A trip on the Northumberland Line

Railway re-openings look like being a thing of the past if the Labour Government continues to snub all the longstanding revival plans that had been coming to fruition, so after a trip earlier in the year to Leven I felt compelled to take a trip on the only other section of line to be re-opening in 2024.

Like the link to Leven in Scotland, the 18-mile Northumberland Line from Newcastle to Ashington has been the subject of a longstanding revival campaign, in this case stretching back more than a decade, and first raised by a former local Labour MP, Denis Murphy in 1999 and then in a Commons debate in January 2007.

Having originally closed to passenger traffic in 1964 the route survived for freight traffic to and from the Port of Blyth and Lynemouth Power Station so, just as at Leven, this continued use and preservation of the railway alignment for freight use made re-opening to passengers a feasible proposition.

But things do not come cheap on the UK railway network, so a project which had been priced at £60m in 2013 has ended up costing almost £300m, and even at that inflated price only two of the six planned new stations were able to open with the line on Sunday, 15 December 2024.

Setting aside the as-yet-unopened new stations, what has been achieved is highly impressive, if my trips along the new line aboard some of its first weekday services (16/17 December) are anything to go by, with a route that has been totally re-signalled and re-built, a half-hourly service frequency and very competitive fares.

The current limited stop service, calling at only one of the five new intermediate stations, was launched to meet the commitment to run trains in 2024. That one new intermediate station, Seaton Delaval, will be joined by Newsham early in 2025, with the remaining three stations, at Bedlington, Blyth Bebside and Northumberland Park hopefully opening later in the year.

Besides sampling the new service, which take just 35 minutes to travel from Newcastle to Ashington compared to 60 minutes on the fastest bus link, I was also keen to venture south from Ashington and photograph the new service crossing the line’s most famous structure, the 14-span North Seaton Viaduct over the River Wansbeck, best known by its nickname of the “Black Bridge”.

Arriving into Newcastle Central on the first weekday of the new service (16 December) after a trip on a Lumo service from King’s Cross, I boarded the delayed 13.50 service to Ashington, where I joined 55 passengers on board, of whom 14 then left the train at Seaton Delaval.

On leaving Newcastle Central the service runs north on the ECML as far as Benton Junction, before diverging eastwards and then follows the Tyne & Wear Metro route towards Whitley Bay and Tynemouth as far as an interchange with the Metro at Northumberland Park. It then turns north and reaches the only new intermediate station to have been opened with the line at Seaton Delaval, some 20 minutes after leaving Newcastle.

Continuing north from here, another five minutes brings you to the next station on the route at Newsham, where a huge amount of work has been done to eliminate a former level crossing, with the station here scheduled to open in January 2025 and looking virtually complete.

From Newsham the train then passes two other intermediate stations that will open sometime in 2025, at Blyth Bebside and Bedlington, passing a junction for the freight and diversionary route to Morpeth just north of Bedlington, then a triangular junction with the freight route to Blyth, before crossing the famous Black Bridge (North Seaton Viaduct) and reaching the new single platform at Ashington.

While the new station at Newsham looks ready to open, the same cannot be said of the other three, and it will be some achievement if they can all be completed and opened during the course of 2025. Despite my outward service to Ashington being delayed by overhead line issues on the ECML just north of Heaton, the new service is impressive and looks set to be a huge success, if the loadings I noted can be sustained.

There may not be much to attract the casual visitor to Ashington, but its large and free station car park was virtually full on the first weekday of train services (16 December), while I also counted more than 40 cars in the large station car park at Seaton Delaval.

One obvious operational constraint is the amount of single track at the southern end of the route, with the route being single track from Benton Junction to a point south of Newsham, with an extended loop east of Benton Junction and another south of Seaton Delaval.

In its former incarnation as the Blyth & Tyne this route had been an outpost of semaphore signals, but that has all now been swept away, although the signal box at Newsham is still standing, along with the two Bedlington boxes, with Bedlington South retained to oversee a busy level crossing.

Two other former signal boxes – Marcheys House and North Seaton – have both been demolished, but there is a reminder of the past as you pass the triangular junction for Blyth, with Winning Signal Box still operational and a couple of its semaphores visible by looking east from a passing Ashington train.

At Ashington a new terminating platform has been built alongside a siding off the double track route on to Lynemouth Power Station, with the two platforms of the old station still in evidence and part of the old down platform having been resurfaced and given a yellow line, for use by the occasional passenger specials that ran in the six decades of closure.

A combination of frequent trains, remarkably cheap fares and free station parking (as seen above) should guarantee that the Northumberland Line is a huge success, as my experiences on the first two weekdays of the new service amply suggested. But once the new stations finally open it seems unlikely that two-car trains will be adequate to cope with passenger demand.