News Brentwood gets
station upgrade The £1.5m upgrade of the National Express East Anglia station at Brentwood was offi cially opened on Friday 11 November by Tracey Chapman, an Essex County Council member with special responsibility for highways and transportation.
Some of the improvements
include the provision of a new ticket offi ce, self-service ticket machines, new retail kiosk, a spacious entrance hall, new canopy, lighting, signage, CCTV, improved toilets and additional cycle parking for commuters. Andrew Chivers, NEEA managing director, explained: ‘The completion of this signifi cant and welcome investment is the fi rst of a number of improvement schemes we are programming across our network as part of the National Stations Improvement Programme.’
Thames Hub would see new passenger and freight lines serve airport
by Katie Silvester
A four-track, high speed passenger and freight orbital rail route around London was at the centre of proposals for a new transport hub, put forward by the architect Norman Foster.
A new international airport
would be located on the Isle of Grain in the Thames Estuary, taking the strain off Heathrow and Gatwick and providing much-
‘The hub will allow Britain to maximise its trade links with international partners’
UK likely to be granted emissions exception
EU environmental legislation that could have seen freight operators unable to source new locomotives has been adapted in order to fi t the UK market. The Non-Road Mobile Machinery Directive introduces strict emissions limits for new locomotives, but with the UK being a relatively small, non- standard market, there was no guarantee that any manufacturer would have developed a UK variant in time to meet the deadline. Now, after lobbying by the Freight Transport Association, as well as
representations by the Rail Freight Group, a new ‘fl exibility package’ is expected to be included, which could see a maximum of 16 locomotive engines and a further 10 extra engines available just for the UK market. Christopher Snelling, FTA’s head of supply chain policy, said: ‘The
NRMM had posed a serious threat to rail freight as, in its original form, it would have required new build or re-engined locomotives to be fi tted with a power unit that simply wasn’t available. If manufacturers were unable to build these engines to the new standards required in time, then this would have surely stymied growth in UK rail freight and acted as a barrier to new entrants. While there are still a couple of administrative steps that need to be taken before the NRMM Directive fl exibility package becomes law, it looks like our investment in putting our case to the UK government, European Commission and parliament has paid off.’
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needed extra capacity. It would have rail links to the Midlands and the north of England, as well as to the Channel Tunnel. The hub will allow Britain to maximise its trade links with international partners, as well as creating more UK jobs, the report’s authors claim. Foster & Partners worked with Halcrow and Volterra on the self-funded study and will be presenting the joint vision of the Thames Transport Hub to the government. Lord Foster, founder and
chairman of Foster & Partners, said: ‘If we are to establish a modern transport and energy infrastructure in Britain for this century and beyond, we need to recapture the
foresight and political courage of our 19th-century forebears and draw on our traditions of engineering, design and landscape. ‘If we don’t, then we are
denying future generations to come. We are rolling over and saying we are no longer competitive – and this is a competitive world. So I do not believe we have a choice.’ Not everyone is enthusiastic
about the proposals, however. The leader of Medway Council in Kent called the idea ‘daft’, pointing out that the Isle of Grain is currently used to store huge containers of natural gas, which would create a health and safety nightmare for any airport planners.
Customer Service Team
020 7500 6900
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DECEMBER 2011 PAGE 7
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