Residents could have to put up with more trains through Rugby with a rival scheme announced today to reopen a disused rail line through the town.

The unexpected news means there is now a second bidder trying to use the old line, built 100 years ago to link up the Channel Tunnel.

Chiltern Railways, which operates services along the M40 corridor through Banbury, Leamington and Warwick revealed it wants to run passenger services along the former Great Central Railway.

It became the first rail company to have its franchise renewed this morning. It beat off a bid to run services between Birmingham Snow Hill and London Marylebone, that pass through south Warwickshire.

And the company set out a list of priorities and new schemes, the most ambitious of which is new line from London to a major parkway station three miles north of Rugby at a motorway junction.

Chiltern operates trains on the Marylebone to Aylesbury line, which uses the bottom 40 miles of the old Central Railway. The next section heading north through Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Warwickshire and Leicestershire currently has stood derelict for 40 years.

Chiltern Railways said today:

“Looking further ahead, and unrelated to the Central Railway proposal, we envisage the reopening of the the railway north from Aylesbury for passengers to a major parkway station on the M1 and M6 in Leicestershire, and to Leicester itself.”

Central Railway, an unrelated speculative company has made an unsuccessful bid to open the line for freight traffic to get lorries off the road, and is about to formally submit new plans.

The rail line was opened in 1899. Uniquely its bridges were raised so that one day it would be able to take trains with lorries on them and head for the Channel Tunnel. Bridges on other rail lines are too low to allow this piggy-back method of transport.

But the idea was so ahead of its time - and it was lost in the Beeching cuts, long before the Channel Tunnel opened. The line closed progressive in the 1960s and the final local services between Rugby, Leicester and Nottingham withdrawn in 1969.

The Central rail line takes a very rural route from Aylesbury thought Brackley and Woodford Halse, and into Warwickshire by the former station at Willoughby then into Rugby running along Percival Road, to the old station on Hillmorton Road.

It continues north along Slade Road and crosses the Avon Valley into Brownsover, but the half-mile aqueduct is long gone. The line would then cut off the Avon Park (Brownsover East) development where every street is named after a town on the old Central Railway.

The line leaves town towards Newton and crosses the M1/M6 area at Shawell where a new parkway station would be constructed. The railway, A426 and M1 then share a corridor towards Lutterworth and into Leicester.

All of the line in Rugby Borough is owned by the council, which bought the majority of it for £5 and turned in into the largest park in the area.

The council has been resolutely opposed to the reopening of the line for the freight scheme.

The project has been very unpopular in the town because of the perceived noise and disturbance from half-mile long freight trains, particularly where it passes homes that have been built in recent years.

The first bid to run a new rail line from Marylebone to the M1-M6 at Shawell (exactly the same length of line as Chiltern now proposes) was rejected in Parliament.

The latest freight plans, which will also have to go to Parliament, makes some changes and even propose a massive diversion around Rugby, passing through the Radio Station site east of Hillmorton as one way of overcoming local objections.

The Great Central Railway had its own station in Hillmorton Road and its line did not run into Rugby Midland station in Murray Road. The lines cross at the Birdcage Bridge, close to Abbey Street.