Echo Comment on the opening of Darlington’s Bank Top station extension

While the Victorian railway cathedral remains from the days of steam and smuts, the £160m extension has the clean lines, sweeping shapes and the swish escalators that are more often associated with an international airport than a provincial station.

Like all good railway adventures, it has been a long journey with plenty of delays to reach the point where the station is now ready for public use. Britain is pretty poor at major infrastructure projects, but it shows that when we stick with it – rather than getting cold feet halfway through and pulling out, as happened with HS2 – we can achieve impressive results.

We live in a bitterly divided country at the moment, but this seems to be a great example of national government working with the regional mayor and the local council to achieve these results, and it was good to see yesterday the credit being shared between the Conservative Tees Valley mayor and Darlington’s Labour council leader, MP and transport minister, Lord Peter Hendy. The public always says it wants its politicians to put their party divides to one side and work together, and here we see collaboration – along with the railway company LNER – paying off. Congratulations to them all.

As the Stockton & Darlington Railway showed, if you build it, all manner of commercial enterprises will spring up alongside it, and we look forward to economic growth rippling out from the station.

But one blot on the landscape presents itself immediately the passenger steps out of the multi-million pound rotunda: St John’s Church, “the railwaymen’s church”, closed in 2023 and now looking empty and forlorn. How can it be brought back into the fold?

Truly, a regenerator’s work is never done.