Parkway stations are a great idea – so why haven’t they taken off? Alex McWhirter reports.
Many business people find getting to a downtown train station more of a chore than the inter-city trip itself. Take London as an example. Tim O’Toole, former managing director of London Underground, told industry magazine Rail in May: “The difficult part is not getting from London to Birmingham – it’s getting across London itself.” That’s because London is ringed by affluent suburbs, and those travellers who live or work in the capital’s outskirts often find that when they are booking an inter-city trip, it’s easier to drive the whole way or simply head for a nearby airport, such as Stansted, Gatwick or Heathrow, where parking is plentiful. A similar scenario, although not quite so extreme, applies to a number of other towns and cities throughout the UK. The Victorians built train stations in city centres because that was where businesses and people clustered. In today’s decentralised economy, it’s airports, not downtown stations, that may be easier to reach. The rail firms’ solution was to develop a new type of station, the Parkway, geared to the needs of today’s passengers. The idea was that these stations would be located on the edges of towns and cities, and would resemble airport terminals, with ample parking. Linked to the national road network, they would be accessible by travellers within a wide radius, like airports are. They would also be served by fast trains to and from London and other major cities. Parkway stations were not intended for commuters, although some of them have ended up playing this role. Rather, they were designed to open up new markets for rail by speeding up overall journey times (savings of two hours or more are easily achievable), which would woo passengers from the airports and reduce long-distance car use. But the development of Parkways has been chequered. For a start, coverage is patchy. Some cities have them but others don’t. London, which needs them the most, has only one facility, Ebbsfleet, and that’s limited to handling Eurostar and high-speed Kentish rail services. So what went wrong? In a nutshell, the policy fell foul of UK planning rules, different rail franchises with their own view on Parkways, and a franchise length that may not be long enough to overcome planning hurdles. The most ambitious plans in recent times came from former train firm Great North Eastern Railway (GNER), which operated the East Coast Main Line. It intended to build four stations, to be located south of Edinburgh (near the city’s bypass), east of Leeds (near the A1), south of Doncaster (near the M18/A1) and at Hadley Wood in north London (near the M25). Had these stations gone ahead, they would have enhanced north-south journey opportunities and encouraged many more passengers to use rail. But two of these schemes were shot down by ferocious opposition from locals, town councils and environmentalists. Plans for Hadley Wood, for example, were opposed by the area’s affluent residents, who didn’t want their peace and quiet to be disturbed. It also didn’t help that the site was in the Green Belt. Meanwhile, Doncaster town council in South Yorkshire wasn’t happy for a station to be built at nearby Finningley because, had it been a success, it was worried that fewer long-distance trains would call at the town’s existing facility, which might then impede Doncaster’s regeneration. Alas, GNER never held its franchise long enough to construct any Parkways, and the current East Coast Main Line franchisee, National Express East Coast (NXEC), has no plans for such stations. Where the new stations have opened, they have offered immediate benefits. The finest example is Ebbsfleet, near the M25 and A2 in south-east London, where a number of Eurostar services call en route to Brussels and Paris. Like the nearby Bluewater shopping centre, Ebbsfleet was built in a redevelopment area so it was easier to secure permission. Akin to the likes of London Stansted’s terminal, Ebbsfleet has 6,000 parking spaces with room for 9,000 and can be accessed from a wide area covering south-east London, Kent, Surrey and Essex. The time savings are evident to a resident of south-east London, with Ebbsfleet being an easy 20- to 30-minute drive down the A2. Contrast that with the one to two hours the same resident must allow to reach St Pancras by public transport, plus the time saved in cutting out the London part of the Eurostar trip, and Ebbsfleet delivers a time reduction of two and a half hours or more. East Midlands Parkway serves the needs of passengers based on the outskirts of Derby and Nottingham, and as it’s not far from the M1 it also attracts passengers from towns to the north. The newest Parkway station, it opened in January despite opposition from factions as diverse as Eon (the owner of the adjacent Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station), Nottinghamshire County Council and environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth and the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Two of the biggest rail firms without proper Parkway stations are Virgin Trains and NXEC. Allan McLean, North England and Scotland communications manager for Virgin Trains, said: “We wanted to operate a Parkway at Watford in the early days of our current franchise but the local authority opposed it. We find there is a strong demand from our business passengers to take their cars to the station. So what we are doing [instead of opening Parkways] is increasing the number of station car park spaces by more than 75 per cent.” He adds: “Our nearest equivalent to a Parkway is Birmingham International [the station for the airport and the city’s motorway network] and here the original 1,390 spaces will be increased to 2,225 by next September. We also have a lot of demand at Preston, and in June we boosted the number of spaces there from 470 to 939. Parking at other stations we operate, such as Coventry, Rugby, Wolverhampton, Stoke-on-Trent, Stafford, Preston and Carlisle, is also being increased.” One argument for developing parking at regional stations is that, unlike London, these cities do not suffer the same extended rush hours so driving there and back is easier. NXEC is also going down the parking route with facilities at Peterborough, Doncaster (where it has dedicated space in an adjacent multi-storey car park) and York. One downside is that parking may have been free when these stations were new or underused, but a recent growth in traffic means train firms are finding parking a useful way to earn extra cash. So rates, while below airport short-stay prices, are creeping up to what you might pay in a long-term car park. But who said that convenience never came at a price?
