Lymington Brockenhurst Community Rail Partnership
Bobby Lock - Rail Development Officer
The Isle of Wight Community Rail Partnership was launched in 2005, their stakeholders initially being, Island Line (South West Trains) Wightlink and the Isle of Wight Council with Bobby Lock as their Rail Development Officer.
Bobby has worked on a number of varied projects to increase passenger numbers and promote community goodwill which has now led to her secondment to the Lymington-Brockenhurst CRP two days a week to replicate successful projects over here.
Bobby is also looking to start friends of Lymington-Brockenhurst Line, which is essentially a volunteer programme which can look at anything from help to organise events, ways of promoting the line to station adoption schemes which have been initiated on other community rail lines around the country can be viewed here. If you would like to be a part of FOLB please get in touch with Bobby, she would be only too happy for your help.
More recently on the 18th September Bobby was voted onto the board of Association of Community Rail Partnerships (ACoRP) at the AGM in Plymouth as a director, which will bring to the table a fresh perspective, particularly on community development and as ACoRP put it, “As such Bobby is fast becoming ACoRP’s expert on heritage rolling stock!” in reference to Lymington-Brockenhurst Heritage line and 1938 ex northern line rolling stock on the Isle of Wight!
The 19th of September ACoRP hosted the annual community rail partnerships awards ceremony at Plymouth Pavilions which saw two of Bobby’s island projects take 1st place, the Isle of Wight CRP, Lymington-Brockenhurst CRP and 3 Rivers Partnership in Southampton awarded ‘Overall winner’ for partnership working and Bobby receiving 2nd place for most outstanding Rail Development Officer.
South West Trains and their Community Rail Partnerships all in all received 8 awards out of 15 and really cleared the board; something which Bobby is very keen to do again next year with the added benefit of successful projects for LB CRP! Southwest Trains. All the winners can be seen here.
As well as all the projects that the partnership want to deliver in partnership with services, schools and organisations is next years Community Rail Day, which Bobby thinks will be a similar event to that of the 150 year celebrations on the 12th July this year and again would ask those who would like to be a part of the day to get in touch with her as she will be organising a steering group shortly to tackle this next event.
To date Lymington-Brockenhurst Community Rail Partnership’s members are;
- South West Trains
- Hampshire County Council
- New Forest District Council
- National Parks Authority
- Brockenhurst College
- Wightlink
- Lymington and Pennington Town Council
- Brockenhurst Parish Council
- New Forest Primary Care Trust
The Chair is Cllr Mel Kendall from Hampshire County Council and Vice Chair is Nick Farthing from SUSTRANS. He is also Chair of the Isle of Wight Community rail Partnership and 3 Rivers Partnership in Southampton.