A PLANNING application for Wellington’s £15 million new railway station is expected to be made ‘by the end of summer or September’ this year.

It will be part of proposals for housing and commercial development on land between the Longforth Farm estate and Nynehead Road leading off the Cades Farm roundabout.

Town councillors were told on Monday there would be two linked applications, one to cover the residential estate and the other for employment units and the train station.

Details were given by Chris Winter, of West of England Developments, which owns rights to both the Longforth site and land on the Tonedale side of the railway line.

Mr Winter said the Government had committed £5 million of funds to take the Wellington station plans through design phases to the point of being built.

The delay in putting in planning applications was because he expected it would take another three months to agree the exact positioning of the station due to the curvature of the railway track.

The Wellington station has been put forward as a twin-project with Cullompton, in Devon, with the cost of building each one estimated at £15 million.

Councillors previously learned that about 25 per cent of the construction costs, or around £3.75 million, would need to be raised locally.

They had been told the most likely source of such large funding would be contributions from housing developers.

Mr Winter said both planning applications would be in outline form at this stage and he recognised the housing element was unlikely to be determined by the district council for some time because there was a need to show how phosphate emissions would be mitigated.

The district council since 2020 has not been allowed by Natural England to approve any new housing development with foul drainage eventually draining into the wetlands of the Somerset Levels.

The agency was concerned that phosphates contained in waste water were harming the wildlife and habitat of the internationally-important Levels, which is protected by Government policy.

Mr Winter estimated up to 200 houses could be built, including affordable homes, depending on the amount of land that was taken by the station.

The commercial properties were likely to be small workshop-type units of up to 3,000 sq ft because there was great demand locally for such premises.

Mr Winter said the new development would be accessed from an entrance off Nynehead Road which was to be built for a new Lidl supermarket.

However, he said the current plan for the Lidl entrance to be a T-junction would need to be changed to allow traffic to flow from Cades Farm roundabout straight into and through the site, with a turning instead to travel toward Nynehead.

Mr Winter said planning consultancy Tetra Tech, based at Chelston, had been commissioned to carry out an online public consultation on the proposals and there would later also be a public event.

He said: “We want to work with as much of the community as we can through the planning process.”

The Department for Transport has officially fast-tracked the Wellington-Cullompton project and the current timetable for a station in Wellington shows it being built by 2025 - 61 years after the original station at the end of Springfield Road was closed under what became known as ‘Beeching’s Axe’.