I love those 'fear' headlines that give a media organisation maximum space to report their 'fears', or someone else's 'fears', or something that may not or is not happening quite like the fear would have it. So forgive me for not clicking on the link, breakfast.
a “cheap and nasty” old route previously used to ferry coal to a power station
aye, well, christ all of these people
I don't want to support Shapps and his sort, but isn't it generally a good idea to make new use of old routes?
I thought they were talking about the Metro extension to Ashington for a minute. That'll use the coal route to Lynemouth.
I think they are talking about the route which served Fiddlers Ferry power station. It originally had a passenger service, but that ceased in the 1960s. Since then it has been a freight route between Warrington and Ditton, but with next to no traffic since the power station closed.
It would be wrong to say that if this route was used as part of a new passenger link between Liverpool and Manchester it would necessarily be "cheap and nasty". That the line of route is already owned by Network Rail might make it cheap-er than one requiring land to be purchased. It would be nasti-er if limitations of using the route meant that speed, frequency of service or connectivity were compromised.
The North is worried because Shapps is proposing a national rail review which will look at service requirements and capital spend, post-Covid. The second stage of HS2 from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds might be significantly scaled back to just short connections to the existing network. Since NPR is predicated on the Manchester and Leeds branches of HS2 being constructed, that might mean NPR is itself scaled back.
Magic Covid Money Tree looking a bit defoliated.
It's not That London so cattle trucks should be fine, they might even throw clean straw in too.
Magic Covid Money Tree looking a bit defoliated.
More like pruned.
I reckon defoliation is correct here. Exfoliation is a terrible thing some women feel they have to do to their faces.
Defoliation is definitely the correct word for removing the leaves from trees etc.
#4 It won't be Metro but heavy rail. And it was the Blyth and Tyne passenger line, as well as carrying coal (and bauxite).
I'm kinda ambivalent about this. There does need to be much improved train service across the Pennines, but I had begun to fear that we would get a new NPR line via Bradford with the minimum of tunnelling possible thanks to Treasury pressure which would likely destroy some beautiful Calderdale valleys.
Money would likely be better spent electrifying everything, sorting out some particular bottlenecks and giving places that don't have them proper metro networks (eg west Yorkshire).
It would be nice if the Manchester metro could be extended too.
The Birmingham Metro gets extended 1 mile in the same time as the Manchester one gets about 20.
I saw the same stretch of track get dug and filled in 5 times.
Meh - just reopen Woodhead, and put more carriages on the commuter trains.
I saw the same stretch of track get dug and filled in 5 times.
A lot of that digging and refilling of trenches would have been moving the various services - telecom and power cables, gas and water mains, etc - away from the route.
Meh - just reopen Woodhead
Someone (it was the CEGB) has used the tunnel of the former electrified railway as a route for high voltage electric grid cables.
#18: I expect so. But the inability to do them all at once, is probably why Birmingham's tram network is a fraction of the size of Manchester's.