Today I was at the Joint Committee for Strategic Planning and Transport.  It’s a committee where members of the City Council join together with members of Nottingham County Council to pursue planning and transport issues that are important to both councils.

We heard a lot about trains last December, including a promise that by December 2008 there would be a regular 98 minute London train; and by 2011, the journey would only take 90 minutes.  This is a big benefit, not only for people who need to go to London for business and pleasure, but also for people taking the new Eurostar service from St Pancras.  It also makes it easier for people from Paris and Brussels to visit Nottingham without having to get on a plane.

This time, we heard of advancing plans to re-organise the main railway station in Nottingham city.  Network Rail plans to completely remove all the tracks and signals from the station area, and replace them with new signals and tracks.  The new layout would mean that the platforms become much more flexible, and more trains could use the station.  Hopefully, it will also mean an end to the annoying wait that many rail users experience as trains queue for a platform in sidings outside the Inland Revenue.

This work is obviously a big undertaking, but would apparently take perhaps as little as a week plus a few weekends.  During this time, the station would have to close to rail traffic completely.  The plans are to do this in 2011.  The best bit is that they are working with the people who plan to redevelop the station, and the people who hope to have started building the new tram lines by then, and hopefully, the work can be done comprehensively all together.  We’ll see whether this actually happens…

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