On holiday in Devon, today I took a trip down to Okehampton, the first new railway to be re-opened under the government\u2019s flagship \u201cRestoring Your Railway\u201d scheme. The Okehampton opening seems to have occurred much quicker than our beloved Ashington Blyth & Tyne (The Northumberland Line) re-opening to Ashington. It\u2019s taken 8 years and just \u00a340m to re-open the 15.5 miles of track, whereas the Ashington Blyth & Tyne Line campaign has been running for 17 years so far, and latest costs for the 18-mile route is \u00a3166m. Comparisons like this are interesting, but can be misleading. The \u00a3166m for the Northumberland Line additionally includes a further 5 intermediate stations, and a private company had been running summer weekend services on the line to Okehampton before the full re-opening. But the key take-away from my Okehampton visit was that the re-opening has clearly been designed with further extensions in mind. 2 platforms at Okehampton are retained even though at present passenger trains are only using 1 of them. (And just for anyone else who has visited, there are in fact 3 platforms at Okehampton, the third used as a museum, and the reverse numbering means all passenger services depart and arrive at platform 3!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On holiday in Devon, today I took a trip down to Okehampton, the first new railway to be re-opened under…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chairmans-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1670"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1698,"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670\/revisions\/1698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.senrug.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}