Varsity Line
The finishing line is in sight for the team behind reinstating the former Varsity Line between Oxford and Cambridge.
Travelling by train between Cambridge and Oxford is a frustratingly timeconsuming business.
Despite their being just 66 miles apart (as the crow flies), a cursory glance at the National Rail website reveals a journey time of anything up to three hours, with a traipse across central London required between King’s Cross and either Marylebone or Paddington.
There used to be a direct link between the two university cities, running cross-country via Sandy, Bedford and Bletchley. But British Railway’s decision to close the Varsity Line as a through route in 1967 has given passengers no other choice but to travel by today’s more circuitous route through the capital.
For those opting for road transport, the options are hardly any better. Even via the shortest route, it still takes more than two hours to complete an 86-mile traverse across central England, on largely congested two-lane highways.
But happily, for all those who live, work or do business in the region, all that now looks set to change with the Government publicly committed to delivering both a £ 3.5 billion Expressway and a fully reinstated Varsity Line by the mid-2020s.
The campaign to reopen the rail link has been punctuated by a number of false starts ever since its inception in 1995, when the East West Rail Consortium (EWRC) was formed of local authorities, businesses and regional stakeholders.
Spotting an opportunity to boost economic growth by making the corridor more attractive to both businesses and individuals, EWRC scored its first major success in 2011, when a report published by Oxford Economics catapulted the business case for reconstructing what was now dubbed East West Rail firmly into the national spotlight.
With its impressive benefit:cost ratio of 6:1, then-Chancellor George Osborne was persuaded to include a large part of the scheme in the Coalition Government’s National Infrastructure Plan in November 2011. It was one of 35 road and rail schemes to be given the go-ahead, in a bid to stimulate a national economy still reeling from a double dip recession caused by the 2008 global banking crisis.
Osborne’s £ 270 million backing for EWR’s Western Section between Oxford and Bedford guaranteed its inclusion in Network Rail’s High Level Output Specification for Control Period 5 (CP5, April 2014-March 2019), and was accompanied by a loose (although welcome) pledge that a Central and Eastern Section would follow at a later date.
In October 2015, the first short stretch of EWR was successfully opened by Chiltern Railways and Network Rail, as part of the Evergreen 3 upgrade of the Chiltern route.
To open up a new route between London and Oxford, a new chord was built at Gavray Junction to enable Chiltern Railways services from Marylebone to leave the Chiltern Main Line near Bicester, and then access Oxford via new stations at Bicester Village and Oxford Parkway.
However, plans to reopen the remainder