The Marston Vale line has seen its full timetable re-introduced today Monday 19 February.
A special event was held at Bletchley this morning, which was attended by members of the Marston Vale Community Rail Partnership and local MPs.
The service will comprise 17 trains each way Monday to Saturday, with one train per hour between Bedford and Bletchley.
In order to celebrate the return of the timetabled service and encourage passengers to use the line once more, fares will cost £1 per adult and 50p per child for any journey made between any of the 11 stations on the line, which equates to approximately 90% off the usual fare.
The fares will remain at this generous discount for the next 3 months, including over the Easter and May Bank Holidays.
For those who aren't local to the line but wish to visit and travel on the Marston Vale section of the original Varsity line from Cambridge to Oxford, an Off Peak Day Return ticket is £2 per adult from Bedford to Bletchley or vice versa, and will take just under two hours to do a round trip on the Marston Vale Line.
Jonny Wiseman, LNR customer experience director, said: “I am delighted the full timetable has resumed on the Marston Vale Line. I look forward to welcoming passengers back on board and I thank them for their patience whilst we have worked to overcome logistical challenges and return services to the line. We have reduced the cost of a trip on the line to £1 for the next three months to encourage passengers to make full use of the train service and we hope this will encourage customers between Bedford and Bletchley to return to the railway.”
Like the majority of backwater countryside stations from years gone by, the intermediate stations do have some extremely short platforms and the Marston Vale line is no exception. This in turn restricts what types of train can run on the line.
The new Class 230 trains were running on the line until December 2022, this ended when Vivarail went into administration. A rail replacement service followed for the next 11 months while London Northwestern Railway went in search of replacement trains.
They were able to secure the use of three, Class 150 Diesel Multiple Units from Northern trains. A partial service started running again between Bedford and Bletchley last November.
Each of the three Class 150 DMUs have been refurbished and upgraded before they have come into operation on the line. They each have USB Charging points, passenger information screens, they are also wheelchair accessible and have universal accessible toilets on board.
The two coach units will be able to travel up to the 60mph line speed, and have capacity for 173 passengers.
Please do not close Fenny Stratford railway station, there are a lot of people with very poor mobility or elderly, that cannot walk the approx 2 miles from Fenny Stratford to Bletchley railway station, PLEASE, When you are planning the new Route Please include Fenny Stratford residents, its unfair to leave us out.
Great to have the trains back. But the long suspension was an example of how the railway generally has tied itself in knots with its own rules, with the various players then incapable of finding a quick solution. It should have been possible to keep the 230s running or obtain three 150s more quickly or build temporary platform extensions. After all, this wasn’t some sleepy rural backwater, this is supposed to become part of a main line!