For all these comments about Hanborough being wired to relieve pressure on Oxfiord surely wiring north to Banbury could also relieve pressure on Oxford, not change the feeder station location (Yarnton) and be of more value than going to Hanborough especially as reference is made above to Warwick and Coventry (route of Electric Spine)?
The choice of Hanborough as one of the rail 'hubs' in the Oxfordshire Rail Corridor Rail Study (just Google this for more details of the full package) is not an accident - the ever-growing town of Witney is a short drive away to the west, in the other direction Woodstock is also growing, as is Eynsham to the south and the village of Hanborough itself (including all the new homes going up just just of the station, with land set aside here to create extra station car parking in the future). The city and county councils are desperate to keep cars out of Oxford, so a frequent train service between Hanborough, the city centre and on to Cowley or Didcot is seen as a key way to achieve that aim and also handle custom from south of Oxford as well, where Culham has been identified as a key development location - not least because of the existence of the station there.
Oxford-Banbury already has frequent trains - what it needs is frequent high-capacity trains, but that's another story/thread.
Apologies if this has been mentioned already, but some years ago plans were drawn up to increase train frequencies at Hanborough by extending some Oxford terminators. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that this was in the constituency of the then Prime Minister!
Witney Gazette article from 2014
Had nothing to do with the identity of the then MP and everything to do with the local transport needs I note above, which was one of the reasons FGW and the county council had worked together to provide an extra 190 parking spaces at Hanborough in 2013. Prior to that there were just 50 spaces available in the old station yard.
I imagine that locals to Hanborough would require dualling and a turnback facility, with quite a lot of signalling.
WAO
Not necessarily. If the local can follow hard on the heels of a Moreton / Worcester bound service, it can spin at Hanborough quickly and be back towards Oxford well before an up train. It would need some signalling to shorten headways on the section, but nothing too dramatic.
Redoubling and turnback facilities are key components of the the project. Trying to do it with the single track is simply not viable, due to the performance risks if the long-distance trains are disrupted for some reason.
At the time the previous work was being carried out the (nearly) the same question was asked - why wasn't Wolvercote Junction relaid for parallel moves and the dual tracking extended towards Honeybourne.
The answer at the time was that the budget didn't stretch for it to be done as it would have been very expensive to modify the relay interlocking for the junction. The Oxford re-signalling was already being planned and the life of the changes would have been, in railway terms, short. It was said then that changes to Wolvercote would be easier when the whole area had been resignalled.
Whether this is still true, I have no way of knowing.
It wasn't budget constraints, it was simply down to the poor state of the interlocking at Oxford. Network Rail wasn't willing to take the risk that they could do the work required to enable control of additional signalling and points at Wolvercote (or anywhere else around Oxford for that matter) without the entire interlocking suffering a terminal failure, so they left it alone. The interim reversible line for Bicester-bound trains from the old platform 3, so they didn't need to weave across the main lines twice, was only provided by repurposing an existing signal.
Where the budget did affect signalling arrangements for the redoubling project was the retention of the three signal boxes along the Cotswold Line, which were initially intended to be replaced by a desk at the Didcot signalling centre.
