Great Western Coffee Shop

Our less local local paper (the Bracknell News with a Wokingham cover wrapped round it), reported this week on a report on station car parking done by a WBC committee. That news item is not on line, but the WBC report (http://wokingham.moderngov.co.uk/documents/s7049/Commuter%20Parking%20T%20and%20F%20Group%20Final%20Report.pdf) is. (Note that WBC have recently reworked their web site so as to break a lot of old links to documents.)

The report covers not just Wokingham but the other stations serving the borough, including of course Twyford. On Wokingham, it says:

I wonder how much parking space will be lost, and for how long, doing that work.

My guess is that about 100 spaces will be lost temporarily.  These decks can go up rather quickly. 

Apparently not, now SWT have announced their plan for building this parking deck.

From GetReading (http://ttp://www.getreading.co.uk/news/reading-berkshire-news/wokingham-station-users-warned-four-10853297):

So it's going to take four months and mean losing all the bigger car park for that time. Presumably it'll cause a lot of aggro as passengers try to find sneaky places to leave their cars for the day.

SWT have an information page on it (http://www.southwesttrains.co.uk/wokingham%20new%20car%20park.aspx#184558), though as usual it's hard to find and not dated. They say over 200 spaces will be added. Exactly how many spaces there are now is, surprisingly, highly secret. National Rail say there are 86, which is clearly wrong. The planning applications said there would be 333, though there were 420 before the new station was built. 

Under " How will I get to the station during the works?" all they can suggest is to use buses, with warnings about the lack of parking space in other stations or in the town. They also mention the drop-off space provided, but that's not accessible from Reading Road or Station road.

Yes it is...Station Road, left into Wellington Road, right around the Elms Road or Carnival Pool roundabouts, back along Wellington Road - simples!!

Fantastic planning by NR/SWT/WokinghamBC (don't know which).  Could they not foresee the additional parking required when they planned the station and the revised car parking which was completed not that long ago.

The additional housing currently going up around the town was in the pipeline for ages so that cannot be the reason - surely?? ???


Sorry to say this, but this is one reason I am not sad about moving from Wokingham - now use Farnborough (more trains per hour, longer trains, less stops on the route)

There's an SWT news item here that mentions a small number of additional SWT services while the carpark work is ongoing:

http://www.southwesttrains.co.uk/wokinghamcarpark.aspx

Re-confirms 200 spaces.

Paul

Why? If there's hardly any parking, what help is running more trains?

As the SWT news says, the council is at least trying to be helpful. Despite prefacing their first response by "^We tried but our discussions with South West Trains about the timing of their work and providing alternative facilities for their customers were sadly unsuccessful,^ said Cllr John Kaiser, executive member for planning and highways.", they have found some unused space for parking. Almost all of it will be for their staff, but apparently it will hold at least 130 of them who currently park in other public car parks.

Additional services that technically run anyway, just ECS to/from Farnham, Staines or Waterloo

Seems to have taken a number of commuters by surprize judging by the short piece on South Today at lunchtime. A number saying they were parking 'down the street' up to ten minutes walk away. Be interesting when the schools go back and the commuter flow is at its more normal.

Wokingham Council say they have had to spend money to create extra parking spaces and that it had cost money to do it, but wouldn't say how much. Perhaps SWT have had to come to an arrangement.

Well, no matter how much telling you do, there will always be some people who don't get the message. But I do wonder what everyone has done to cope - other than not going to work, which has evidently been pretty popular today.

If I'd remembered the date, I would have had a look as I was going to have lunch. But by 6 p.m. there was oodles of space in The Paddocks (the nearest big alternative car park). And given that even now the last Waterloo train to get in was the 16:12 (lightning at Staines), few could have left already.

But it is a puzzle - WBC were going to open an old staff cark park to the pulbic (it's still private), and use some old tennis courts for yet more staff (nothing done). Then there was talk of how much space there is in other car parks, but most of those are still limited to 6 hours or less (and the Carnival Pool one is 3 hours max). So maybe, if enough were on holiday, the rest got into the Paddocks or the old Elms Road multi-storey (Tesco as was). If they did, at least they were only paying ^4 all day, rather than ^7.50 to SWT.

I did take some pictures of progress on the new 3D car park, but never got round to posting them. Currently the downstairs is open, and upstairs there is still just a little decorating still being done (carpets, by the look of it).

To give an idea of the time it took:

28/3/16    car park closes and contractors start moving onto the site
17/4/16    so far a load of slots for trenches have been cut through the tarmac - that's all
Once the trenches had had concrete foundations poured into them -
2/5/16    the Meccano men moved in with their big crane and heaps of metal bits
10/6/16    most of the structure is in place (then I went on holiday)
18/7/16    (I guess) full opening. So they beat the four months quoted, but not by much.

And here's what it looks like (and how it all got erected):

Many thanks for that update, stuving.  :)

At a quick glance it seems built with almost identical hardware components to the one at Winchester.  Makes sense to standardise where possible I guess, there must be hundreds of places around the national network where the same technique could be used.

Paul

At Nailsea & Backwell, as a for instance.  :P :D ;D

I was wrong about that - there's now a sign at the station entrance announcing that downstairs is open (and very popular it was yesterday, as a sunshade). That says upstairs will not be opening until late September. I can't see why - there was no work still going on. Maybe it was a bit like the new houses nearby: as they were being finished off and sold one of them had its kitchen ripped out and then (the same units) replaced. Presumably someone spotted an "issue" that had to be sorted. 

In the end, upstairs was announced to be opening yesterday, and did so. Presumably the delay was for the supply and fitting of all that very fetching blue carpeting.

That's a bit odd. Downstairs, that blue is used to make the pedestrian routes more visible. Also the white lines stand out in the gloom, and the steelwork makes the routes pretty obvious. Upstairs, it's not at all easy to make out what's parking space, rather than car or walking routes. getting to the down ramp is an awkward turn, if you don't spot it in time.

And why are the lights upstairs on in the daytime? They may be efficient LED ones, but you'd think they could run to a timer or light sensor for them.

Having finished that new car park, already a few spaces are being commandeered for site buildings for the platforms extension work. The preparation for that has already started, though there will need to be a lot of delivery of the heavy Lego.

And that's going to be a lot more difficult now. It would have been easy to just bring trucks up behind the new platform and heave the stuff over the fence, or take some of it down. Now it will all have to be taken down a very narrow access almost by hand, or else unloaded inside the car park. At least steel is hard to break with an errant derrick.