‘Critical’ safety upgrades needed for Wessex route

Railway reliability upgrades by Network Rail spell temporary closures of level crossings at Wokingham station and Easthampstead Road (Star Lane) as diversions for road users are planned.

NR engineers need to resignal and upgrade level crossings between Reading, Bracknell and Guilford between Saturday 10 to Sunday February 18 as part of upgrade work to support reliability of its Wessex Route.

Wokingham station’s manually-controlled barrier is to be upgraded with CCTV monitors, while at Easthampstead Road (Star Lane), engineers are to modernise the level crossings, installing new equipment to extend the life of the crossing by an expected 30 years.

Buses will replace South Western Railway (SWR) and Great Western Railway (GWR) trains between Reading, Bracknell and Guildford, extending to Ascot and Aldershot on some weekends.

The work is the conclusion of NR’s £116m Feltham and Wokingham re-signalling programme which, over the past four years, has seen upgrades to key signalling equipment and level crossings controlled by the Feltham Area Signalling Centre and Wokingham Signal Box, which jointly cover 80 miles of railway and 500 separate pieces of signalling equipment in key areas of the South Western Railway (SWR) network including Feltham, Hounslow, Shepperton, Twickenham, Windsor & Eton Riverside and Wokingham.

Tom McNamee, Network Rail’s Wessex route infrastructure director, said: “These works are critical to us being able to deliver a safe, modern and reliable service for customers travelling on our network between Reading, Bracknell and Guildford.

“There’s never a good time to close the railway, and we know that level crossing closures in Wokingham will be disruptive to local road users. However, delivering the bulk of these works during the half term break, when fewer people travel by rail and the schools are closed, helps us minimise the disruption to our customers who rely on this important stretch of railway.”