A unique trial that saw Severn Valley Railway steam and diesel trains help people travel was used by 1,000 passengers – leading to calls to make it a permanent service. <\/p>\n
For the last two months heritage trains have been used to carry commuters from Bewdley to Kidderminster, where they can then access mainline services to Birmingham and beyond. <\/p>\n
John Dutton, a special needs teacher, said: “It’s brilliant – I think it would be good for tourists as well as workers if they made it a permanent thing.” <\/p>\n
Gus Dunster, Severn Valley Railway’s managing director, said talks would be held to decide what happens next.<\/p>\n
The service, known as the ‘Bewdley Express’, has been running three days a week between Tuesday and Thursday during the 8-week period in September and October.<\/p>\n
Passengers were able to use two early morning connections from Bewdley to Kidderminster, and then two evening return services. <\/p>\n
Commuters using it on the final day of the trial this past week said it had transformed their ability to travel. <\/p>\n
Lisa Rawlings, 39, who works in Birmingham for a bank, said: “I live in Bewdley and before this I’d been cycling to Kidderminster four days a week to get on the train to Brum. <\/p>\n
“Yes it’s kept me fit, but doing it in the winter can be horrendous. I can’t work from home so I’d love to see this service come back.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A unique trial that saw Severn Valley Railway steam and diesel trains help people travel was used by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":813211,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-813210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813210\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/813211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=813210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=813210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}