Crossings come under scrutiny

Temporary cameras were installed at manually operated railway crossings in three villages.

Network Rail installed them at Station Road, Fiskerton, Station Road, Rolleston, and Causeway Lane, Morton to help with a traffic survey. They were in place for nine days and were removed at the end of last week.

A spokesman for Network Rail, who maintain the crossings, said the survey was part of a risk assessment.

“We haven’t withdrawn staff from the crossings,” said the spokesman.

“We installed cameras because we were doing some monitoring of how many people use the crossings.

“We are always looking at how many people use railway crossings because, depending on their use, we might change what we decide to do with them.

“It is only right for us as the managers of the crossings to see how often they are used.

“We monitor crossings for safety using CCTV. We do this on all our crossings. It is quite normal.”

Members of Southwell Golf Club claim they have had lengthy waits at Rolleston crossing and that on one occasion a member had a near miss because the crossing gates were left open.

The spokesman said the decision to monitor the crossings was not in response to any safety concerns.

He said: “We monitor the risk assessments at all level crossings and I think all level crossings should be safe if properly used.

Not automatic

“We have a responsibility to make sure this crossing is safe and appropriate to the area’s needs and we are doing our job to make sure all crossings are safe.”

A Newark and Sherwood district councillor, Mr Roger Blaney, said he often drove through Rolleston crossing.

“It is an observation that these are the only three crossings in the area to my knowledge that are not automatic so I don’t know whether Network Rail are proposing to put automatic crossings in their place,” he said.

“I don’t think we can assume anything about what they plan to do with the crossings but I think it would be a shame if they did change to automated crossings.”

The Network Rail spokesman said they could not say if there would be any change to the crossings until they had the results of the survey.