Kentish Express Ashford & District
Renewed calls for £18bn rail project to come to the county
Kent is the only Home County not served by the London Underground or earmarked to have a Crossrail station. Campaigners hope to change this...
It’s the £18bn project set to revolutionise travel in the South East.
But Crossrail – when it opens next year – doesn’t come into the Garden of England.
This means Kent, with its tens of thousands of daily commuters, is the only one of the Home Counties not earmarked to have direct access to it, or the London Underground.
Despite worries future rail demand will collapse due to coronavirus-inspired working from home, council bosses are leading the call for Crossrail’s eastward expansion.
Known as the Elizabeth Line, the 41-station project, which was originally due to open in 2018, runs 73 miles from Berkshire to Essex.
Early plans for it had included running the line towards Gravesend.
But this was later curbed when a review recommended stopping at Abbey Wood in south east London.
Gravesham and Dartford council leaders, John Burden and Jeremy Kite, have now reignited their calls for it to be extended into north Kent.
Both have previously said it would be “short-sighted” to ignore huge developments like Ebbsfleet Garden City and the planned London Resort theme park in Swanscombe.
They say key infrastructure projects such as Crossrail are strategically important in the short and long term, providing much-needed construction jobs.
The Crossrail to Ebbsfleet Partnership was set up in
2016 and was tasked with overseeing work in support of an extension.
This has been hampered, however, by the repeated stalling of the first phase of the project dubbed Crossrail 1.
The campaign has repeatedly called for the route to continue from Abbey Wood calling at Dartford, Greenhithe, Stone Crossing, Swanscombe and then Ebbsfleet Garden City.
Last year, the extension was given renewed optimism after being provided with nearly £5m government funding to investigate further options to bring the line to Ebbsfleet.
Campaigners says the extension would support oftenoverlooked areas with high levels of social and economic need and give commuters from across Kent better travel options. Crossrail 2 is earmarked to go into Surrey.
In the meantime, former Network Rail worker Nicholas Hair believes commuter habits are likely to change in a major way post-Covid.
He says it would be wise to consider whether the demand for a service to Ebbsfleet would be the same.
He said: “We should probably expect that around 20% fewer people will travel on trains at all, or at the very least perhaps only for one day per week.
“A further 10% may only work in London two or three days per week, meaning existing capacity issues can be heavily relieved.”
Mr Hair, who campaigns for inproved connectivity across the region, is sceptical about expanding to Ebbsfleet.
He added: “Before we do something quite daft in the form of procuring, for example, many hundreds of new trains of which only 80% have a future post-Crossrail extension, we can seriously ask what sort of fleet and strategy we need.
“We can do everything from deciding to improve bus services to certain stations, to getting people ready for changed habits and even opening up development land.”