Call for support in campaign to reopen defunct Horsham to Guildford rail line

The English Regional Transport Association – which has been fighting for years to get the rail line reopened – is holding a public meeting on the issue in Horsham on April 27.

Transport association chief executive Richard Pill said: “We need all the support we can get, including advocating to agencies like Transport for the South East to show more interest, support and leadership, especially funding studies, round-tabling and helping to move the project onwards and upwards to court national recognition as a strategic rail link and helping put local transport on a more sustainable basis.”

Association members also want to see the reopening of the Horsham to Shoreham line but both that, and the Guildford to Horsham stretch, have been closed for more than 50 years. However, much of the original track beds survive.

The transport association – a voluntary membership-based group – has long maintained that reopening the line with cycle and footpaths would provide a ‘transport-leisure corridor which could cut congestion, reduce road traffic, save land, make modest development more sustainable and offer many new rail direct journeys currently laboriously lengthy, costly, inconvenient or non-existent.’

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The association also says that the proposals would bring places like Cranleigh back onto the railway map and would ‘make access and visitorship a more atttractive proposition.’

The public meeting in Horsham will be held at The Lynd Cross pub in Springfield Road on Saturday April 27 at 1pm.