Belford station reopening proposed as part of transport vision for the North East

The reopening of the station, closed in 1968 as part of the Beeching cuts, is one of 327 schemes included in an £8.66 billion blueprint for the future of the region's transport system.

The North East Combined Authority's (NECA) Local Transport Plan proposes the station would serve Belford and the surrounding catchment at a cost of £14,070,000, with an estimated delivery date of 2036.

Cllr Guy Renner-Thompson, Bamburgh ward county councillor and Belford Parish Council chairman, said "A re-opened station will be a huge economic boost to Belford.

"Belford has a growing population and a thriving industrial estate which would be well served by a mainline station, allowing passenger and freight traffic.

"Freight and passenger trains already stop at Belford Station sidings to turn around or enable other trains to pass, but without the right facilities, they’re of no use to local people and businesses.

"A train station at Belford will serve a large rural area stretching from Wooler to Seahouses. It is adjacent to the A1 giving easy access to traffic is on the crossroads of north/south buses between Berwick and Newcastle, and east/west bus routes between the Northumberland Coast National Landscape and the Northumberland National Park.

"Hundreds of thousands of tourists visit north Northumberland each year and a station at Belford would be in the epicentre of the tourist trade.

“The bad news is it has an estimated delivery date of 2036. This is not fast enough. I have written to the North East Mayor, Kim McGuinness, to ask for more detail about where the money is coming from and what plans are being drawn up to make our station a reality.”

Campaigners from the Belford Rail Users’ Group have pushed for the creation of a short platform and reopening of the station since 2001 but met various funding and bureaucratic obstacles.

In more recent years, South East Northumberland Rail Users’ Group (SENRUG) has called for regular local commuter services to be extended northwards from Morpeth to Berwick and Edinburgh and for Belford to be reopened as part of this.

In 2020, a bid to the Restoring Your Railway fund for a feasibility study into reinstating the station was unsuccessful.