***URGENT NEWS****

Mobile Mast

It would appear that, sadly the Mobile Telephone mast sited for Sandown Road has been erected and disguised behind a mock chimney pot on top of the allocated building. As a parent of children at Chipstead Valley School this will remain a cause for concern which I hope can be discussed, if necessary with the support of the CWRA
Local Resident , Mary Wood

A View from the Top of The Hill

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Buildings
We will all be aware of the limitations of the buildings presently occupied by the local GP practices in West Coulsdon. Many of you will be patients of the Woodcote Practice on Chipstead Valley Road. We patients like being seen / treated close to where we live by someone who is familiar with us and we have confidence in. The trend over the last few decades has been for more work to be moved into GP practices, such as health promotion / advice, care for those with long term conditions such as diabetes, diagnostic tests, nurse-led work etc. However these improvements have been limited by the lack of space and opportunities to build on. In Coulsdon there has been a chronic shortage of land to build replacement 21st century facilities. That is until now. The extra housing developments around town - over the new Sainsbury (late 2009), Lion Green car park (2010) and Cane Hill soon after - will put significantly more pressure on local GP services. However local GPs, CWRA and other local Residents' Associations, and Croydon Council councillors and officers are pressing the Croydon NHS Primary Care Trust and English Partnerships, the Government body responsible for developing Cane Hill, to make provision for the modern health facilities we need locally. Cane Hill is one possibility but there may be others. I expect there will be a campaign starting later this year to show the level of local support and hope you will all back this. Watch out for further news in the GP practice surgeries, on our website, Coulsdon Library, 37 Chipstead Valley Road (currently being used as an office for Christine Samson, Coulsdon's District Centre Manager), shops etc.
CWRA Chairman , David Rothberg

Shoe Shop

New Shoe Shop in Coulsdon
Many local residents mourned the passing of our local Stead and Simpson the year before last. This left us having to travel to Croydon, Redhill or Banstead to replace worn out shoes. Salvation is at hand and a new shoe shop is coming to town. Look out for it … and use it, don't lose it! CWRA Committee Rep, Geoff Hunt

CWRA Website - Now Under New Management

Thank heavens for volunteers! At long last we now have a new webmaster who has been working on the sadly out-dated articles on our website. He has up-dated a lot of information on it already and has offered to continue doing so. If you haven't taken a look recently - check it out. cwra.org.uk, Thank you Richard!
CWRA Committee Rep, Chris Hunt

Post Office Closures
The post office in the rank of shops by Rickman Hill closed on 23 June, 2008. The 'consultation' seems to have been a little bit of a waste of time; despite the volume of letters and emails sent, the closure went ahead anyway. As with so many changes being forced through, it seems that the EU may ultimately be behind this. EU directive 97/67/EC stated that items weighing more than 100 grams, small parcels upwards, were opened up to competition on 1 January 2003, so private companies, such as DHL, TNT, and the heavily-subsidised German Post Office, all moved in to compete - but only on the most lucrative parts of the market. Jan Bart-Henry of TNT Netherlands admitted recently that TNT are cherry-pickers, they do not want universal service obligation on new entrants to the UK post. Eighty percent of post is business mail. The private companies bid for, and take, the lucrative part, the business mail. Your bank statement is prepared centrally; the private company takes all the mail away, delivering to the main postcode areas. The mail is dumped with the Post Office who then sort into local areas and deliver the statements. The Post Office picks up the expensive part of the business of mail delivery as well as collecting individual mailings from all the post boxes. Private companies are being subsidised by the work of the Post Office. Leaving the Post Office with all the unprofitable work means that the Post Office has to get rid of the most expensive elements or go under. This is why hundreds of rural and urban post offices have closed or are under imminent threat leaving thousands of people, many of them elderly or infirm, with no local service.
Free Scotland Party , Catherine Scott

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Midsomer Coulsdon?
I don't know what on earth's been going on in our relatively quiet little town of late. I know that things aren't perfect here; we have the odd burglary or two, the occasional mugging, some trouble with rowdy kids and graffiti, and far too much vehicle crime - things just haven't been the same in England since the seventies, when kids were old enough to know right from wrong by the time they reached secondary school age, and most people accepted the fact that they had to take responsibility for their own wrong-doings instead of continually blaming someone else. When my brother and I got drunk at the age of 6 and 8, my grandmother gave the old bloke down the road a real rollicking for giving the pair of us his home-made Scrumpy (apparently he'd done the same with our father, and many of the other village kids, at a similar age! His idea of a good joke!), but when my brother rolled up drunk 6 years later, he was the one who had to cope with the rough edge of her tongue as she attempted to sober him up before our parents got home. We weren't angels, but we accepted the fact that we were usually going to get a clip around the ear from whoever caught us doing whatever we were up to. Anyway, getting back to the original subject - this month I was asked for information regarding the headless body found on Portnalls Road! First of all I thought that Tom Barnaby must have joined our Safer Neighbourhood Team, then I went away and 'googled' Coulsdon Headless Body and found that there was some gossip on the internet about a headless body on the A22 near St John's, but nothing about a second one near 'The Pines' cut through from Rickman Hill to Portnalls Road. Discussions with other local residents turned up news of the discovery of a hit and run victim at 6.30am, but the free papers came and went with no further information. The gossip mill changed tack and went along the lines of 'Police Cover-Ups.' Finally the Advertiser came to our rescue. Our body wasn't headless, in fact, though in critical condition, he wasn't dead; the police weren't covering anything up - they didn't know anything! Somehow or other, 40-year-old Mr Ernest Croucher, who had been shopping at Tesco's at 10.30pm on Thursday night following his release on conditional bail from Guildford Police Station (where he had been charged with assaulting a woman) ended up in Portnalls Road with serious head injuries at 6.30am. No Midsomer Coulsdon, no headless bodies, but a truly bizarre mystery. I'm not even sure that Mr Croucher is actually a Coulsdon resident! If anyone does have any information, please contact DS Brian Flynn on 020 8649 0277.
CWRA Committee Rep , Chris Hunt

Note from the Webmaster

Well, I have finally updated the website on 21st August and the CWRA site is now back up to date (well, almost!). Walking through Coulsdon this weekend, it was pleasing to see the new pub almost finished, and the new shoe shop taking shape.
However, I saw many more empty shops, some closing just recently. We must move fast with the Town Centre project, time waits for no man! Richard Thurbon, Webmaster

HAVE YOUR SAY - YOUR CHANCE TO LET OFF STEAM OR REPLY TO OUR ARTICLES!

Have you ever felt that there was no point in letting someone know that you were unhappy with the service that you were receiving as no-one ever listened? Let this local resident's example provide you with hope. We believe that he and Southern Customer Services can now be regarded as regular pen pals.
Letter 1: Dear Southern, I would like to pose a question as to why Southern have yet to implement the proposal suggested by the SRA in 2004 to improve services at Coulsdon South? I travel from the station every weekday and some weekends and the service provided is appalling in regards to frequency of service and timings. Why do you only provide a service to London Bridge at 0725 and the next service at 0757? I should not be forced to change at East Croydon in order to get to the major terminus for the South. The services are crammed by time they ARRIVE at Coulsdon South. Trains should not be full to bursting when they arrive at Zone 6 station. That indicates a problem further up the line. Please could you indicate your thoughts on this, as £1750 for a season ticket is getting a bit of a joke with this service.
Reply 1: Thank you for your web comment. The proposal to which you refer was actually one of a number formulated by the former Strategic Rail Authority (SRA) in connection with a review they undertook of the whole of the Southern network in the early part of 2004. The document published by their successors, the Department for Transport (DfT), aims to address the huge increase in the number of people travelling on Southern routes and to provide a new timetable that is suitable for today's commuters, rather than the current timetable which has essentially evolved over years to be the best it can be without starting again .At this stage, all that the DfT have issued is an outline document and the details are not yet decided. We are well aware of passengers concerns over the through service and we are working very closely with the DfT on this new timetable. While I don't have any specific details at the moment, we will of course keep our passengers informed of any progress, so please do look on our website or feel free to contact us again if we can help further. Regards, Vinny Bandini, Southern Customer Services
Letter 2: Dear Southern Customer Services, Thank you for the comments. I am well aware of the SRA proposal, but that was back in 2004, before the growth of passenger numbers at Coulsdon South and many others. The picture has changed since then and Coulsdon is now the fastest growing station in passenger numbers on the entire route. This coupled with the planned re-generation of Coulsdon Town centre and more importantly the Cane Hill site across the road from the station which planned to provide a vast number of NEW homes. Coulsdon South will be overrun within two years. The document in question is still years away from any implementation and even then will address issues raised in 2004! Key questions need to be answered: 1. I assume that Southern physically monitor train loads (at least by travelling on the trains). Why do Southern believe this is not an issue which needed to be addressed in the winter timetable 2007 or at very latest Summer 2008 as advised by TravelWatch. 2. Why is the focus being placed on the Gatwick Express service and solving the issues with that rather than looking at the commuter routes which provide the vast majority of your travellers?
Reply 2: Thank you for your e-mail dated 15 January about pressures on local train services. Please accept my apologies for the delay in replying. The proposals put forward by the SRA in September 2004 have been much modified since then and the current plan is to relieve pressure on the Brighton Main line by extending six Gatwick Express trains to run from and to Brighton in each peak and to have two new trains in each peak from and to Redhill. The detail has yet to be finalised but it is expected that these changes will be introduced next December. In addition to that, we hope to be in a position to provide some further relief in the longer term in the light of a recent announcement by the Secretary of State for Transport. She has just elaborated on an order placed by the government for some 1300 new carriages to be deployed nation wide. Some of these are to go to provincial networks but some 900 are to be allocated to London and the South East and preliminary indications are that 106 of those will come to Southern. They are to be delivered between 2009 and 2014 and we expect to be able to reveal more about their actual distribution in due course. In the meantime, Network Rail have made clear in their Business Plan the need for 10 if not 12 carriage trains in South London albeit that extensive infrastructure works like platform extensions will be required to support that. However, at least work can now start. I am sorry I am not able to put more flesh on the bones at this stage but it needs to be understood that because (the timetable = resources = costs = subsidy from the taxpayer), the latter has to have a voice and so it is not the train companies who call the shots. Regards Richard Lancaster, Southern Customer Services
Reply 3: Thank you for your email. I do acknowledge your comments of the problem of crowded trains on the Coulsdon South and accept that Coulsdon South is not served by trains within the geographic scope of the South London Route Utilisation Strategy (RUS) and services from here are being considered as part of the Brighton Main Line RUS published by the Department for Transport. Purley is served by main line trains as well as by trains from the two branches to Caterham and Tattenham Corner. Service provision here has, therefore, been investigated both by the Brighton Main Line RUS and the South London RUS. Work continues in order to ensure that the combined effects of the two RUS's provide a satisfactory solution to the level of peak demand at Purley. It is likely that splitting and joining of Caterham/Tattenham trains at Purley will need to continue, because of the need to optimise the use of paths in the congested East Croydon area. Running separate trains from each of the branches requires two paths through Croydon, whereas joining them uses only one. I am sure that the people involved with these Route Utilisation Strategies are blatantly aware of the building works taking place in the Coulsdon area and the increase in passengers this will result in and also the general regeneration and building works taking place in the area. That said we can only plan with the resources that will be available to us and as part of this it is my understanding that as part of the provision of additional carriages from the Government some 106 carriages are being deployed to the Southern area of which some will hopefully be used to strengthen services in the Coulsdon area. Having said all that, I am unable to go into any further detail as we at Southern still await the findings of these RUS's. Regards David Cotterell, Southern Customer Services

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