’t happen otherwise.
A flexible concept
There is no standard ‘product’ delivered by a CRP. Rather, it is about sustainable development in both rural and urban contexts along a railway corridor. It brings in skills focused on community development, regeneration, arts, land use planning and education - as well as transport planning.
The community rail model can be applied to a variety of lines, and has long since moved beyond being just about the rural railway.
For example, in Sussex, community rail exists on busier commuter lines. The same basic principles apply, except that they cannot be designated as ‘lines’ or ‘services’ because of the frequency and speed of services. They still have Station Partnerships (over 50 within the Southern network), and have also raised patronage by above the national average, with passenger satisfaction on the five lines covered by the CRP also well above the average for Southern lines overall.
Funding comes from a wide range of partners, with a lower than average reliance on local government funding, and help from neighbourhood-based parish and town councils as well as private sector partners (including Gatwick Airport).
Even some inter-city routes have good examples of communities working with station staff - for example, Virgin’s Wigan North Western, Rugby and Warrington. And Huddersfield station, operated by First TransPennine Express with nearly five million passengers a year, has an award-winning ‘visitor information point’ staffed by volunteers from Friends of Huddersfield Station.
The role of Huddersfield-based ACoRP in promoting best practice has been essential, and merits recognition. ACoRP’s annual Community Rail Awards (this year to be held in Torquay) showcase best practice and provide a very important celebration of the work of those thousands of volunteers, while its staff and volunteers provide help and assistance to emerging CRPs and projects.
It is an interesting feature of community rail that many of its advocates, in both CRPs themselves and train operators, have been involved for two decades or more. That provides valuable continuity, but also poses the big question of succession planning. ACoRP is currently working with the DfT to develop a ‘community rail apprenticeship scheme’ to train tomorrow’s community rail activists.
Beyond the boundary
Are there ways of getting more out of the ‘community rail’ concept? The answer has to be ‘yes’, although it requires a combination of support from ‘the top’ - the DfT, the devolved governments for Scotland and Wales, and the rail industry - combined with a grassroots willingness to get stuck in and get things done.
The community rail officer of tomorrow will need to be multi-skilled and do a lot more than just promote the local rail service. What he/she does will be determined by local circumstances and partner priorities, rather than a centralist blueprint.
Community rail has moved a long way from being just about unconventional marketing schemes. It is a highly professional but very much bottom-up enterprise in the broadest sense, bringing new thinking to once-neglected parts of the rail network.
It has also stimulated innovation in both infrastructure and technology. The ‘tram-train’ concept came out of ACoRP’s links with well-established projects in Germany, while the ‘Harrington Hump’, which provides affordable level-access ramps at lightly used stations, was another community rail success.
More recently, Vivarail’s project to convert former London Underground D-Stock for regional rail operation is another example of creative ways of applying technological innovation to local railways. The ‘holy grail’ of community rail in the future will be to maintain the ‘community’ aspect and to look at innovative ways of addressing costs of operating local railways without any loss of quality and safety.
Yet there is a degree of frustration, both within the DfT and among Community Rail Partnerships, about the pace of change. We have to find ways of getting things done more quickly, at less cost. Providing a supportive framework through franchising is vital.
The DfT’s ITT for Northern should provide the benchmark for new regional franchises that incorporate significant community rail activity, but there is also scope in longer-distance inter-city franchises and commuter networks.
The ScotRail franchise, specified by Transport Scotland, is highly supportive of community rail, and the franchise agreement includes a £500,000 per year budget. Abellio, the new operator of ScotRail, has gone even further and developed the idea of ‘ScotRail in the Community’, which takes the railway beyond the boundary fence and into neighbourhoods and communities.
And by 2018, when the Wales and Borders franchise comes up for renewal, the Welsh Government will have full responsibility for specifying and awarding the contract.
Wales has several long-standing CRPs, and there is great potential on routes such as the Heart of Wales Line, linking Swansea with Mid-Wales and Shrewsbury. The local CRP - the Heart of Wales Line Forum - has launched a subsidiary regeneration agency (the Heart of Wales Line Enterprise Network, Howlen), which aims to stimulate sustainable development along the rail corridor, focusing on developing station hubs. To succeed, it will need a new approach towards land use planning that ensures that new development - both housing and small business - is located at and around stations.
Howlen is effectively re-creating the 19th century model of rural railway development, whereby entire villages were built up around stations. The vision is of a genuinely sustainable ‘eco-village’ built around the railway, with affordable low-energy homes, co-operatively-run car clubs and cycle provision - and at its heart would be the station, providing shop, office space and community facilities.
The same approach could work on many other rural lines, such as Settle-Carlisle, Cumbrian Coast, East Anglia, Devon and Cornwall branches, and rural routes in Scotland and Wales.
As with so much of community rail, the starting point is getting enthusiastic partners on board, with a shared vision. Community rail is highly professional and has been shown to deliver results. It has got us a long way, but there are plenty more miles for this fascinating train to run.
