GOING back to the drawing board on plans for a new railway station for York could set it back more than a decade, transport chiefs have warned.

Work on £4.5 million station in Haxby have been put on hold because of the uncertainty surrounding government funding, with City of York Council saying it will not be in a position to move them forward before the autumn.

The authority hopes the station could ultimately be included on the TransPennine network and run trains to York, Scarborough, Leeds and Manchester.

The Department for Transport is reviewing “uncommitted” schemes accepted by the previous Government for possible funding allocations between now and 2015-16.

Coun Steve Galloway, the council’s executive member for city strategy, said: “This is an important public transport initiative and one which I hope will get the go-ahead when future central Government funding allocations are known in the autumn “Larger, more expensive schemes linking additional villages and/or providing a ‘gateway’ access station may be reasonable longer-term aspirations, but we know that we cannot, under existing rules, substitute significantly different schemes without going through the bid process from square one again.

“This would mean a delay in the project of more than ten years.

“Even under existing spending limits, the Regional Transport Board did not have any headroom in its programmes before 2023.

“A radical change of direction on this project would, therefore, delay work commencing for more than a decade.”

The favoured site for the station is a patch of land south of the level crossing at Towthorpe Road and Station Road and the possibility of also creating a rail halt at York Hospital has been suggested in the past.