Final phase for Weymouth’s new rail/bus interchange
A £1 million refurbishment of Weymouth station forecourt is nearing completion.
Until now, holidaymakers arriving at the seaside resort have had to drag their suitcases along narrow pavements to the seafront, where buses stopped on the promenade. But now, for the first time, buses and trains will be just a few steps apart.
Both station and forecourt have been shabby for decades. End-ofthe-line Weymouth has long been seen as one of the most run-down stations on the South Western Railway network, with platform canopies crumbling, rusting ironwork, and a concrete entrance and ticket office that is inadequate on busy summer Saturdays.
The station has long been criticised locally as a poor gateway to the resort, which boasts one of the country’s finest sand beaches.
The new interchange should alter that, although for now, passengers are directed through a side entrance into a car park, to avoid the construction site outside.
“It’s a bit scruffy. It could do with tidying up a bit,” one passenger told RAIL.
And a tourist with a pushchair, visiting from Liverpool, commented: “There should be more seating. And kids want to run around and do things. There is nothing for them.”
Bus driver Nick Dalkins has lived in Weymouth all his life: “A lot of people arrive at the station on the way to the holiday camps. Or to go on west down the Jurassic Coast.
“It’s going to make their lives a lot easier. Before, they had to wheel their pushchairs and cases down the street, to go looking for the bus stops along the seafront. Now the bus will be waiting right outside the station.”
Marc Reddy, managing director of First Bus in Hampshire and Dorset, said: “You had to walk a fair distance to get a bus previously. A lot of summer holidaymakers arrive here by train, and they want to go to Portland, to West Bay or Bridport.
“Bringing the bus stop right here helps to make public transport a whole lot more attractive.”
From May 15, SWR reinstated two trains per hour to London, for the first time since the pandemic. For more than two years, the normal service was halved to one service an hour. Since 2021, MPs across the region had been calling for the full service to be reinstated.
But Weymouth is principally a leisure market. Both day-trippers and holidaymakers to this beach town have returned to prepandemic levels, and last summer the five-car Class 444 trains via Bournemouth and Southampton were frequently packed. The continued lower numbers of commuters and business travellers is less of a problem at this end of the line.
Alongside the station, track that has not been used in decades is being dug up. The former link towards the town centre and
harbour wall, which once carried Waterloo trains on-street to the ferry terminal for the Channel Islands, is finally being replaced by a footpath and cycle way.
But a red signal still remains, brightly lit if rather overgrown, even though no train has passed this century. The last scheduled services ended in 1987, and the final charter train crept along it in 1999.