By Cllr Jason Brock
I’m no trainspotter, but I’m showing some excitement about trains and railway stations this week.
The Council has now completed, or is nearing completion on, its element of work on two major rail projects in Reading.
After what seems like a long time – and let’s be honest, it has been – we are inching closer to the opening of Reading’s first brand new railway station in over a century.
It was back at the turn of the century that the Council first worked alongside the developers and owners of Green Park, Prudential Property Investment Managers Ltd (PRUPIM), to draw up exciting proposals for a brand-new railway station at Green Park.
The station would have been funded by PRUPIM and the business case was actually approved by the Department of Transport back in 2006
A global recession followed and delayed the residential development of Green Park Village. In fact, it was only a few years later, during the planning application stage for Green Park Village, that new funding was secured for the 2016 Green Park Station planning application. Since then, the Council has secured additional funding to enhance the station facilities beyond the original scope to include a fully accessible station building. The project has faced some challenges, in particular material shortages which coincided with the Covid pandemic causing further delays. Sometimes things come along that are out of our control.
We can now look forward with some confidence, however. The construction element at Green Park Station, led by the Council, is now very nearly complete.
There now follows a commissioning and safety validation process – led by Network Rail and Great Western Railway – which needs to happen before the new station can welcome its first ever trains and passengers. While as a Council we cannot immediately influence this process or how long it takes, we obviously hope it can happen as rapidly as possible.
Green Park Station sits on the Reading to Basingstoke line and will be served by a half-hourly service in each direction through the day. It will have two platforms, disabled access and a multi-modal interchange with a surface-level car park, bus stops, taxi rank and cycle parking. It will serve established communities in Whitley and the relatively new community at Green Park Village, as well as local businesses and the expanding Business Park.
The station will help to alleviate queues along the busy A33 by offering an alternative sustainable mode of travel. It sits alongside bus priority corridors built by the Council along the A33 in what is a truly strategic approach to changing travel behaviours and creating a cleaner and greener Reading, as well as contributing to our net zero carbon ambitions by 2030.
All being well, Reading fans will also enjoy their matchday experience even more when travelling to games early in the new year. With parking places always limited, this is another realistic alternative to travelling to the game by car. Let’s hope for some more success on the pitch this season too.
Over to Reading West, a real community station for the Oxford Road, where, after completing preparatory works, the Council recently handed the reigns over to our partners at Great Western Railway to begin building the new station building and ticket hall.
The refurbished Reading West will boast new gates at the Tilehurst Road and Oxford Road entrances, meaning you can only get on the platforms if you have a ticket. Combined with the new ticket office, new toilets and a retail facility, safety and security will be significantly improved in an environment that has been no stranger to anti-social behaviour, as residents will know.
Over the past months, Council teams have realigned the Oxford Road to provide space for the new ticket office, made improvements to the transport interchange on the north side of the Oxford Road and resurfaced both the pavement and road on the north side.
We have also been working with various utilities to divert their existing services away from the station. This can be an immensely frustrating process in terms of timelines, but a necessary one in the long term.
For those interested – because I know it has been a bugbear for Oxford Road regulars for some time now (including myself) – the open trench which was used to divert various utilities away from the new station building will now be hidden behind hoardings in GWR’s construction zone and the pavement next to the entrance of platform 1 will be reinstated.
GWR’s latest estimate for completion is early in 2023.
All being well, it means early in the new year both the refurbished Reading West and new Reading Green Park stations should be open to the travelling public. I’m tempted to say something here about waiting years for a new train station to arrive and then two come along at once…
Cllr Jason Brock is the leader of Reading Borough Council and Labour councillor for Southcote ward
