Lelant Saltings railway station
Encyclopedia
Lelant Saltings railway station was opened on 27 May 1978 to provide a park and ride
Park and ride
Park and ride facilities are car parks with connections to public transport that allow commuters and other people wishing to travel into city centres to leave their vehicles and transfer to a bus, rail system , or carpool for the rest of their trip...

 facility for visitors to St Ives
St Ives, Cornwall
St Ives is a seaside town, civil parish and port in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. The town lies north of Penzance and west of Camborne on the coast of the Celtic Sea. In former times it was commercially dependent on fishing. The decline in fishing, however, caused a shift in commercial...

. It is situated on the A3074 road close to the junction with the A30
A30 road
The 284 miles A30 road from London to Land's End, historically known as the Great South West Road used to provide the most direct route from London to the south west; more recently the M3 motorway and A303 road performs this function for much of the route and only parts of A30 now retain trunk...

 near the foot of the hill up to Lelant
Lelant
Lelant is a village in west Cornwall, England, UK. It is on the west side of the River Hayle estuary about 2½ miles southeast of St Ives and one mile west of Hayle....

 village.

History

The station was initially provided with a car park for 300 vehicles, all the occupants of each could travel to St Ives for just £0.60. Cornwall County Council
Cornwall County Council
Cornwall Council is the unitary authority for Cornwall, in England, United Kingdom. The council, and its predecessor Cornwall County Council, has a tradition of large groups of independents, having been controlled by independents in the 1970s and 1980s...

 provided £35,000 to build the car park and Penwith
Penwith
Penwith was a local government district in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom, whose council was based in Penzance. The district covered all of the Penwith peninsula, the toe-like promontory of land at the western end of Cornwall and which included an area of land to the east that fell outside the...

 District Council paid £15,000 to build the platform. During the first summer nearly 136,000 people were carried from the station, with 3,000 cars using the car park in peak weeks. Nearly 40% of users surveyed said that they would not have visited St Ives if the park and ride was not available.

Usage statistics from the Office of Rail Regulation appear to show a dramatic decrease in passenger numbers over the last few years on the whole of this branch: this is most noticeable at Lelant Saltings where the figure was more than 23,000 journeys in the year ending in March 2006, but only 653 attributed to the station the following year . 2006-07 saw a significant decrease in recorded passenger numbers when rover tickets were excluded from the figures.
 2002-032004-052005-062006-072007-082008-092009-10
Entries 8,092 8,632 11,693 317 116 227 311
Exits 8,909 9,649 12,081 336 135 227 311
Total 17,001 18,281 23,774 653 251 554 622

The statistics cover twelve month periods that start in April.

Description

The station is 0.5 miles (804.7 m) north of St Erth and faces the Hayle Estuary
River Hayle
The River Hayle is a small river in west Cornwall, UK which issues into St Ives Bay at Hayle on Cornwall's Atlantic coast.The River Hayle is approx 12 miles long and it rises south-west of Crowan village. Its course is west for approx 5 miles...

. There is just a single platform
Railway platform
A railway platform is a section of pathway, alongside rail tracks at a train station, metro station or tram stop, at which passengers may board or alight from trains or trams. Almost all stations for rail transport have some form of platforms, with larger stations having multiple platforms...

  built from pre-cast concrete components, which is on the left of trains arriving from St Erth.

St Ives Town F.C. play their football
Football (soccer)
Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a sport played between two teams of eleven players with a spherical ball...

 matches on a pitch at The Saltings next to the station.

Services

All trains are operated by First Great Western
First Great Western
First Great Western is the operating name of First Greater Western Ltd, a British train operating company owned by FirstGroup that serves Greater London, the South East, South West and West Midlands regions of England, and South Wales....

between and , although a few are extended beyond St Erth to .
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