Next week: work to begin on Darlington's new platforms and footbridge

Network Rail is to build two new platforms for Darlington station, in a £99 million project.

Platform 5 will be a southbound through platform for long-distance services and Platform 6 a bay platform serving the lines to and from Eaglescliffe.

Both will sit outside the station’s current trainshed, but will be linked to it by a new bridge that will be installed as part of work that is under way to build a new eastern concourse.

Starting next week, hoardings will begin to be erected along Platform 1, with current seating moved to accessible parts of the platform.

From Wednesday March 6, the thoroughfare between Platforms 1 and 4 will be closed off while work continues, while access to Platform 1 is to be signposted around the south end of the station buildings by Platforms 2 and 3.

At the end of March, a new temporary ticket retail facility will be provided for passengers to purchase tickets, located opposite the existing travel centre while development takes place.

Steelwork for the concourse is now appearing as part of a £150m project masterminded by the Tess Valley Combined Authority.

Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen said in January: “Darlington deserves a top-class station to mark its rise as a civil service and technological powerhouse,” adding that it was remarkable to see how quickly the project was taking shape.

NR told RAIL that Platform 5 would be served by a loop off the Up Main line. There is already an Up Goods Loop on the site and NR said it would be building a new freight loop.

Track work is scheduled to be done in February and March 2025 during annual weekend engineering closures, with final commissioning of new signalling set for autumn 2025. This commissioning will need the line through Darlington to be closed, but NR said it could not yet confirm the date for this.

Work should start on the new footbridge this spring. NR received consent from Darlington Borough Council to alter the station, with permission necessary because the station is listed Grade 2* for architectural merit.

NR plans to demolish the travel centre that British Rail built in the 1970s and which sits between the station’s north and south ranges that were built when the current station opened in 1887. Part of the space created will be used for the staircase and lifts up to the footbridge.

The footbridge then runs over Platform 1, its track and the adjacent Up/Down Station Loop before piercing the station’s barrel roof to cross the main lines outside to the east. This gives access to Platforms 5 and 6 and the eastern concourse now being built.

Drawings supplied with NR’s council application show a bridge with an exoskeleton that repeats some of the angles and curves of Hitachi’s ‘800’ series trains which LNER and TransPennine Express run through the station.

Further south along the East Coast Main Line, Network Rail is in the initial stages of a project to improve capacity through Northallerton, with £3.9 billion of funding promised by Rail Minister Huw Merriman.

NR told RAIL that it was looking to deliver one extra hourly path through the station from 2029 onwards, and was “in the early stages of development to confirm the infrastructure changes needed”.

In strategic advice published in 2020, NR suggested building two loops at Northallerton with platform faces to take trains calling at the station clear of the through tracks. The northbound loop would feed into a track heading further north to cross on a bridge over the ECML and then curve round to join the line towards Eaglescliffe.

The same advice suggested for Darlington two through platforms east of the station and a bay facing Eaglescliffe. NR’s work now takes that forward, but only with one through platform.