You sometimes wonder how it ever got to this - that a railway that will HAVE to be rebuilt can have houses built on or near its trackbed! This is the scene at Cole, 40 years to the day after closure.
It's clear from the picture that a diversionary route could easily be built here, but even with that in place these houses would be very close to the track. Obviously at some point trains WILL pass through Cole again, so a solution will need to be found.
The solution is not only simple but also elegant. With the housing market still quite bouyant most of these houses will be for sale at some point. So all we need to do is buy them as they become available, rent them out, then put the line back in place when needed. Rental agreements would clearly state that the line will be rebuilt and that the tenant would have to agree to this as a condition of taking on the lease.
Given 15 to 20 years before reinstatement as the ideal set up, the property would actually cost us nothing once the rental income is taken into account. Even where a house would need to be demolished there would be various cash inflows from salvageable materials.
Harsher folk may say 'Forget such subtle schemes, as a public railway we'll be free to use compulsory purchase'. True enough, but what legacy would that leave us in relation to the local communities we'll be serving? We need to work with them, not against them, and what is worse than turning somebody out of their house?
No, we'll do it in a gentler way, an S&D way as always ...
4 comments:
It will haunt them, not us! But it still isn't quite time for the wider public to realise this, there are still a few years of cheap oil to keep 'em dreaming.
We need to use those few years to position ourselves so that the S&D will be one of the first - rather than one of the last - routes to be reinstated.
And as I hinted in the original post, reinstated lines will always be able to play - or even just threaten - the compulsory purchase card. Once this gets round houses built on routes of future railways will suffer from blight and will be even cheaper to buy!
Houses have already been compulsorily purchased on the new tramways in Croydon and Sheffield, and 60 more will go when the Waverley line is reopened in a few years' time.
Fortunately Radstock-Shepton is just about clear of idiot development, but there are a few houses on or close to the Radstock-Bath protected route.
Fortunately the developers issue won't apply to us, with Bath to Midsomer Norton protected and the climb over the Mendips not exactly attractive to commuters etc (no trains see!)
But the idea is an excellent one - in principle we are charged with and seek to reinstate the whole S&D in the long-term, but to declare this now with just the one small station may seem a little over-ambitious!
The whole idea is to develop the route incrementally, so we don't bite off more than we can chew. We can shepherd the right volunteer and financial resources at each stage of the line's development, never borrow money or risk money-losing activity. I imagine that as we reach new goals we'll make landowners etc further down the line aware of our short and medium-term plans.
The Port Road was another barely believable closure that will need to be reversed sooner rather than later! What were they thinking of?
Is there any news on the Maxwelltown stretch or has that now gone? Dumfries was one of my old stamping grounds in the 90s, my son was delivered at Cresswell Hospital in Dumfries!
If you do go ahead we'd be first in the queue to add a link to any website etc you set up!
Best of luck with it.
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