Up To Ebbw Vale From Newport
I took these pictures as my train climbed the hill up to Ebbw Vale Town station.
Note.
- The Class 150 train, that I was in had no difficulty in climbing up to Ebbw Vale Town.
- The dtations and track appeared in good condition.
- The weather was getting wetter, which didn’t help the pictures.
It’s a typical South Wales valley packed with houses and factories and with a small river and a few chapels an rugby pitches through in.
Burnley And Ebbw Vale
You may wonder why I’m writing a piece about two towns in the United Kingdom, which are hundreds of miles apart.
Both towns have not been in the best of health lately, although employment has risen in Burnley between 2009 and 2013 by 7.1%, as against 0.6% across the North-West and 2.0% nationally, according to this article.
They are also towns with similar geographic and transport problems being in the hills with not the best transport links.
But last Sunday, both towns got improved rail links to their nearest big city.
Ebbw Vale Town station opened and trains now run direct to Cardiff every hour.
At Burnley, five hundred metres of new single track called the Todmorden Curve has enabled trains to run direct to Manchester Victoria every hour.
I have been monitoring news stories about both new pieces of infrastructure and these reports from local media are noteworthy and generally positive.
Ebbw Vale
First train pulls into new Ebbw Vale Town Station
Burnley
TODMORDEN CURVE: 500 metres of track has opened up new world
TODMORDEN CURVE: £12m spin-off for Burnley’s economy
The only article with a negative tone is this piece entitled Rossendale Scribbler: Forget the bus station, we should look to rail to improve our transport links, which has a touch of jealousy that the Todmorden Curve doesn’t help his travels.
It will be interesting to go back to Burnley and Ebbw Vale in a few months to see if the early green shoots of optimism have grown or withered.
By Train To Ebbw Vale
I don’t think I’d ever been to Ebbw Vale before. But I certainly hadn’t been by train.
So when I said that I was going to Cardiff today after getting in contact with an old acquaintance, who now lives in South Wales, he suggested that we meet up, when I was in the Welsh capital.
As a new station has just opened at Ebbw Vale Town, which was perhaps a dozen miles from his farm, he suggested that we meet there and find a convenient pub.
So I got on a Class 158 train direct from Cardiff Central and we quietly trundled up the hills to Ebbw Vale. These pictures detail the journey.
I didn’t really know what to expect, although the scenery on the way up was typical ofthe South Wales Valleys on a fine day. At the top, you arrive at a simple one-platform station in a landscaped bowl beneath the town, with various civic buildings and a funicular to the town centre.
Sadly, the funicular hadn’t started running yet!
Obviously, the project is not finished yet.
The first thing that must be done is get the funicular working reliably, so that visitors and regular travellers can get to the town centre.
Obviously, there is little information at present, about perhaps some walks or other things you might like to do. As I didn’t have much time, I didn’t have a real explore, but I would think that it might be a nice walk down the valley to Ebbw Vale Parkway station.
The other thing the station needs is a nice cafe and shop.
This Google Earth image shows the area round the station.
Ebbw Vale Town
It would appear that the town centre does have an elusive cafe.
Incidentally, the hospital isn’t far away down the hill. So that isn’t a difficult journey away!
Wikipedia says this in the article about Ebbw Vale Parkway.
Demand for travel to and from the station was seriously under-estimated by the promoters of the line’s reopening, even though the service provided was to Cardiff only and not to Newport as well, as originally assumed. For example, in 2008/09, usage at the station was forecast to be 50,000, for journeys on the lines to Cardiff and to Newport, but was actually about 250,000, for journeys on the line to Cardiff only. Part of the reason for the demand underforecast was the requirement that no demand from regeneration of the former steelworks area should be assumed.
If they’ve got the site for Ebbw Vale Town right, there could be another serious underestimate.
At least plans are in place for a second platform and I saw evidence of a second track being built, which will all allow a half-hourly service and a possible service to Newport.
Long term, the line like many of the lines in the South Wales Valleys, could be electrified, for which funding was announced in 2014 in this article in South Wales Online.
So in a few years time or so, when I travel between Cardiff and Ebbw Vale Town, will I use a much more frequent and faster service in something like a refurbished Class 315 electric train? In some ways it would be very fitting to do the journey in a steel-bodied train, even though they will be around forty years old. But then they are based on Mark 3 coaches and have the capacity to live more lives than the average cat.
As by 2022 or so, Newport and Cardiff will be on an electrified Great Western to London, if the connections are arranged correctly, places like Ebbw Vale will have a frequent electric service to London, Heathrow and all points East, which can only be good for the employment, leisure and other prospects for the South Wales Valleys.
The Anonymous Widower 