Rail Matters from BARRUP

www.bromsgroverail.org.uk

Rail Matters from BARRUP ( Bromsgrove and Redditch Rail User Partnership)

By the time that you read this article, the Vaccine Programme should be well under way and all of us can hope that by the middle of the Summer, life will be returning to some form of normality.

During the next few months, we will need to turn our attention to rebuilding the local economy and improved rail services stopping at Bromsgrove Station can play a valuable part in doing so. Probably we don’t consider Bromsgrove to be a Tourist Destination, but tens of thousands of people visit the Town and District for a wide variety of reasons.

They come for The Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings, The Norton Collection Museum (and they used to come to Artrix in their numbers and will do so again when the District Council re-opens it - hopefully this Autumn), St John’s Church, Court Leet Day, Sanders Park, The Tardebigge Flight, The Lickey Incline, the three Royal Hunters Walks, The Town Market on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, The Jinney Ring, The Bromsgrove Festival, The Bromsgrove International “ Young Musician of the The Year Competition”, The Houseman Statue and Trail, matches at Sporting Bromsgrove, Bromsgrove Cricket Club and Bromsgrove Rugby Club, the Running Track at the Rylands Centre, the Climbing Wall at the Sports Centre and many more “attractions”.

And these are for people visiting just for leisure !!. There are many more people visiting also, for business purposes, the plethora of trading estates and business parks throughout the district. Thus the easier it is made for every visitor to travel to Bromsgrove by train and then onwards by buses / taxis from the Station, the more the number of people who will visit and the more trade they will generate for the local economies.

In addition to trying to improve the number and frequency of services on the West Midlands Trains Cross City Line Service to and from Bromsgrove and then onwards to Droitwich / Worcester / Malvern and Hereford, BARRUP is working also on persuading Cross Country Services to stop at Bromsgrove all the services which stop at Worcestershire Parkway.

If they do so, then people wishing to travel to and from Bromsgrove to Cheltenham, Bristol and the South West, Cardiff and South Wales, Oxford, Reading and Paddington could board and alight at the station, thus improving considerably the town’s connectivity and thus its economy.

by Nick Taylor