Old Oak Common: Train Disruption

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Berkeley]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what intercity train disruptions are expected and for how long because of the construction of the new Great Western Railway station at Old Oak Common.

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill) (Lab)]

My Lords, building Old Oak Common station will enable HS2 to start operations by providing a new interchange with the Elizabeth line. Without it, HS2 cannot open. The complex construction work cannot be delivered without some disruption to the Great Western main line. It will require a mixture of overnight and weekend possessions and some limited use of full closures. Industry partners are reviewing plans to ensure that disruption starts no earlier than it needs to and is minimised during construction, and that any journey time impacts, both during construction and future operation, are limited.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for that explanation, but is he aware that four of the eight platforms to be built on the Great Western main line are for intercity trains that come from Bristol, Swansea and the south-west? There seems to be no idea of how many people would want to get off a train from Bristol and change at Old Oak Common to get to Birmingham. There is a perfectly good service called CrossCountry. Why is it necessary to have the four intercity platforms built at all? How much money would be saved if they were not built?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I have to give your Lordships a brief description of railway geography in west London. The Great Western main line at Old Oak Common has two pairs of tracks. One is called the main line and the other the relief lines. The Elizabeth line now runs on the relief lines and, as my noble friend said, Great Western main line trains run on the main line. However, two of those four tracks sometimes close for maintenance, and if platforms were not built on the main lines, even in the interim period before HS2 provides the full service that it one day will, the station could not be operational because Elizabeth line trains could not stop on the main lines. So it is essential to have platforms on both sets of tracks, and in the long term, when HS2 is operational and serves a whole variety of destinations in northern England, stopping Great Western Railway trains there will be useful to railway passengers.