PASSENGERS haven’t travelled on the railway at Sharpness for over five decades, but now the line is set for a revival, with plans to bring it back to life coming from two very different sectors.

As regularly reported in the Gazette, Vale of Berkeley Railway volunteers have been working hard to reopen the Sharpness branch line as a heritage railway tourist attraction.

And in October, proposals to build a new railway station in Sharpness, as part of Stroud District Council’s draft local plan for the area, were revealed, with the new station allowing services to Cam and Gloucester.

The Gazette asked the Vale of Berkeley Railway Trust how, or if, the two proposals will work together.

Chairman Howard Parker said that although a new rail service would affect plans to run heritage trains, he believes the two are compatible.

He said: “It is now well known that a major housing consortium is intending to build up to 5000 houses in the Newtown, Sharpness and Berkeley area over the next 10 to 20 years.

“This is a massive scheme and many local people will feel alarmed at how it will change the nature of the area. In particular, the prospect of thousands of new car users on the existing roads is clearly not going to be a viable or sustainable option.

“Impossible demands will be placed on the already worn out and overloaded Junctions 13 and 14 of the M5 and other solutions will need to be found.

“The developers say they are in favour of overcoming this problem by developing the railway line for commuters and the public in general and this does potentially impact on our own plans to run heritage train services on the branch line.

“However, we have now met the agents of the developers and have been delighted that there is so much common ground and good-will between us.

“We have agreed a joint paper with the developers that we will be presenting jointly to Network Rail in the new year.

“In it we agree that there does not need to be any contradiction between running both a heritage leisure rail service for tourists and local families and a commuter service that takes people to and from the Vale of Berkeley and Sharpness area, keeping cars off the roads in the process.

“Indeed, as a group with considerable railway experience, we believe we are well placed to play a key and leading role in the creation of a rail service that can, over the next decade or longer, be developed to provide services for both leisure and work travel.

“We are now very close to obtaining a lease to our Oldminster Sidings site, we are in touch with the regulatory bodies that determine how safety is managed on the railway and we have much of the equipment we shall need to run the railway.

“We are in favour of starting small, of providing a heritage experience at weekends to start with, working closely and consulting with the local community so that growth and development in the area is carefully managed and done in a manner that is sympathetic to local community needs and is sustainable for the future.

“The next stage is to build our operational and storage base at Oldminster and we hope that work will start there early in the new year.

“The VoBR is a charity, it is completely run by local people for the benefit of the community and we believe that within the next two to three years it will become a very popular leisure attraction in the area that everyone can be proud of."

The trust is aiming to complete the platforms at Berkeley station and Newtown by the end of 2021, said Mr Parker.

“Thus physically providing a passenger rail connection with the mainline to Bristol and Gloucester," he said.

“This will put us in a good position to test out how best to go forward to the next stage, of how to plan for providing a service for the wider general public who may wish to use the railway to travel further afield for work.”