Trains Back on the Tracks!: After 40 yrs, Misery Metro must now be buried never again to be resurrected

Friday 14 January 2022

After 40 yrs, Misery Metro must now be buried never again to be resurrected

Dear Kath (Hartley - Chair of TDC)

After 40 yrs, Misery Metro must now be buried never again to be resurrected

I think Kath, you must now speak out to immediately cancel all further work on Misery Metro extensions. You must bring to an end the biggest and longest-running financial/transport scandal in the history of the UK.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE, IRREFUTABLE FACTS OF THE CASE

Misery Metro construction is ten times more expensive per Km than rebuilding the 50 Kms Borders Railway when it opened in Sept 2015.
Metro One has seen accidents that have involved death and injury that would never have occurred if the mainline railway had been used for its original design purpose - regional and commuter trains from Shrewsbury via Wolverhampton.
Metro One failed to connect with even Wolverhampton Bus Station, let alone the railway station!
You failed to simply put back the commuter trains between Wolverhampton railway station and Snow Hill Station.
You failed to complete Metro One in the 1990s, in order to bring it to 'Grand Central Underground Tucked Away In The Basement Of The John Lewis Store Station'.
£750 m for a cosmetic tart-up of this station that never provided the much-needed extra tunnels and lines, even in the 1990s.
When the Metro One extension was completed in 2016, the job was done so incompetently that the tram tracks had to be replaced after only five years.
To date, I believe, the trams are still not running beyond Bull Street after failures in the construction of the trams that closed the one and only tram line in 40 years of trying to get many more than the one line!
The Westside extension should have been completed and opened by the beginning of December. Trams are still not running on the 13 January 2022, I believe.
That extension has well and truly mucked up public transport in west Brum. Eleven different bus routes are now excluded from Five Ways Underpass and most (if not all) of Broad Street. A diversion through narrow side roads parked with cars continues for hundreds of buses every week.
WBHE aka the Dudley Tram to Merry Hill, continues its snail-like pace of construction on the UK's only mothballed, principal mainline railway of 120 Kms (74 miles) in the heart of the country - the Black Country and its one million population. This is incompetent idiocy.
Crossing the unused, wasted but fully built, 120 Kms Black Country Railway in Staffordshire is the £106 billion High Scam 2 Fast To Stop railway. This is also incompetent idiocy at a time of the climate emergency that you all declared in 2019.
The blatant hypocrisy seen by our top leaders in national government is affecting West Midlands regional government, too.
£7 m/Km for rebuilding the Borders Railway in Sept 2015.
£21 m/Km for M6 Toll when it opened in Dec 2003 that included this railway bridge for the 120 Kms Black Country Ghost Railway to use.
M6 Toll banner 01.jpg
£75 m/Km for the Magnificent Metro 2 Km extension to close Five Ways Underpass and Broad Street to buses and self-powered bikes.
£133 m/Km for the Super Magnificent Metro Eastside Extension. This is truly scandalous and shocking misgovernment.
£15 BILLION to 2040 is now being spent for 150 miles of underground and overground Metro, its eight lines and, 380 tram stops.
I have listed the conversion of the 120 Kms Black Country (Bypass Brum) Principal Mainline Railway into three different kinds of trams, as the seventh and last Dudley borough railway to be destroyed.
Even with this destruction of 6.7 Kms out of 56 Kms between Stourbridge and Burton on Trent, that still leaves 49.3 Kms for the trains that were so successful for 100 years. GO TO IT!