Cambridge South station is due to open on 28 June after the Department for Transport announced a £250 million investment in the new link to the Biomedical Campus. It will offer a direct 45 minute journey from London, up to 20 services in peak hours and 1,000 cycle spaces. The train has accepted the applause, but would like everyone to calm down until somebody locates the correct entrance.
This is useful public infrastructure, which makes it unusually difficult to market as a miracle. A visitor travelling from London previously needed a train, a bus and a walk. The new arrangement removes two stages of the national transport ritual in which each service hands responsibility to the next one and hopes nobody asks where the destination is.
The station will serve a campus with more than 20,000 current staff and thousands of daily visitors. It also arrives carrying a green roof, a rainwater system and enough cycle parking to suggest that the building has been appointed deputy minister for biodiversity. Somewhere, a drainage pipe is preparing a statement about regional growth.
The announcement presents Cambridge South as a gateway and a game changer. The platform remains admirably composed. It knows that a platform is mainly a long place where people stand while checking whether the train has developed a new interpretation of the timetable.
There is a serious achievement here. One direct train is easier to understand than a chain of connections, especially for patients, visitors and workers who have better things to do than conduct field research beside a bus stop. Better access does not abolish delays or crowded carriages, but it can reduce the number of ways in which a journey becomes an argument between transport operators.
The official language still cannot resist promoting a station into a national parable. Every roof becomes a symbol, every cycle space becomes a commitment and every service becomes a corridor to opportunity. The station itself appears to be the only institution involved that has not claimed to transform the future.
So Cambridge South opens with a genuinely useful route, a roof that remembers rain and a timetable being asked to carry the emotional burden of an entire region. The train has put on its graduation cap. The passengers, having arrived directly, are laughing because for once the ceremony may finish before the connection.
Source: GOV.UK.
