Villa Park Redevelopment

[Crown Hill]

The Witton Station plans are part of the extra funding announced by the government that the Blose thought was all earmarked for Knotweed Park.  If Villa are contributing to improvements at Aston then that is fair enough, although much of the problem there comes from the attitude of the staff in control of the barriers as much as anything - they are still not letting enough people onto the platform, causing a bottleneck at the bottom of the stairs, a mad rush when a train arrives, and then trains leaving half-empty.

If the funding is there the Witton Station upgrade could be started surely? Is it that the funding is only proposed and not yet rubber stamped?

It hasn’t actually been allocated by WMCA yet.

The announcement by Rachel Reeves was pure spin. It was a reannouncement of what Rishi Sunak told the Tory conference that the HS2 money saved could be used for local transport projects.

Basically nothing has changed!

Emailed our Mayor/tiger and they have replied to basically say Witton Station improvement is still going ahead, Transport for West Midlands and Villa are in a working group implementing it.

Yep thats the one Andy Street announced! and the funding is the reannouncment.

[paul_e]

Pure spin is stretching it a bit, Street announced it was planned but without the funding being in place. Sunak announced that projects like this were possible to complete with the money saved from HS2 but didn't actually allocate any funds and then Reeves has put the funds in place to have the work completed. Seems perfectly reasonable to me, of those 3 the only one that seemed a bit pointless was Sunak trying to find some positive spin for cancelling the northern part of HS2 and thereby removing a lot of the main benefits it would've provided.

[AV82EC]

Pure spin is stretching it a bit, Street announced it was planned but without the funding being in place. Sunak announced that projects like this were possible to complete with the money saved from HS2 but didn't actually allocate any funds and then Reeves has put the funds in place to have the work completed. Seems perfectly reasonable to me, of those 3 the only one that seemed a bit pointless was Sunak trying to find some positive spin for cancelling the northern part of HS2 and thereby removing a lot of the main benefits it would've provided.

Spot on, this is exactly what happened. It would be nice for the Mayor to maybe let people know what’s going on though rather than jizzing his kecks over a stadium and associated infra that hasn’t even got planning permission. I’d also suggest the improvements at Witton station will in no way “solve” the issues of crush loading trains pre and post match unless Ive misread the scope of the works.

[Olneythelonely]

It won’t make a bit of difference to train capacity. However, it’s much better with the new trains on the Cross City now.

[maidstonevillain]

You could whack a corner on there, by going over the road. Have the lower Holte wrap properly with the middle/lower (or soon to be just lower) Trinity. There is a bit of a lower bowl at Villa Park anyway.

Looks easy in theory. But would probably require the whole roof to be rebuilt. A lot of work for the number of seats gained.

[AV82EC]

You could whack a corner on there, by going over the road. Have the lower Holte wrap properly with the middle/lower (or soon to be just lower) Trinity. There is a bit of a lower bowl at Villa Park anyway.

Looks easy in theory. But would probably require the whole roof to be rebuilt. A lot of work for the number of seats gained.

I’ve been banging on on here that the Holte needs redeveloping into a single tier super stand for sometime, the current Holte is a mess and its two tier nature isn’t great for either acoustics or capacity. Knock it down and rebuild the whole thing.