The Most USELESS Airport Station in Britain?
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
- If an airport is close to a train station, you would be forgiven for thinking you could actually use it when you're taking a plane. But not here... welcome to Teesside Airport station, officially one of the least used train stations in Britain.
Let's find out why it's just so useless.
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Imagine if you missed a train by 10 seconds late and have to wait an entire week just to take it again.
OMG NINJA!
@Anne Woodward XD
@Anne Woodward There's a bus stop just down the road at the airport. Incidentally, they tried an airport shuttle bus from Darlington station. It didn't last. No passengers :(
That would suck.
Fr lmao
I was one of those 42 people, having visited the station in July 2022 as part of my longstanding Station Count Challenge. I'd boarded the train at Allens West, showed my ticket to the train guard and he remarked that he'd served Teesside Airport a dozen times and never had a single passenger up to that point.
Fast forward a few minutes and as the train is coming to a stop at the station, I'll never forget hearing the most geordie sounding "OH MY GOD!" from the guard when he'd noticed someone was at the station waiting for the train. 😂
Ha!
A Geordie voice on Teesside?
@@Aysome well its not really far
@@Aysome Railwaymen DO get around!
Rename it "London Teesside Airport".
Ryanair are going to call it Edinburgh South International
😂
Hahahaha that might work
London North!
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
42 passengers, and one train a week. Its probably just one person who does a weekend shift in the local industrial estate and takes the train on a Sunday when they run
It’s probably rail enthusiasts going out of curiosity. Or maybe even just buying a ticket as a novelty item and not travelling at all. There’s probably no “genuine” passengers.
Its a farce, though farces are normally funny. The folly of this situation was demonstrated when an airshow was mounted at the airport during the summer. Mostly due to incompetence by the organisers, the result was total road gridlock for miles around, meaning that many visitors couldn't even reach the airport! Meanwhile, trains trundled alongside the jams, passing the station without stopping. As for the airport, its now really only a vanity project by the current Mayor. It still only has scheduled flights to Aberdeen and Amsterdam, which is all its had for a decade or more, plus a very few summer holiday charters. There's also a brand new freight terminal....without any freight. I can only presume that the 42 passengers last year were all RUclipsrs doing videos about Britain's least used station!
@@crapmalls He probably has already!!! I remember he visited the nearby British Steel station not so far away and nearly got stuck as the only train back was cancelled - and there was no way out of the station!
I used to go to the Airshow when I was a kid back in the early 60s.
It has a few more routes, like Belfast and London... but yeah, not well managed
@@edificity No sign of any London flights on the airport's website (I think they were pulled a while ago). Belfast flights only 4 days a week, so a bit limited.
@@timbounds7190 The Wright brothers would be doing flips if they read this comment
They are building freight depot as well with a new road to link it to the rest of the area and yet they neglect the train station. When I went to their air show, the roads were backed so my family and I think that reopening it just for that day will turn 42 people into 10,000 people!
Teeside used to be a seriously busy little airport in the 90s. I seem to recall there were at least 6 daily flights to London and early as many to Amsterdam.
here is what to do :
- Renovate that station
- Put at least 12 train stop by day
- Put a (free ?) shuttle between airport and station. (a 14 passengers minibus will do - maybe 2 for big days).
Last problem maybe the train cost in UK
The sheer state of the station shows how much northern care honestly. If we look back to the year the footbridge was closed, it had at least 1 train every single day - Which after the footbridge was shut, dropped to 3 trains a week, then 2, then 1. Northern Rail (Or Northern Trains now) are infamous for doing this type of thing, with British Steel Redcar falling into a similar state, and now, Stanlow In Thornton has had it’s footbridge closed too.
This station could be a useful link to the airport, it really could, if they just repaired the footbridge, maybe added a heated waiting room on ether platform, as well as a few other facilities, and simply ran a shuttle bus to the airport timed with the trains, and I think usage figures would look a lot less bleak. The problem is, no one wants to pay for it.
The last remnant of British Steel went last week when the the furnace was blown up to develop the Free Port area. If that does well it could see both reopen.
@@davidpeters6536 That'd be neat, it's not often a mothballed station comes back from the dead
Chinese trains?
@@muckle8 I'm not sure what you are referring to.
Isn’t the free port owned by a Chinese firm?
Having a train station so close to an airport (it is actually close) is a gift! I bet that some investment in the station and the area around it would be a good investment.
A common gift these days. Newcastle is just up the road and even has a metro line that goes straight to the airport. 10 minute train from Durham will get you to Newcastle too.
A few road markings for bikes/pedestrians, some direction signs and either a shuttle bus or some rentable e-scooter/bike scheme and it would be quite usable. Might have even added to those low passenger numbers.
All those small changes could have been done by the airport, local groups or a private/public partnership. But if no one is willing to take responsibility on their shoulders, nothing ever gets done.
A good investment? I'm not too sure it is
@@solaraspect5255 All pretty much pointless since there's already a bus that gets you there.
@@truth.speaker You might as well invest in the Angel of the North :)
Teesside Airport is being rebuilt in 2023/24. The reason it has 1 service/no service a week is due to the disrepair. Network Rail didn't refurbish the station earlier due to Peel Group running the airport into the ground so it wasn't known if the airport would survive to justify spending money on the station. Now the airport is in public ownership, the mayor has spoken with NR who have now agreed to rebuild the station now there is some certainty on the airports future. This is a full rebuild with new platforms and new footbridge and once done I believe the airport will connect it up with shuttle buses.
Its taken a few years to plan as it requires the line being closed for numerous weekends so has been aligned to be done alongside the Darlington Bank Top extension which also requires line closures.
When Teesside Intl. Airport was RAF Middleton St. George, my Uncle did his national service there. They'd get the train back from Newcastle to Middlesbrough & pull the emergency cord next to the fence for the base, jump off and clamber through a hole then walk to the barracks.
Madness like.
Crazy!
to quote another military person: if it’s crazy but it works, it’s not crazy🤣
madness, but ingenious too!🤣
This is the train I took to college every day for two years, on the days it doesn't stop at the airport it runs every thirty minutes and still goes through the station, it's called the Bishop line and services all the villages between Darlington and Middlesbrough where a lot of my friends travelled from to get to the same college. It was practically the luck of the draw of which train you would get, often it would be a bare bones two decades old train which has what looked like bus seats in it. People who don't come from this area of the North East really don't understand what it's like growing up here, I honestly thought it was normal as a kid having every public service I used to have 20-30 year old technologies. That is till I moved down south for university and boy did it feel weird having what I would call the nice train but what everyone else called the normal train every time I rode on public transport.
I've lived in Teesside all my life and i didn't even know the airport had a train station. it just goes to show how little information we get given about it
The station was only opened in 1971.
Bruh, if folks from Teesside are told about somethin’, it’s generally had all of its parts nicked, and sold for scrap, within a week...
@@MadnessIncVP Within in a week is outrageous mate its usually up to 2-3 working days.
@@zoots5436 In Teesside, there's no such thing as a working day!
Perhaps it should be demolished and rebuilt with park and ride facility and shuttle buses running between Teeside Airport and Teeside Airport railway station and perhaps rename it as “Teeside Airport Parkway” station.
Growing up, we'd drive passed the station and I'd always think: "why is there a train station in the middle of nowhere" - it's so pointless! It's a real shame because if it was closer to the airport and ran a proper service, it WOULD be used!
"Redcar British Steel" was on that line too wasn't it, that would be a service
I think they've finally closed that one for the time being
@@edificity The actual steelworks is long gone . . .
As the airport is growing after many years of Peel running it down with the most likely reason to sell it off for housing (see Doncaster now!), the flights need to be established to create a customer base. After this maybe the useless train company may be willing to do something about the station. Yes it is a distance from the terminal, but its always been like this. I remember many years ago the shuttle bus being an old Leyland National 3111
I think the station should just be closed and have a rail replacement service like Barlaston on the WCML. Northern have shown how much they care about the station so at least they wouldn't have to run a whole train there anymore.
I visited in april 2019, getting the train from Allens West to there, then cycling one stop further to get back to my car. The footbridge wasn't closed, as I went across to the other platform and got shots of the public phone.
I'm sure as part of the upgrading of the airport, there were plans to fix up the station and make it useful again...
I watch this from a suburb of Melbourne where we don’t have an airport station and politicians don’t think it’s feasible since the 1960s. Yes one is planned now but construction won’t start until 2023 and expected to open in 2029.
they need 6 years to build one Station or do they bild the whole railway?
@@andreaswiesheu2240 The whole railway, the distance is not huge, they are waiting for the big tunnel project to be completed in 2025 which I think is just an excuse to delay the airport line. I look forward to the next reason to delay it.
That's terrible. Big airport hubs need transit options, no question
The government around 2000 pointed to the white elephants in Sydney and Brisbane and now Perth is getting one at apparently little fuss, I don’t know why it’s so hard in Melbourne, never seems to go beyond the numerous feasibility studies. As Sir Humphrey says, you never have a feasibility study where you don’t know the outcome.
@@edificity You can ride the 901 From the airport all the way to Frankston if you really wanted. Most people get taxis.
As someone who uses the only service that calls at this station to get literally anywhere I never knew that it stopped here on occasion
I lived in Middlesbrough for four years and never once used this airport, genuinely easier to just go to Newcastle airport whether you have a car or not
3:55 'It's just rubbish.' Three words to accurately describe the entire railway network outside of the London commuter belt (which now extends to Birmingham, apparently)
Reminds me of small airports here in germany like Lübeck for Rostock or example
About 2 flights per week but substituted with millions of tax money each year..
Here I was thinking Liverpool South Parkway's 2 mile bus journey to Liverpool John Lennon Airport was absurd!
It has a bus service? Luxury!
To clarify: it's 2 miles as the crow flies, about 3.5 miles for the 86A bus, and 4.3 miles for the 80A.
I've lived in and around Teesside since I was about 7 years old, 25 today, but I've only ever used the airport once. It was to visit my great grandmother, who lived in Southampton, and it was a direct flight to some small, nearby airport. It was my first ever plane ride, took it with my little brother, and while it only lasted around 55 minutes, it's something that stuck with me my entire life. The flight attendant kept coming over to check on us, since we were just kids, she was a lovely lady.
I'm genuinely surprised to see that the airport is still around. Even when I was walking around back then, in around 2010, the place was dead quiet. We saw maybe a dozen people boarding flights while we waited for ours. I might take a plane from there sometime, just to relive that one flight I took all those years ago. Thanks for bringing this back to me from whatever deep crevice in my brain the memory of the airport fell into
That's a lovely memory :)
@@edificity Happy to share it, wasn't one I would have expected to share honestly lol. Videos of things in my local area are rare to see, and I appreciate you making it
I was one of the 42 people that used it. I was in the area so thought it would be funny to catch it yo Darlington
So many of the outter birmingham stations are like this it's quite sad, especially when you see stations like kidderminster basically state of the art lol
Surprised Ben Houchen hasn't found a way to take this down. He controls transit with an iron fist so he can launder money into vanity projects. It'd be illegal elsewhere, but welcome to Teesside!
It’s a well-known fact that Teesside International Airport only has a departures lounge
Lived there when it was RAF Middleton St. George and again after it was civilianised. Remember the station being built.
A situation like this would only happen in Britain. It’s absolutely potty beyond words. Why wasn’t the station upgrade over the last decade or two? A shuttle bus would be convenient, but when I did it some years ago, yes a flight from Dublin then train home via Darlington, it only took me eight minutes to walk to the station. It’s quite simply scandalous!
Dublin Airport does not have even one train a week. No airport station at Cork, Shannon, Knock (or whatever they're calling it this week), Galway, Waterford, Kerry, Belfast Intnl or City of Derry either.
@@esmeephillips5888 Belfast City airport has Sydenham a short distance away.
What I meant was I took a flight from Dublin to Teeside and used the one train a week; Saturday at the time, home via Darlington to Leeds.
@@nigelkthomas9501 IIRC George Best is the only airport in Ireland, north or south, with an easily accessible rail link. Lot of talk about building a branch off the Limerick-Athenry section of IE into Shannon or extending the Luas to Collinstown, but that's all... a lot of ould talk.
Wouldn't stations like this be a good place to build affordable housing and restore a regular rail service? Does anybody else remember 'levelling up'?
A very informative video, thank you for sharing! 💜💜
Meanwhile the train station here is five and a half miles from the airport, but even if you're willing to walk that far, service has been "temporarily suspended" due to weather for seventeen years.
Massive investissement is being done to increase cargo operations at Teeside airport, which means more income to be spent on infrastructure, maybe something might for the train station in the near future
For a while the old RAF station was used as Halls of Residence for Teesside Polytechnic as it was then. The station was well used. The halls were known as MSG and had a bit of a reputation. Only went there once, that was enough!
Cheeky bugger! I was in the first intake at MSG, qualifying in 1971 before spending over 25 happy years in teaching secondary pupils to GCSE and A Level. MSG was pretty basic it's true but it filled its function and I enjoyed my 3 years there. Weekend treats were travelling in to Stockton or Darlington for the shops, civilisation and a Chinese business lunch or the Berni Inn if we were feeling flush! But if we had a car and wanted a really good meal or just a great cheeseburger, the Spotted Dog at Piercebridge was fine! So lay off MSG MATE!
@@royfearn4345 Ha. Nice to hear someone had a good experience! I studied from 83 to 87. We had three people on our course who were in MSG and we were invited to a party there. Can't remember the name of the pub but it was a long hike along a narrow road. Got back to the halls to carry on until some late hour and crashed on a floor. Woke up next day and went back town, never to return!
I was in the halls there in 1987, the last students at the site. I loved it though it was pretty remote from everything! I think just 3 H blocks housed students by then, all the others had been converted into care facilities for the elderly. The pub was The Oak Tree, or "The Twig" as we all called it. The next year everyone moved into various houses in Middlesbrough.
all it would take is a minibus that comes to the station whenever a train comes in to take people to the terminal, a bit like the long stay car parks at airports like leeds and newcastle, to make the station work as the number of passengers continues to grow
Just found your channel, known about Teeside Airport since a couple of RUclips vloggers visited it in 2017, you may have heard of them
I think “Stratford International”, that goes as far as Dover is a contender surely.
Dinsdale station is 1.9 mile walk from the Teesside Airport. So might be easier to run a bus service than rebuild the station. Northern have given up on many stations recently.
well, this is a good type of videos for city councils and MPs.
So glad I found this channel. Does anyone know the name of the song?
I don´t think it would be costly to arrange for a suitable connection between the station and the airport - if the will was there.
Teeside airport is certainly served by taxi´s and certainly has a small minibus in its inventory that could connect station and airport at minimal cost - we´re talking about just a 1 mile distance and it doesn´t have to be a free shuttle.
But - in order to make this work Northern Rail has to be forced to make certain trains stop on a daily basis and once these services start advertising to use the service has to do its part.
This could work even if there are not going to be thousands of passengers to be expected.
Station wasn't even used for the teesside airshow which resulted in drivers stuck outside for hours waiting to gain entry. Others gave up after waiting for over 5 hours. And in the distance you had an idle station. However I'm not sure if it was safe enough to handle big crowds.
The Tees Valley Mayor is so incompetant that he can't handle an airshow, even when he's earning tons out of it. I doubt this station will ever be useful.
Why was the station built? And has there ever been a timetable of trains? The stations fixtures and fittings aren't exactly Victorian, so I can only assume that there were grandiose plans when the airport became commercial to turn the area into a regional industrial centre.
I reckon they were basing it on the idea that people would want to use the airport lol
It was built at the request of the airport and was close (ish) to the old terminal - but then the airport built a new terminal further away, leaving the station on a limb, there are not enough flights/passengers for a shuttle bus and the airport has stopped contributing to maintenance - BR only agreed to build it if the airport funded it's upkeep because they saw it as unlikely to be successful (and I think they were right in that assessment)
The station was opened in 1971.
Most Amtrak service in the USA is basically a parliamentary service.
not even close to the same thing
Salutari din Romania 🙋 🙋 🇷🇴
This makes the current rail option for LAX looks really good 😂
As soon as i saw the tittle of the video in my recomended videos i knew it was teeside airport station
With approx 4 flights a day in winter and only 40 miles from Newcastle airport close it!
Great video. Subscribed.
Its existence sounds like total incompetence.
The attitude of this rail company lacks so much long term vision. Build a service and people will use it, plus bring growth and investment in the local area. I’m surprised Teeside airport haven’t addressed this considering there are already flights and potentially more if facilities improve. Look at Southend airport - once essentially unused. It got a rail station and new terminal. Now Ryanair and easyJet and others started services there and it’s really taken off (writing off Covid).
We've got many stations in South Yorkshire that don't have barriers.
Often people board without tickets
So with that in mind who knows how many people travel from those stations
Plus all the money on hs2 leaves the North much like this
It’s useful in some way because my dad goes there for business trips
Nothing beats East Midlands parkway used a lot more but it’s nowhere Near East Midlands!!
Durham, Tees Valley it is now called: RAF Middleton St. George (AKA Goose Pool). The "halt" on the line to Darlington from (not Stockton) Middlesbrough has always been a total waste of time simply because it is too far to walk and has never had any other method to get from the platform to the terminal. It is easier to fly to Newcastle.
I agree, I'm from Sunderland but if I was from Teeside, I'd rather take the train to Newcastle Central and then hop on the metro to Newcastle International.
In all honesty, Teesside airport looks a bit of a joke compared to Newcastle.
Was Teesside Airport, then Durham Tees Valley when under Peel ownershi), now back to Teesside Intl. The Airport code is MMG, which I guess must relate back to Middleton St George, loosely!
6 flight per day with 1 train by week
No shuttle between Airport and train
"We OnLy HaVe 42 PaSsEnGeRs PeR YeAr"
The station is like the airport, kind of pointless. With Newcastle 1 hour North, and Leeds Bradford about an hour South, it is just a victim of wrong place wrong time. But its great for light aircraft flying
The very least they could do is put up some signage, mark a walkway to and from the airport terminal with paint and put a passengers' only railway crossing. Then maybe 43 people might use it
And then stop some trains!
Is Levelling Down a hill in Kent?
Is six flights a day enough passengers to keep a station going? If they refurbished the station, ran a shuttle bus around the times of the planes/trains, and stopped all trains there.
And assume all the flights were on time? This isn't Japan you know!😀
Integrated transport will never be a thing in the UK.
@@LesD9 You're right. It would need a shuttle bus from first train to last one. I was just wondering about the numbers. If each plane carries 150 people and you could get say 20% of the market, that's 180 people per day (plus some of the staff too). That might cover it's operating cost, if the local authority would pay for the setting up.
@@surreygoldprospector576 Trains shouldn't have to make a profit; roads don't have to, after all, yet roads rarely get demolished for being a drain on resources. Trains closing isn't economic, it's ideological. The oil and gas industry have more money than most governments, and use it to control our way of life; it's no coincidence buying a car, and all of the money drains that come with it, is becoming the only option in most places.
That would mean losing out on parking revenue, sadly. But with the airport's plans to keep adding flights and routes, it's madness to neglect a station like this
@@caramelldansen2204 look up highway teardowns
What’s the point of even having this station if it’s set up to fail like this? Seriously, I’ve seen stations in here in the U.S. that are significantly better, which is definitely saying something.
It takes an act of Parliament to close a station in Britain and this is the sort of thing that one person would stall just enough to make it a pain.
does that mean even if you walk to the station theres no trains
Huge gathering of Train enthusiasts should get togther one sunday to give the service a big surprise.
I wonder how much a yearly season ticket is from the next station ?
Very good and informative video!
Its the fault of the local authority planners that allowed the station to be built that far away from the airport.
Shows how the powers of the London bubble really don't give a fuck about anyone away from the M25
Does the train line pass closer to the airport? They would at least get some traffic.....
British airport hospitality at its finest.
Heathrow.
@@56independent42 I was thinking more of Stansted.
Could if actually be only one or two people who constantly use it throughout the year, instead of 42? Just a thought.
Teeside was part of the County of Cleveland, well known for being a rundown dump.
I'd be inclined to give you more credibility if you could actually SPELL 'Teesside'.
Remember when air transport was glamourous?
Still better than London Southend Airport
There's a station on Sheppey that's just as pointless!
I believe now there is no service at all to the station…no parliamentary service whatsoever?
Why do you need a station when it only takes 15 mins to get to the airport either by car or a taxi lol
I actually enjoyed this video
42 passengers is it me or does anyone else think a train station is a great way to launder money
I never knew this existed, but I suppose it's not needed given that the Airport is linked to Newcastle by metro.
Wrong airport. Newcastle is on Tyneside not Teesside
@pedanticradiator1491 : Damn, I always mix those up :) Had no idea that Teeside had an airport.
@@luckhurstrobert I had no idea that a place called 'Teeside' existed.
I suppose it must be on the River Tee?
Malaga airport to the train is a bit of a walk
Not nowadays it isn't. It's right in front of the terminal building.
Never involve Tesside with London. Smoggies no thanks. Its a fecking long walk from the station to the airport
Total madness and why have a station that is nowhere close the the airport terminal
The solution might be putting in an airport people mover between the Tees Valley Line and the airport. If you were here in the 1980s you would have seen the ageing Class 101 & new Class 142 Pacer Class 150 156 sprinters
Not enough passengers for that, the airport has a handful of scheduled flights mostly on 70 seaters. IIRC it was under 500k passengers per year pre-covid
The first British steel redcar
Well a useless station for a useless airport!The Tory Tees Valley Mayor keeps bailing out the airport presumably because having an airport on his patch makes him feel more important.Although neither are totally useless as I caught a train there once and a flight, BMI,to London Heathrow.When I was a child we also flew from there to LHR and onwards to Johannesburg Jan Smuts as it was then called.I think that the service that stops there now , westbound only,is one of the strange Sunday only Hartlepool to Darlington trains? Really the north east only needs one airport and Teeside should be shut and the few flights transfered to Newcastle.
I mean not only a silly station but a silly airport to go with it. Newcastle airport is the only airport needed for the region. A bit like the situation with Doncaster.
Too many little airports were opened on wartime RAF bases in the vain hope that 'if you build it they (scheduled carriers) will come'. Every city council felt it would look bad if it did not have its own airport, no matter how badly sited and served by ground transport. They thought depressed industrial areas could be kickstarted by symbolic gestures of modernity.
But economics and geography say otherwise. Distances within England are too short for flights to compete with mainline trains when transit times are added, and there is too little potential traffic to Scotland, Ireland or the Continent to support regular services at reasonable frequencies. The small planes often used are cramped, and their limited seating makes fares uncompetitive. Hub airports using big aircraft soak up demand.
Teesside is one example of a starving minnow. Now that air travel is under fire from the green brigade, its prospects are dimmer than ever.
The spelling of "Tees-side" really bugs me more than it should
Yes, it is. I live on the saltburn line, this stations useless.
Also, longbeck is literally in Marske as well. Marske is a village with two stations and a connection straight to several big towns, work that one out.
@@thomasawl I used to live in Saltburn and often wondered why Lonbeck had a station, one for Geoff Marshall.
@@thomasawl My grandad lived near Longbeck station... it was pretty convenient. Never turn your nose up at 2 stations when it could be 0
Why not have all the flights go to London and Edinburgh?
This is the opposite of Liverpool JL Airport with millions of passengers but NO station on the Merseyrail system!
I've never understood that. The railway is right there!
6 flights per day???? Goodness
Do you have a link to the Geoff Marshall rant, if he knows of this station`s existance ????
Is there a litter bin ?? - yes the whole area !!!
Geoff has been there
@@pedanticradiator1491 Happy to know this - thanks.
will Geoff Marshall visit? Least used station maybe?
Complete contrast to Southampton Airport Parkway Station (in south of England) that can have over a million passengers a year!
Teesside Airport Station (in north of England) not joined to the Airport is a classic example of what is wrong with Westminster politicians who care not for their constituents and success of their area.
Theres nothing wrong with the stations design, there are tonnes of stations like that in other countries. If they just run a short shuttle bus service and forced more than 1 train a week it would be usable. The stations already extremely convienient location wise.
I agree, if the station had been adequately maintained and if there was the passenger demand for the airport itself, a simple shuttle bus service would be more than sufficient to make this station useful again
6 flights a day!! Lol