We are also making progress in improving things
on long haul journeys. Since I was elected, I have been fighting to get
an upgrade to the “Night Riviera” sleeper service, which is now being
introduced. I am a regular and devoted user of the sleeper service, using it
every weekend to get down to Camborne. I know how important the service can be
for businesses and visitors alike and I am pleased that it will be able to
provide more capacity and better facilities to compete with other forms of
transport. The future of Newquay Airport, once in doubt,
is now secure, helped by government support to establish a public service
obligation which has increased resilience and led to more people using it and
more commercial routes on offer.
However, the
majority of people in Cornwall use public transport primarily for local
journeys and that is where there is more to do. For me, the key to making
things work better is to try to integrate or join up the bus network with the
rail network more effectively than we have done in the past so that rail and
bus timetables work in tandem to give people more frequent options to get from
one destination to another. If you are in a village and there are only a
couple of buses per day and they travel a very long, rambling route, you will
be less inclined to rely on the bus to get about. However, what if you
had more frequent shuttle buses running a much shorter distance to the nearest
train station which then connected with a reliable and regular 30-minute local
service through the county?
Some interesting
ideas are taking shape in this space. Firstly, I have long
pressed for a regular and routine 30-minute local train service through
Cornwall with buses then providing onward connections over shorter rural routes
to our villages. If we could join up commercial trunk routes of buses and
trains with smaller, local, shuttle buses travelling shorter distances, you
start to get the makings of something that could really work and you could
build more confidence in the public transport network. Cornwall Council
is now working on detailed plans to help make this a reality.
Secondly, in recent weeks, I have become
aware of two separate proposals to significantly improve the rail offer in the
Camborne and Redruth area. A couple of years ago when we were discussing
the right location for a stadium in Cornwall, I had argued that we should go
for a slightly smaller stadium at Carn Brea Leisure Centre and then re-open a
train station at Pool so that you could use public transport to help get people
to matches. I thought it would be a far better option than putting a
giant project in a traffic jam on the outskirts of Truro. Also, we should
not accept that everything needs to go to Truro. At the time,
I could not get support for a change of plan because the Truro option was too
far entrenched.
However, discussions around the possibility
of a new train station at Carn Brea have come back to life. The building
around Heartlands, the Pool Innovation Centre, the growth of retail space at
Pool and new housing around Tuckingmill all strengthen the case for a new train
station at Carn Brea. There was previously a station at Carn Brea,
but it was closed in 1961. It had also previously been the home of the
West Cornwall Railway’s workshops, where locomotives were maintained. Things
go full circle and it would be great if we could re-open the station at Carn
Brea which would considerably improve the resilience of our transport
infrastructure.
Finally, the second idea being mooted is to
establish a small train station or halt at Ponsanooth. There has been
talking of a station at Ponsanooth in the past but it has never quite come off. The
Falmouth branch line runs alongside Kennall Vale Woods, and the Ponsanooth viaduct
is an iconic part of the landscape. The fact that we now have a university
outside Penryn and growing use of rail in the county means that the option of
an additional halt at Ponsanooth has become an interesting proposition in my
view and I am keen to work with local groups to develop these ideas which would
really help connect the village to Falmouth and Truro.
