A petition calling on East Midlands Railway (EMR) to restore their full Nottingham to Matlock route and timetable has received more than 6,500 signatures to date.
The service should form the bulk of train services arriving and departing from Spondon rail station, previously providing a direct train route from Spondon to both Derby and Nottingham as well as stops towards Nottingham such as Beeston, Attenborough and Long Eaton.
However, the service was cancelled in June last year in what was described by EMR at the time as a 'temporary measure' due to a combination of COVID-related staff shortages and a shortage of available train stock to successfully deliver the service.
The cancellation came just weeks after a new timetable had initially been introduced which was intended to significantly increase the number of services to and from Spondon station each day. However, the initial positive service improvements quickly disappeared when the cancellations were announced within a month of the new timetable starting, resulting in next-to-no trains to/from Spondon at all.
Spondon rail travellers hoping for a reinstatement of the service were left further disappointed in the autumn when EMR's updated timetables, effective from December 2021, confirmed the continued cancellation of the service. It means that the earliest likely return date for the route would now be May 2022 - a whole year after the initial cancellation. However, despite EMR claiming that the service is still under review, many are now speculating that the route has been cancelled permanently.
As a result, a petition has been created on the 38Degrees campaigning website to demonstrate the strength of feeling about the cancellation and to encourage EMR to reconsider the restoration of the service at the earliest opportunity. As of the start of February 2022, more than 6,500 people have added their names to the petition.
The petition can be found here and there is more reaction to this story in this Derby Telegraph article.
