Our Campaign for Corby Rail

The second platform

This is the most critical part of our positive plan for rail transport in Corby. Corby station handles over half a million passenger journeys a year through a single operational platform. A station with one usable platform can really only be treated as a terminal: a train that calls at Corby on its way somewhere else needs a platform in each direction. Oakham continues to have sparse services and any further northward services would end up being bottled onto the one platform.

This is also the cheapest and most deliverable item in our entire rail programme. The second platform is not a new structure to be built from nothing so the provision is there. What is missing is the access: a footbridge, which the original project brought in along with basis for lift shafts, and a guarantee that it is step-free for everyone. Welland Valley Rail's own scheme documents list a footbridge and accessible lifts at Corby as a requirement. So do we. We believe this can be done for relatively small costs and massive benefits to Corby, Oakham and other areas we may connect including Melton Mowbray, Leicester, Nottingham and with more investment to Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire.

Alongside it, the station needs the basics it was promised and never got:

• Parking. Corby station has 60 marked spaces, three of them accessible, against the 140 planned when the station reopened in 2008. The overspill parks in Old Village streets, which is now one of the biggest live grievances residents there raise with us. The cost of parking has tripled the daily charge from £3.50 to £10 in December 2024, which raised the cost without adding a single space. We want at least 200 additional spaces, multi-storey if that is what the site allows, with further EV charging  and we have said the council should look seriously at the land behind Corby Bus Station and at shared use with Tesco rather than treating the current footprint as fixed.
• Cycle parking. Twenty stands today, with expansion we'd like to see a real
• Further Amenities: A coffee shop is now in place but we need to ensure that there's a place to be whilst waiting for trains.

Corby Demands Better.  These are not extras contingent on new lines being built. Even if not one new mile of track is ever laid, the station as it stands is inadequate for a growing town, and the parking overspill is a live problem in Old Village streets today. 

The Luffenham Cord

The ask: reinstate 3.5 miles of railway between Seaton and South Luffenham which the single piece of infrastructure that turns Corby into the gateway for the East Midlands

This is the heart of it, and it is worth understanding why such a short piece of railway matters so much.

Trains from Corby run north over the Welland Viaduct to Seaton and on to Manton Junction. At Manton they can turn left, towards Oakham and Melton Mowbray. They cannot turn right, towards Ketton, Stamford and Peterborough. The connection simply is not there. Everything east of Corby, on a line that is open and carrying traffic, is unreachable from Corby.

The Luffenham Cord fixes that. It is a 3.5-mile reinstatement between Seaton and South Luffenham along part of the old Rugby and Stamford railway, closed in the 1960s, and it completes a triangle between three lines that already exist. Morcott Tunnel, which carries the route under the A47, survives in remarkably good condition and would be reused. Eight houses now stand on part of the historic trackbed, and the Welland Valley Rail team has already identified two alternative alignments near South Luffenham — one to the north, one to the south of the original route — that avoid every one of them. The options are there and we need to seek them seriously.

A new, fully accessible station at Luffenham would serve Rutland as much as North Northamptonshire, and part of that plan would help add to the business case of doing this.

This is why Welland Valley Rail is our primary target for a new service, and why we back it in full. It is the most deliverable major rail proposal available to Corby: most of the route already exists, the missing piece is short, and it already has a constituted partnership behind it with cross-party, cross-county backing. When it comes to bidding for national money, an established partnership between the MPs, unitary authorities and parish councils can see real transformative change to our part of the world.

There are discussions around electrification, and other details. However, the next formal step is a rail feasibility study, and securing one is the second key objective of our Corby Rail Improvement campaign.

North to Oakham, east to Peterborough

The ask: a regular service on the line north of Corby, and an hourly service east once the Cord is built.

Infrastructure is only half of it. A platform and a chord are worth nothing without trains booked to run over them, and the two directions need different things.

Northward, the track is already there. The line from Corby through Manton to Oakham and Melton Mowbray is open and in use, and it currently carries two trains a day each way on weekdays. That is not a service; it is a technicality. Turning it into a regular, usable service is a matter of specification and rolling stock rather than construction — a decision about what the railway is asked to run, taken through the East Midlands Railway franchise specification and Network Rail's next control period. It is the cheapest new connection Corby can win, and it puts Oakham, Melton Mowbray and — with a change or an extension — Leicester within reach of Corby residents for the first time.

Eastward, the Cord unlocks a genuine cross-country service as a potential for another East-West connection mirroring the lateral going via Bedford. With the opening of the cord and the second platform, the options will make Corby a gateway to the East Midlands opening up options to many and supporting larger projects like East-West, Universal, and improving Corby's economic position along with all those along it.

East-West Rail, between Oxford, Milton Keynes, Bedford and Cambridge, exists because four places asked for it together for two decades. There is no equivalent corridor fifty miles north, between the Midlands and East Anglia, and if one is ever developed the most natural alignment through this part of the country runs through Corby. We argue now to make that argument and begin putting into place the opportunity to create the next natural, and needed, lateral this country needs.