Great Western Coffee Shop

The Ministry of Defence is considering whether or not to open its rail depot near Bicester to commercial freight (link below.)
http://www.roadtransport.com/Articles/2009/01/12/132674/mod-considers-rail-freight-depot-development.html

The 1,550-acre site contains 36 miles of track and warehousing and is currently used to distribute equipment for the armed forces.

There will be an open day on the site on Thursday 29 January to show interested parties around the site.

Back to the future.

Wasn't Oxford Blechley to be the freight M25 in te e60s, hence Blechley flyover and the proposed yard at Swanbourne.

This also links to other posts re rumours of a flyover at Redhill between Tonbridge and Guildford lines.

Wonder how freight fits in with Chiltern's and East West  proposals?

With new flyunder at Reading would be a good route for channel tunnel freight.

Indeed the Bletchley Flyover was built as part of the 1955 Modernisation Plan with the intention of serving a new freight marshalling yard just east of Swanbourne. In the event the flyover was built in the early 1960's but by then the ideas had moved on and the marshalling yard never opened.

The joint East West Rail/Chiltern scheme allows for an hourly freight path between Oxford and Bletchley (WCML) in both directions (inlcuding existing flows to Banbury Road, MOD Bicester and Calvert) in addition to the 2tph East West Rail service between Oxford-Bletchley and 2tph Chiltern Railways service from Oxford to London.

If gwr2006 will permit, for those without local knowledge, Banbury Road is a stone aggregates terminal on the northern outskirts of Oxford, adjacent to the site of the proposed Water Eaton station which would be alongside one of Oxford's existing park and ride sites. Calvert is a container terminal on the remnants of the Great Central line from Aylesbury, used by trains carrying rubbish for landfill from Brentford and Bristol. It can be reached either via Aylesbury or Claydon junction, east of Bicester, where the locos run round their trains in a loop on the East-West line.

That's good news. An hourly freight flow would probably be more than sufficient to allow for existing traffic, potential new flows and the odd diversion from the current trains on the Oxford-Leamington corridor.