Letter sent to residents of roads off Dundonald Road.

A Cochrane Road resident recently contacted us about noise and disturbance from the goods yard by the railway.

A new high and ugly barbed fence has been erected between the yard and the houses. Large trucks have been parked by the fence, and machinery used very close to the houses. This causes noise and fumes, with reports of activity at unsociable hours overnight.

Therefore, we have:

• Written to Merton Council’s planning department to ask if planning permission is needed for the new fence and what restrictions there are on the use of the yard.
• Put Merton’s environmental health department in touch with the resident, so they can monitor what’s going on; and
• Spoken to the yard’s owners Colas Rail about the company they’ve let their yard to, to see if they are aware of what’s going on, and what they can do to stop it. The firm leasing the site from Colas is called CVU. After we got in touch, CVU have written to residents about an ‘open evening’ on Thursday 20 April at 6.30pm at their Dundonald Road Depot. It seems likely that lots of people will be away over Easter and miss this meeting organised at short notice. We’ve asked them to think about doing something later in the month (too).

What you can do:

• Tell us your views and experiences of this – including details of any disturbance, so we can raise this with CVU – especially if you can’t attend the meeting.
• Let us know if you’d like to be kept informed about this issue – email [email protected].
• Come to the meeting if you are able and make sure CVU know what you think.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if we can help in any other way.