Oxford station - facilities, improvements, parking, incidents and events - merged posts

[whole diary]

[ChrisB]

Can someone check the EAS & update us on current plans? They must be set in stone by now?

[stuving]

Can someone check the EAS & update us on current plans? They must be set in stone by now?

Well, it hasn't been changed as of October. That doesn't mean it's going to happen - if the work can't be done the posession will presumably be cancelled. In which case it ought to be done pretty soon.

As that work was to finish resignalling the old Down Jericho line and reconnect it as the bidirectional Up Relief, and to put up some of new-fangled those electric wires from Appleford to Radley, it doesn't look like it can happen then.

[JayMac]

How about another rebuild like Newport, South Wales?

[AMLAG]

Nairn

[Red Squirrel]

How about another rebuild like Newport, South Wales?

...or this:

[ChrisB]

So has this been cancelled? No notices that I've seen anywhere and its only a few weeks away. Suspect its been combined with Hinksey flood relief work in July/Aug?

[phile]

No mention on NRE^‡(resolve) Future Engineering Work on the website.   Should be 12 weeks notice for Booking Engines.    There is another thread on the Board re Closure Oxford to Didcot 23 July to 8 August.

[ChrisB]

Which is now 30 July to 15 August....

[stuving]

From This is Oxfordshire:

Winning designs announced for multi-million pound Oxford Rail Station revamp
Naomi Herring, Reporter covering Bicester

THE top three designs of the multi-million pound overhaul planned for Oxford Rail Station have been announced.

The striking designs give an insight into what the city centre rail station could look like in the future and will be used as inspiration for the long-awaited ^75m revamp.

Six designs were put to a panel of judges and following a public consultation Entry F by architects AHR was chosen as the 'people's favourite' with 70 per cent of the vote.

A judging panel - made up of Network Rail, Oxford City Council, Oxfordshire County Council, the Department for Transport and Great Western Railway - separately selected the design along with two others.

Winning designs including entries from architects Wilkinson Eyre (Entry B); Allies & Morrison (Entry C) and AHR (Entry F).

Chairman of the judging panel Fiona Piercy said: "We were delighted with the calibre of architects involved. They all produced excellent ideas making it very hard to choose the three winners.

"The ideas will help us set the benchmark for architectural quality standards and raise ambitions for a new world class gateway station for Oxford building on the completed work at Frideswide Square and linking to new schemes at Oxpens  and the Westgate development."

I can't get any of their pictures to show here, so you can use their page link, or go to the original consultation page which has all six candidates as files to download.

[IndustryInsider]

Yes, it will be interesting to see whether 'people power' and their massive vote of 70% for the one design will win through, or whether one of the two other ideas will eventually be taken forward.  I suppose there's also a good chance that money constraints mean that all three of them get binned in preference to a much more modest design!

[ray951]

Judging by the last comment in that article Oxford station isn't going to look anything like the winning designs as they are just ideas and I quote "The ideas will help us set the benchmark for architectural quality standards and raise ambitions for a new world class gateway station for Oxford".

[ChrisB]

Just like the County Council's idea of a monorail to relieve the Oxford traffic chaos....

They need to identify how much cash can go in this pot....and the County has a BIG problem as they are making swinging cuts. I doubt the City Council can find much either. Until that's solved, it's pie in the sky really, because NR^» (Network Rail - home page) won't stump it up.

[IndustryInsider]

The two parcels vans that have been in the east dock at Oxford for well over twenty years are currently being broken up in situ.  Cost of them being preserved was deemed too much apparently.

[81F]

The down platform at Oxford in Realtime Trains today seems to have an identity crisis, being referred to occasionally as 2, occasionally as 4.  Looking ahead, it appears to be consistently platform 4.  I imagine this means that the new platform for Chiltern trains will be known as platform 2?

[IndustryInsider]

The platforms were all renumbered as of today, with 1 becoming 3, 2 becoming 4 and 3 becoming 2.

Written like that it sounds a silly idea, but the new Chiltern platform will become Platform 1 when it opens later this year, and then all platforms will be numbered sequentially 1 through 4.

No doubt it'll take a while for everyone to get used to the new numbers, just like when Platform 4 became Platform 7 at Reading.