Higham Ferrers - Transport and Communication

Transport and Communication

Historically, the town was at the crossroads of the A45 east-west route from Northampton to Cambridge, and the A6 north-south road from London to Leicester. It was a busy junction as both were long-distance transport corridors. The A45 bypassed the town in the early 1990s with a dual-carriageway, the former route (through the narrow, but beautiful streets of Kimbolton) becoming the B645. As the A6 carried less traffic, a bypass around Higham Ferrers and Rushden came later, opening on 14 August 2003, with the old road through both towns becoming the A5028.

Higham Ferrers railway station was the terminus of a short (5.25 mile) railway branch line on the Midland Railway from Wellingborough. There was an intermediate station at Rushden. The station closed to passenger services in 1959 and closed completely in 1969 with the end of goods services. Nowadays, the nearest operational railway station is at Wellingborough about four miles away but there is no bus route connecting Higham Ferrers to Wellingborough Station.

However Rushden station still stands and is completely preserved and the RH&WR plan to extend the line to the old station site and eventually to Wellingborough (making the heritage railway, one of only a few heritage lines around the UK to operate a whole branch line in its original format).

Higham Ferrers is served by the BT Rushden telephone exchange which has been enabled for local-loop unbundling. However, due to the length of telephone lines, the north of the town furthest from the exchange can only achieve around 3Mbit/s as it suffers from high attenuation. BT have assigned the Rushden exchange to the FTTC (Fibre-to-the-Cabinet) upgrade program (Phase 4b) due to commence in December 2010.