Winslow still waits for its first train

More than a year after Phase Two of the long-awaited East-West Rail (EWR) Project to link Oxford and Cambridge was completed, residents in the small Buckinghamshire market town of Winslow still wait for the day when the promised half-hourly trains between Oxford and Milton Keynes begin calling at their shiny new station.

Winslow originally lost its passenger service on New Year’s Day 1968, with delayed closure to passengers of the Varsity Line, and its new and re-sited station is the only genuinely new stop along the section of EWR route from Bicester Village to Bletchley, apart from new high level platforms at Bletchley, alongside the existing WCML station.

This double-track, but not electrified, section of line was completed and available for use from the end of 2024, but since that time it has only been used by a handful of freight services, special workings and, for the past few months, by Chiltern Railways Class 165 units working “ghost” route learning services between Oxford and Bletchley High Level.

Chiltern Railways was appointed operator of the new Oxford-Milton Keynes service in March 2025 and at that time expected to begin scheduled services by the end of 2025. But the operator is in an as-yet unresolved dispute with the RMT union over its proposed single-manning of trains, so it remains unclear when the service will actually begin.

That must be pretty infuriating to Winslow residents, who have been waiting 58 years for the return of regular passenger services to their town and, with them, a regular link to Milton Keynes that will take a mere 16 minutes, compared to the current journey time of 62 minutes aboard an Arriva X6 bus running via Buckingham.

Head west from Winslow and it will take just 27 minutes for trains to reach Oxford, which is less than a third of the current best time on public transport of around 90 minutes, by taking a 20 minute trip on an X6 bus to Buckingham and connecting there with the half-hourly Stagecoach X5 service linking Cambridge and Oxford that takes one hour from Buckingham to reach Oxford.

Paying a first ever visit to Winslow on bright bright but freezing day (5 January 2026) it was disappointing to discover that the Chiltern ghost services I had hoped to photograph (5M51/92) were both cancelled at short notice, although the unit I had expected to see (165014) made three later round trips from Oxford to Bletchley High Level on that day.

I was however able to see how the £20m or so it had cost to build had left Winslow residents with a large new station, complete with two-level car park, a sizeable station building and lifts to both new platforms. Having taken just over an hour to reach the town on an X6 bus from Milton Keynes it was not difficult to appreciate what a benefit to the town the new station will one day be.

What Winslow will lack when passenger trains finally return is the direct link to London that was promised as part of the EWR project by re-opening to passenger traffic of a section of the former Great Central main line north of Aylesbury to Claydon Junction, where there was a south-east connection onto the Bicester-Bletchley route that had remained in freight use, but would require upgrading for passenger services.

Re-opening the Oxford-Cambridge route has a long history and will take at least another decade to be completed. Its first phase opened in December 2016 when Chiltern Railways services began operating from London Marylebone to Oxford via Bicester Village, and after completion of Phase Two, the next Phase, a total upgrade of the Bletchley-Bedford route, including re-building/re-siting of intermediate stations, is expected to take until 2030.

There are some contentious local planning issues as to how the new EWR will pass through Bedford, while heading eastward from there the route will follow a totally new alignment, as the original route has been lost to development over the past half century, and will include a station to serve a planned new town at Tempsford, which will also create an interchange with the East Coast Main Line.