Campaigners have raised a 450-name petition in a bid to get a railway station reopened.

The petition has been organised by the Bradford Rail Users' Group (BRUG) as part of its long-running campaign to secure a new station in Low Moor.

The petition will be presented to Bradford Council and possibly the West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Authority, better known as Metro.

The rail users group, which is keen to speed up the long-awaited reopening of the station, said the south of Bradford was desperately in need of a station to help ease road congestion.

Jim Jennings, a member of the group, said there were no stations on the ten-mile stretch of line between Bradford and Halifax, compared to five stations in the nine miles between Bradford and Keighley.

In 2000, Metro's Rail Plan identified five stations to be opened in West Yorkshire, including one in Low Moor.

Mr Jennings said: "If the station reopened, it would benefit the residents of Low Moor, Oakenshaw and the Spen Valley, as well as the workforce of Ciba Chemicals, where there are over 900 employees and contractors on a site that is just a few minutes walk from the proposed station."

The rail users' group stepped up its campaign in September when it called a public meeting to publicise its proposals.

The meeting was attended by more than 75 people, including David Hogarth, Metro's director of development.

Mr Hogarth took the opportunity to assure residents that Low Moor would get a new £3 million rail station. He said the station was on Metro's priority list of four stations to be reopened in West Yorkshire.

But he said delays in reopening the station had been caused by time-tabling difficulties, adding that trains from Leeds and Manchester would have become unreliable if an extra stop had been put in.

He said that up to four ideas were being considered to solve the timetabling dilemma.

In October, Labour councillors tabled a motion at a full meeting of Bradford Council in a bid to speed up development of the new station.

The Conservative-led Council reaffirmed its commitment to supporting the development of a new station and asked for the re-designing of the track outside Bradford Interchange to be brought forward from 2011.

The revamp of Mill Lane junction could assist plans to reopen Low Moor station by improving the speed of trains leaving and approaching Bradford, thereby cancelling out the time that would be lost by an extra stop at Low Moor.