Little-used stop symbolizes dysfunctions of nation’s transportation network
As an aging train pulls into view, two men wait patiently in the biting cold, taking photos as it grinds slowly to a halt, before jumping quickly aboard.
It is not a good idea to miss the 2:56 p.m. service to Darlington: The next train will call here in precisely one week.
At England’s least popular railway station, herd in Teesside, the only travelers these days ard those attracted by the novelty and rarity of? their journey, which lasts a maximum of 14 minutes.
“The more obscure it is, the more interesting it is for rail enthusiasts,” said one of the men, Henry Kennedy, from Southampton. Along with Murray Colpman, he had travelled hundreds of miles by train, then walked for 45 minutes, to reach this transportation outpost in northeastern England.
It was not meant to be like this.
Teesside Airport train station, about an hour’s drive north of Leeds, was built in 1971 along an existing line to bring thousands of passengers to and from a regional airport, now called Durham Tees Valley Airport, whose terminal building lies less than a mile away.
There is no longer a bus service from the train station to the airport terminal, and the numbers flying from Durham Tees Valley are greatly reduced; it once attracted around 900,000 passengers a year but now serves around 125,000, connecting to just a few destinations. So rail bosses have sidelined the stop for years, halting just two trains here a week, one in each direction.
Then, in December, the service was cut again － to one train a week.
Yet the various rail authorities cannot agree to close Teesside Airport station, preferring to retain a zombie station that come to symbolize some of the dysfunctions of England’s transport network.
Under private ownership, a fragmented rail transport system has evolved in England, where a historic aversion to central planning sometimes comes at a price for passengers. British railways may have a good safety record, but the network is expensive and over-crowded, and opinion polls show that a majority of voters support railroad nationalization.?
The airport is responsible for the train station’s maintenance under an agreement made when its majority owner, Peel Airports, took over operations in 2003.
When the airport said last month that instead of operating two services a week, there would be only one from Teesside Airport, it blamed the aging infrastructure, including the footbridge, and argued that the cost of maintaining it “could be as high as six million pounds over the next five years” －
a figure disputed by Ms. Foster, the campaigner.
Ben Houchen, the mayor of Tees Valley, which covers five boroughs, wants a revamp of the airport and its rail link. He said that Peel Airports had wanted to close the Teesside Airport railroad stop, but that he had objected.
“If you now decided to close the rail station at the airport, it would be significantly more difficult again to reopen it,” he said, adding that “there are airports, regional airports especially, that would die for the connectivity that Teesside Airport has got, actually having a station.”
Mr. Houchen wants to create a consortium to take over the airport and fears that Peel’s “ultimate long-term goal is to close the airport and turn it into a housing estate,” because that would turn an easier profit.
Peel said that it had discussed closing the train station, but that it had also considered moving it to a new site closer to the terminal. It rejected the claim that it wanted to run down the airport and sell it off for housing.
In a statement, the airport said that, “as our chairman has stated previously, we are not looking to sell the airport and remain committed to delivering our business plan to secure its future and deliver growth.” That plan involved “a range of developments on land not required to aviation operations,” including some housing, though “the proceeds of the residential development will all be reinvested into airport operations,” the statement added.
Onboard the 2:56 on a recent Sunday, the conductor, Sally Holtham, said that in five years of doing her job, she had worked on only three services that stopped at this station.
“It's the first time I've sold any tickets from Teesside Airport,” she said before asking, with a long laugh, a deliberately pointless question: “Would you like a single or a return ticket?”
