On the Manchester-Preston mainline, this station has been built to service a new "eco-village" on a former armaments site.
It consists of Network Rail's new-ish "standard kit of parts", so it's a bland beige box faced with vaguely terracotta tiles.
Interestingly (for me), the place is positively festooned with bizarre quantities of lamp-posts...
The footbridge bears comparison with another recent job, at Coleshill Parkway, which gives a bit of a lie to the idea that there is any "standard" approach:
Which is, I have to say, A Good Thing. Stations are an important part of the civic fabric, and they should be designed with respect to their neighbours. Otherwise why not just plonk a couple of Portacabins down?
3 comments:
Architecture/design aside, why are there so many Parkway stations? Has/did Railtrack/Network Rail/BR run out of ideas? Is it supposed to convey some sort of green credentials? Do the station planners have no imagination?
I'm sure you'll have a sensible answer!
Not "green" at all: "Parkway" was a brand created by British Rail. It is applied to a station that has extensive car parking facilities and that's adjacent to transport links (but often not close to any centre of population).
Bristol Parkway, serving a motorway junction, was the first of them (I think); Southampton Airport Parkway serves both the airport (d'oh!) and the M3/M27 -- generally they are to be found in places that are relatively rich-ish, and where car drivers might take their cars from posh suburbs to the parkway station rather than trying to get into a city centre.
They apparently generate huge amounts of railway traffic that would otherwise go onto motorways so I suppose, in that sense, they have turned out to be "green"-ish.
Thanks. I did wonder as we have Luton Airport Parkway and I passed a couple whilst driving around the west country somewhere, apparently in the middle of nowhwere.
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