Oct 2022
Severnside Community Rail Partnership has a great track record at the annual Community Rail Awards, and the 2022 event held in Manchester saw recognition for several of the Partnership’s recent projects and more prizes coming back to the West Country.
Platform Rail Education Scheme winning the Influencing Positive Change and Sustainability category was a real highlight. It been wonderful for Severnside to collaborate with Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and TransWilts Community Rail Partnerships to develop such a high-quality education offer open to mainstream schools and specialist education provision. Platform supports teachers to deliver the National Curriculum while empowering young people to make sustainable, healthy travel choices as they grow their independence. At a time many schools are struggling to meet the cost of running school trips, Platform’s completely free of charge offer of curriculum linked resources, in school workshops and rail familiarisation trips have a really important role in supporting learning inside and outside of the classroom. We are extremely grateful to GWR and CrossCountry Trains and the Community Rail Network for supporting Platform. These grants, plus ongoing practical support and encouragement has helped bring our ambitious vision to reality. It’s incredible to think that in the first six months of Platform our small team of passionate and talented qualified teachers have delivered their programme to almost 2500 young people, and thousands more will benefit during this academic year and beyond.
The Community Rail Awards is an inspiring evening, celebrating everything that is great about involving local people in enhancing their rail network and encouraging the use of local sustainable, healthy travel. Severnside CRP are delighted to have also picked up second place awards for ‘In our Hands’ British Sign Language artwork at Patchway station, and for our unique wayfinding scheme to helping navigate the rout to the station passengers while busses replaced trains at Bedminster during the autumn of 2021.
Read more about the winning entries here
