We’re all aware that the re-opening of the Isle of Wight’s Island Line has been delayed twice now. What hasn’t been disclosed is when it will actually reopen, with South Western Railways declining to put a date on it.
What’s occurred recently is some apparent jiggery-pokery with the ‘End Date’ of Island Line’s engineering work entry on the National Rail Website.
Bus replacement until September?
Before the company decided to officially announce the second delay, News OnTheWight had been told by a source that the Island Line replacement bus service was going to be running until September 2021.
We decided not to run it at the time as we couldn’t double source it.
Further digging
It was this nugget that put News OnTheWight on the path of looking deeper into the situation. This in turn led to us breaking the news that it was unlikely that Island Line would hit their promised mid-May reopening the the Isle of Wight’s public railway including the view of a railway expert, Phil Marsh, that it appeared that work on the infrastructure looks, “nowhere near completion”.
Reopening “later this summer”
This was officially confirmed by South Western Railways a few days later.
They were a little shy about the date of when the trains actually would finally get running on the Island again, opting instead for the non-committal, “we will have to push back the reopening of the Island Line to later this summer”, claiming, “it is too early to provide a firm date.”
So to the latest
We were recently sent a screen grab showing the National Rail Website reporting that the bus replacement service would be continuing until 3rd Sept 2021 – well at least for a while it did.
A short number of days later, the date vanished, being replaced by a blank. It remained like this for a few days and the end date now shows as 31st Jul 2021.
This could all be an administrative mistake of course, but given the lack of provision of official information, worthy of note perhaps.
The rumour in the railway world is that this had then been noticed by SWR, requesting it be removed. At this point, nothing more than rumour.
Image: © Phil Marsh
