Today, it was the announcement of a spate of railway improvement projects including the electrification of the Trans-Pennine route, Manchester-Leeds.
Bizarrely, this would be the second trans-Pennine route to be electrified, the first, via Woodhead, was energised in the 1950s and then destroyed in the 1980s.
That was such a waste. But the modern trans-Pennine route is completely over-stuffed and electrification offers opportunities for capacity enhancement which are long overdue. Although oddly they appear to be proposing to electrify only as far as Leeds, not all the way to Hull.
I suspect it's one of those schemes which will grow a little as it gets started.
The second major railway project -- completely unexpected -- was a commitment to the reopening of part of the former "Varsity Line", the cross-country railway connecting Oxford and Cambridge that was stupidly closed in the 1960s.
Sensibly they're starting with the restoration of the easier, western end, from Oxford to Bedford via Milton Keynes. Over much of its length this will effectively involve the construction of a completely new railway.
It makes me furious that NuLab spent almost all its time in office thinking up arguments against electrification (apparently we'll all be using hydrogen fuel cells within a decade, so electrification would have been a waste of money), and against honouring their commitment to re-nationalisation. Fuckers.
3 comments:
If this sends a load of pacers to their long overdue death then it can't come a minute too soon!!!
What do they do at Leeds. Get out and push the rest of the way?
DfT subsequently confessed that they'd made a monumental cock-up, and that electrification will continue beyond Leeds to York. Which makes sense. They really should go all the way to Hull, though -- but the Tories seems to be on an electrification roll at the moment (thank God!), so I guess that will come.
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