South Western Railway (SWR) is celebrating the gongs awarded to one of its stations and one of its community rail partners at the 2023 National Rail Awards held at the Grosvenor Hotel in London on Thursday (14 September).

Staines station in northwest Surrey won the title of ‘Medium Station of the Year’.

Judges assessed stations on their access, information, ticketing, customer service, disabled access, presentation and special features such as links to local communities and decoration.

Staines, which opened 175 years ago last month, is a busy station at the junction for trains between London Waterloo, Reading and Windsor & Eton Riverside. The station was previously managed by Teresa Pearson, who was awarded the British Empire Medal (BEM) in June for her services to the State Funeral of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II last September.

SWR nominated Hampshire Community Rail Partnership (CRP) for the category of ‘Outstanding Contribution to Society’. It incorporates four CRPs covering fifty stations and has adopted twenty-eight stations on SWR’s network. It has grown from two part-time rail officers to three part-time directors, around one hundred volunteers and more than four hundred steering group and stakeholder members.

The CRP has also turned ten redundant station buildings into spaces for the local community. One of these is a Swaythling station, near Southampton, where the old station building is now a free shop, providing food to those who need it, that otherwise would have been thrown away. Shawford station, near Winchester, has seen its old station building turned into a café named Platform 1.

The CRP delivers the ‘Travel With Confidence’ programme to give people support and confidence to travel by train, including autistic people and people with anxiety and phobias. In May, Hampshire CRP and partner Winchester Go LD celebrated training one hundred adults with learning disabilities to travel by rail.

Claire Mann, South Western Railway’s Managing Director, said: “We are so proud of our colleagues and partners who have been recognised by the railway industry at the 2023 National Rail Awards. The award for Staines is a testament to the hard work that our station colleagues put in every day to give our customers the best journeys possible.

“We are delighted too for Hampshire Community Rail Partnership, who thoroughly deserve their award following the years of dedication to the many local communities they work with, and the fantastic work they have done to give old station buildings a new lease of life and inspire more people to travel on our network.”

Nick Farthing, Chair of Hampshire Community Rail Partnership said: “We are delighted to have been recognised along with South Western Railway for all that we do and we look forward to continuing our work across our network of stations.”