The Northumberland Line
The Northumberland Line has rightly been welcomed as a success story with over a million journeys being recorded since the passenger service was restored at the end of 2024. Northumberland Park is now open, providing an interchange with the Tyne and Wear Metro. The last station (Bedlington) opens at the end of March – and perhaps it will not be the last, because plans are afoot to extend the line to Woodhorn and Newbiggin-by-the-Sea.
Success has brought problems in its wake, most notably a lack of space in the trains. This is not surprising. If you plan for half a million people to use the railway over the course of the year and you end up with one million, then you will need longer trains than you planned for. And this is a problem for Northern. It’s making some trains longer when it can, but it has a shortage of rolling stock overall that makes shuffling coaches around different parts of the country difficult. It would be good if renationalisation of the railways included a policy of controlling the production of rolling stock, as this article in LabourList suggests, but that’s an argument for another time.
Group of local stations on the main east coast line
So that was the first branch line, with record numbers of passengers going way beyond expectations. Now on to the second, which is not strictly a branch line at all, since it’s a group of stations serving local communities along the main line from Newcastle up to Berwick and Edinburgh. And there lies the problem. Because if these stations were to receive the sort of regular service that the stops on the Northumberland Line receive (twice an hour for most of the day, once an hour on Sundays), they’d effectively clog up the main artery North. Yes, there are one or two passing points on the way, but they can’t do enough to cope with an increase in the number of stopping trains.
So what happens to the four smaller stations that are served by the stopping train that runs between Newcastle upon Tyne and Chathill? They get one train a day running North and two trains a day running South. And nothing on Sunday, of course. On Saturday 28 February the first train to Chathill was at 17.38. Should it happen to be cancelled, don’t worry, there’s the next train at 17.38 on Monday 2 March, so only 48 hours to wait! The price for this roughly 45-minute ride, by the way, is £14.20, (and only one of the stops, Widdrington, has a ticket machine), far more than the equivalent ride from Ashington to Newcastle on the Northumberland Line.
Acklington
Being Northumberland’s least-used station has led to a lot of YouTube videos about Acklington, and they’re very revealing. There may be only one stopping train a day northwards and two southwards, but express trains roar past every few minutes. There’s the usual yellow line on the platform with warnings to stand back but standing behind the yellow line doesn’t leave you with much space! Walk out of the quaint and roomy waiting-room and you hit the yellow line almost immediately, as an entertaining short video called Tommy’s Trains shows. And though Tommy loves all the express trains he can spot rattling through Acklington station, you can’t help wishing that he’d move away from them a little as they come roaring through. As for the picture shown above from the end of the station, taken from Matt’s Railway Adventures, it’s clear that there are parts of the station where someone with a buggy, for instance, simply wouldn’t have room to stand behind the yellow line. And this matters. When express trains fly past they create a vacuum that actually pulls you towards the speeding train. And apart from once or twice a day, they’re all you’re going to encounter on Acklington Station.
‘Desolate Northumberland’ – try visiting
Can anything be done to support the stopping trains that are increasingly being marginalised on the busy intercity routes that dominate the thinking of companies like LNER? A good beginning would come from recognising the extraordinary beauty and cultural richness of Northumberland itself. There would be enormous potential for encouraging visitors to the county by having a regional railway much wider in scope than the one existing now.
Some of that would not be too difficult. When Bedlington station opens at the end of March, it would be fairly straightforward to have the current freight line between Bedlington and Morpeth used for passenger traffic. The stopping trains from Chathill to Newcastle could then turn off the main line at Morpeth and run through Bedlington and the Northumberland Line into Newcastle, reducing the amount of time they have to spend on the main route from London to Edinburgh. Recent timetable changes made by LNER have effectively cut down the number of trains which stop at Morpeth. This would be a way of moving in the other direction and boosting regional connectivity.
As the BBC reported, there is a campaign to increase the number of trains at Chathill, but they remain few and far between. Priority is given to the express trains roaring through what some of the journey planners think of as ‘desolate Northumberland’. They should try visiting.
To end on a positive note. The Northumberland Line has been a fantastic success, and it is a tribute to groups like SENRUG, as well as the local Council and the regional Mayor, that two decades of pressure have paid off. The trains are frequent, tickets are reasonably priced and the line is integrated with the Tyne and Wear Metro system. But that other ‘branch line’ described here needs consideration too. It needs to be integrated into a wider regional network which is well described in SENRUG’s various campaigns. The connections which work so well for part of Northumberland need to be extended to other parts of the county, so that a regional train service is provided that can do justice to Northumberland’s beauty and attract the visitors that come in increasing numbers every year.
