Durham County Council announce start of work on Horden/Peterlee station:-

Work is now underway on a new £10.55 million railway station which is expected to bring an economic boost to east Durham.

Ray Browning, Anna Weeks, Jonjo Ward, Cllr Simon Henig, Cllr Carl Marshall our Cabinet member for economic regeneration, and Stuart Timmiss our head of development and housing

The scheme, at Horden, near Peterlee, will link the area into the local, regional and national rail network and support wider regeneration in the area.We have been working closely with Network Rail and Northern Railway on the project, which is being funded by the authority, with £4.4 million from the Department for Transport’s New Stations Fund and a grant from the North East Local Enterprise Partnership LEP.

Representatives from the organisations involved gathered at the site on South East View to mark the start of work, which is expected to take about a year to complete

There is very little change to the Grand Central NE service – just the odd minute here and there. 

The Northern Coastline service (Leaflet 2) also remains much the same, except for two significant changes on weekdays

1) The train that left Nunthorpe at 0806, calling at Hartlepool 0854 to Hexham now leaves Nunthorpe later at 0820, calling Hartlepool 0904 and so becomes an off-peak train from Hartlepool again

2) There is now a late evening weekday train from Newcastle to Hartlepool – one of the things that Coastliners have been campaigning for. It departs Newcastle 2232 on Saturdays, 2249 M-F – good if you want an evening out on Tyneside

The next Open Meeting of the Coastliners Rail User Group will take place on Thursday 16 May 2019 at 7.15pm in the Reading Room of The Athenaeum Club, Church Street, Hartlepool when we will have have two guest speakers:  Cllr Michael Mordey, Deputy Leader, Sunderland City Council (and former Transport Portfolio holder), and Mr Patrick Rice, Chairman, Tyne Valley Rail User Group.

Coastliners’ Officers have already met on more than one occasion with Mr Steve Payne, Strategic Transport Manager of the Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA), and Coastliners are fully in favour of the rail service improvements which TVCA seeks.  During our meeting of 16 May we hope to have similar discussions with the above representatives from Sunderland and the eastern section of the Tyne Valley line.  Many of our local trains run through Sunderland and via the eastern part of the Tyne Valley line to Hexham and several proceed to Carlisle.

Arising from this meeting and those with the TVCA, we hope to decide on what Coastliners can say to the Williams Review by way of putting the case for Coast Line improvements on behalf of what is a large percentage of the region’s population.  Please come along and help shape our representations to the Williams Review.  Perhaps an appropriate title for our meeting, and looking ahead from it, would be Where do we go from here?