Revival of Cambridge to Haverhill railway was ‘never viable’, councillor tells meeting

As plans to build a new busway to the south of Cambridge took a step forward, hopes for the renewal of a trainline from the city to Haverhill were described as ‘never being viable’.

The Greater Cambridge Partnership (GCP) has agreed to begin some early work and ask Cambridgeshire County Council to submit an application to build the busway.

The new busway is proposed as part of the Cambridge South East Transport scheme (CSET).

The CSET project was paused by the GCP last year after increases in construction costs meant it did not have enough money to fund all of its projects.

However, earlier this year the government announced it would give £7.2million of funding to start progressing the major transport project again.

The scheme proposes to build a new dedicated mainly off-road busway, as well as a segregated walking and cycling route, from a new travel hub off the A11 near Great Abington and the A1307 to the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.

Last week the GCP executive board agreed to ask the county council as the highways authority to submit a Transport and Works Act Order (TWAO) to get permission for the project.

The board also agreed for early work to start on improvements along Francis Crick Avenue, which are planned to support the opening of Cambridge South Station.

Concerns have been shared previously that the money planned for the CSET busway would have been better spent reopening the Haverhill train line.

At the board meeting, Cllr Elisa Meschini, representative from the county council, said she was aware pressure was being placed on councillors not to approve moving forward with CSET, due to fears it would “kill any option to ever reopen the rail line to Haverhill”.

However, she argued this was not actually the case and highlighted the separate issues she said there were with reopening the rail line.

Cllr Meschini said land where the old rail line used to be had been built on and said it would be complicated to come up with a completely new alignment.

She also pointed out that since the rail line closed the A11 and the A505 had been built, and claimed any new rail line would need an “enormous amount of structures to overcome all these roads”.

Cllr Meschini said: “This would be a very complicated thing to do, incredibly expensive to build, massive landscape and ecological impact, so these things are complicated.

“The GCP did review reports into Haverhill during the early stages of CSET; there have been other reports produced by rail lobbying companies since.

“The status has not changed, the rail link would cost in the region of £800million to reopen, it is not possible to do that, there is nothing to kill, it was never alive I’m afraid.

“There have been several reviews into new rail schemes by governments of various colours, Haverhill has never made the cut, it is not viable.

“It is a spur, so it will get you to Haverhill and back, this is not attractive to the rail industry unless you can carry on into Suffolk or Essex, which is not currently envisaged.

“What you can do is have a corridor, that we have identified and we have got in front of us today, which is flexible.

“If you wanted to carry on CSET onto Haverhill later, you had the funding and you wanted to convert it into a tram or a train, you could do that.”

Questions were raised at the meeting about the rest of the money needed to fund the CSET project.

James Littlewood, chief executive of Cambridge Past Present and Future, said the current government has claimed it could not afford to raise the cap on child benefit and had made the decision to cut the winter fuel allowance for many.

He said it would be “perplexing” after doing this for the government to allocate £160m for CSET when he said an alternative on-road proposal would be cheaper.

He asked what “exactly” the government had said about funding the scheme.

Peter Blake, interim director at the GCP, said “positive dialogue” was ongoing with government officials about the further funding options for the CSET project.

Others at the meeting did highlight their support for building the off-road busway, arguing it would be more reliable than an on-road alternative.

Dr Andy Williams, business representative at the GCP, said it had taken 10 years to get the project to this point and said in that time growth of the science campuses to the south of the city had continued.

He said buses were only currently used by a “relatively small part of the population” as he said they were not reliable.

Dr Williams said the buses on the guided busway were reliable, which is why he said an off-road busway was needed.

Councillor Brian Milnes, representative of South Cambridgeshire District Council, said the guided busway to the north of the city had been successful in providing a “robust service”.

He also said moving the project forward would mean a public inquiry that would consider all the debates around the scheme.

Cllr Meschini said they could not put more buses on roads to get stuck in traffic.