EWR Co’s consultation opened yesterday. They are consulting on a single route alignment for Haslingfield and Harlton which is part of a 7km long elevated section from north of The Eversdens to somewhere east of Harston. With the exception of an up to 17m deep cutting on Chapel Hill the rest of the proposed route seems to be about at or about 10m above local ground level so at or above rooftop height. The proposed track crosses the Harlton to Haslingfield road just outside Harlton and has an underpass for road traffic. There is a map of the route here and a section plan here. The rest of the consultation can be found here.
The next East West Rail consultation on route alignments in our area has been imminent since the start of January 2021. We are currently told that it will be out before Easter. Now is a good time to step up the campaign for a fair consultation on the northern approach to Cambridge as well as the southern approach.
The EWR action group in The Eversdens is opening up to invite like-minded people from Haslingfield and Harlton to attend (but also any local village). It’s a Zoom meeting on Thursdays at 8pm on this link. All welcome. This group is well connected with other parts of the CA campaign. Through this group you can get involved with various more specialist teams working on the project.
A new email group has been set up for residents Haslingfield and Harlton so that we can exchange information and views about the proposed East West Rail line and how it might affect the villages of Haslingfield and Harlton. You can of course stay in touch with wider issues on cambridgeapproaches.org and also on the excellent Haslingfield and Harlton facebook group.
It’s good to see so many “No EWR Rail Here” signs going up around the village, on the road sides and in people’s front windows. Our MP Anthony Browne picked up on it in a facebook post here. It is also good to see the opposition to Option E growing fast in neighbouring villages.
Recent discussions with local district councillors imply that EWR Co’s next consultation “early in 2021” will include options very close to The Eversdens, Harlton, Haslingfield and Harston, even if the Cambourne station is to the north rather than the south. This position is supported by survey activity here reported by the public. Even if your home is not close to the edge of the village consider the effect on access roads. Here is an image of what the crossing of the A10 might look like, it would be a similar picture for other roads (if access is restored at all).
EWR Co. have confirmed the line will be freight capable and the EWR Consortium are on record as saying that the EWR represents a huge freight opportunity – see section 2.2 of this document. Here are some freight trains in the fens. The video and especially audio gives a feeling for what they are like. Contrast this with our recent baseline noise survey in a back garden in Harlton where, over a 24 hour period the loudest noise was birdsong.
Things are not looking good.
If you have not done so already pleaseconsidersigning this petition it was started by CBRR just before the last consultation, but it is still the right question. It already has more signatures than the number of consultation responses that supported option E in the first place. Let’s push it much higher.Read more
Cambridge Approaches have made some progress since our last round of webinars back in September. We would like to do an updated webinar initially for residents of The Eversdens, Harlton, Haslingfield and Harston and in conjunction with parish councillors from these villages. Read more
East West Rail (EWR) is planning to build their railway through the rural villages of South Cambridgeshire from Cambourne to Great Shelford. This will irreversibly change the character and peace of local villages. Other route options would be more appropriate and less invasive but have been discarded by EWR without good reason. Time is running out for us to have our say. This requires us all to take action.
The Cambridge Approaches Oversight Group includes a collection of local parish councils discussing route alignments in the area for the new East West Railway. Although EWR have not yet proposed detailed route alignments the Cambridge Approaches Working Group has produced some representative options and they are set out here. Read more
The Cambridge Approaches working group published a map of alternative route alignments in EWR’s option E search area. These have been presented to about twelve local parish councils (Toft, Comberton, Barton, The Eversdens, Harlton, Haslingfield, Harston, Hauxton, Little Shelford, South Trumpington, Great Shelford) and some district and county councillors. The presentation and discussion has been at an on-going series of meetings, with the aim to reach some consensus about their relative merits and for subsequent presentation to other stakeholders including East West Rail. Note these are not the EWR route alignments, we expect those to appear in January 2021. Read more
AC7XAK Freightliner freight train, pulling out of the North rail freight terminal, Port of Felixstowe, Suffolk, UK.
Background
After the public consultation last year, East West Rail (EWR) decided in January this year to focus their attention on route ‘option E’ for the section of their new railway between Bedford and Cambridge. It is classed as a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project and will form the busy central-section of the final East West Railway between East Anglia’s ports and the Midlands, serving fast growing towns along its route. Why the multi-modal corridor to the north proposed by CamBedRailRoad was not selected remains a mystery. ‘Option E’ is not a rail alignment but a corridor, several miles wide in places, through which the line will run. It includes Haslingfield and the outskirts of Harlton but also extends to Comberton and Barton in the north and Newton and The Shelfords in the east. EWR are currently carrying out further design and survey work to determine different line options which are planned to be used in a public consultation in 2021 before their selection of a preferred alignment. Construction is expected to start in 2025. Read more
As presented in previous articles on this site here, here and here, the East West Rail is probably the biggest planning issue to hit the area for a long time. A new group focussed on influencing the East West Rail impact on parish in the search area for the new railway has been formed. Read more
A local resident has kindly put together a Google map of the locations of East West Rail Environmental surveys known to us. As I said in my previous post we have not yet been able to get this information from East West Rail or their contractor Ardent. The map is available on this link. Read more
EWR aims to build a railway from Cambourne to Cambridge in the 2020s. Information on the status of this section of the route can be found on their website here. They have selected a search area for the route that includes all of Haslingfield and the area to the north. In terms of possible impact on village life, this is probably the biggest planning issue we have faced in decades. Read more
The traffic survey running on Church Street recently as can be seen from the rubber cables running across the road. Shortly after the survey started this blue car was parked next to the cables. The survey has now stopped and the car has gone as well. The presence of the car would have slowed down the traffic going past, since it effectively makes it a single carriageway Hence the results of the survey would not be valid.
