We comprise a local community action group that looks after our station.
Government guidelines and advice from Northern Trains is changing; we are now starting to prepare to run scheduled Work Parties at the station.
Access for All – In April 2019 Handforth station secured Government funding to make it step-free. Much more work is yet to be done, though. Click here to see the full details.
JOIN US AT FoHS
We are very proud to have been the first “Friends of a Station” group in the whole of the UK, and we are still going strong. When we were founded in 1996, the outlook for the station seemed bleak; we believe that our efforts have turned that situation round completely, and we are consistently one of the Best Kept Stations in the area.
Working in cooperation with National Rail, with Northern Rail and with the local community and business, our primary aims are:
- To make changes for the better at the station where we can (the many “Handforth” rail sign-posts, “Art In A Box”, annual Christmas Lights, keeping the station tidy, and so on).
- To campaign and lobby the relevant authorities for improved access to the station, and for other areas where we can’t make the change ourselves.
- To represent the users of the station.
Several of the community initiatives at this station were developed after visiting European and Scandinavian Railways on a “Churchill Travelling Fellowship”. This is a travel grant from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust – click here for more information.
As you can read elsewhere on this website, the station has seen a remarkable turnaround in fortunes over the past 22 years. This is due primarily to how well FoHS works in partnership with the local community, with businesses and with the rail industry.