Dear David and wife, whose name I failed to ask for yesterday. Copied to Maggie Simpson and Jed Marson.
Thank you for making me realise how important hydrogen is for trains and larger HGVs. Your elucidation was most helpful. I had, in fact, picked up on hydrogen trains six years ago but I was unsure of my facts when we spoke last night, so remained silent until I could check today. See my photos and the published letter, below.
Please see the bigger picture and the full length to Worcester and on to Oxford and London, to help Brum by bypassing it to the west - one of only two North-South railways between Brum and the Irish Sea
It is this Railfuture map
that shows the full 120 Kms Black Country Railway
from Worcester to Derby via Stourbridge, Dudley, Walsall and Lichfield. I know you said you want to see it opened one small step at a time. However, I would plead with you that its national importance is only recognised if it is taken as a whole and opened as a complete line for both freight and passenger use. It is vital for freight to take the pressure off the Camp Hill line (Kings Norton, Kings Heath, Moseley, Grand Central) once the three stations and half hour diesel service is reinstated in 2025 (?) However, I never succeeded in getting Maggie Simpson of the Rail Freight Group to take an interest and help me.
Are there any other rail freight organisations I could try, David?
HYDROGEN
I was promoting this hydrogen train six years ago in my many emails trying to get your local mainline back in use by saying it would be ideal for our 120 Kms Black Country Railway!
I've pasted my letter to Rail Professional magazine at the bottom of this page:
When we spoke last night, I thought that I had read about the hydrogen (or similar) train sometime last decade but could not remember for sure. I wrote emails at the time saying it would be ideal for our regional railway from Worcester to Derby, if only the middle section of 56 Kms could be completed with commuter, regional and freight trains. However this was not to be. BECAUSE OF:
METRO TAKEOVER!
This is from an email I wrote earlier today to a LibDem activist I met before yesterday evening's meeting started, Jed Marson, Vice Chair, Campaigns, Green Liberal Democrats who is from Hallow, a village north of Worcester. A vital city on our forgotten principal mainline railway. Jed wrote:
"Glad to meet you this evening. I note your concern about the jamming of major intercity corridors with trams, potentially blocking routes for trains. I will engage in the LibDems party to find out how we can do both."
MY REPLY:
"We already have trams and trains in seven places in the UK out of a good few more than seven. Unfortunately, our taxes have been misused and wasted to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds in both price and in weight of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), over 42 years, to give us a miserly 25 Kms of tramways of which 18 Kms are on the first mainline railway destroyed. The second, would you believe, one of only two between Brum and the Irish Sea is being turned into the world's first TRAIN-TRAM-TRAIN mainline railway "of national strategic significance"!!
"Actually, the world's first TRAIN-TRAM-CYCLE/WALKWAY-TRAIN mainline railway of 120 Kms between Worcester and Derby. How absolutely absurd. Not at all. You will just have to hire a bike between Walsall and Lichfield - a great idea to keep passengers in trim!
"Yet again, the UK becomes a laughing stock around the world - Brexit, HS2, two mainline railways downgraded to tramways.
"What is the point of replacing and duplicating buses and trains with trams when we desperately need the two main modes to be as good as they are on the mainland of Europe? Those two main modes, in addition, have nowhere near come to being finished as electrified modes, have they? The authorities have been diverted by the lure of trams which we all do love to ride on - me most of all! But it has been a fatal and foolish fascination, don't you think, Jed?
"We've seen the destruction of railway lines for trams and buildings. For example, for over 20 years, up until 2015/16, the Camp Hill Line was designated to be given over to trams! All you good politicians and transport experts then changed your minds and decided to use it for TRAINS, after all, and to rebuild three stations. Yet, that cannot even be done because, I think, you all love extravagant trams more than trains and ran out of money!! The three stations won't be finished until next year, now.
"Trams and trains, I think, means:
- Duplication or replacement/conversion of perfectly adequate buses and trains that need to have electrification finished.
- Very high greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from all the steel and concrete that has to be manufactured for the steel tracks and the concrete that they get laid in.
- Places like Kidderminster have the most disgraceful and slum looking bus station imaginable, while Brum luxuriates in the second most expensive transport mode, per Km, to construct after HS2.
- I see Metro as very desirable but just far too greedy and extravagant. Swish, swanky and smooth but the wrong priority.
- Use the £15 billion for Metro's 150 miles and eight lines to restore our railways instead of destroying them.
- Use the money for insulating the homes of the poorest; for Fare-Free Public Transport for all (and not just for my age group); to build homes at High Plateau, Merry Hill SC; for transforming the 25 Kms Black Country Cycle/Walk Mudway, the UK's grandest, longest and most important cycle-walk mudway.
- Use some of the money to finish the Black Country Urban Forest and to do the ecological survey at Daniels Land, Merry Hill SC to see if it is an SSSI.
- Above all, free rides on the bus, train and tram for all you youngsters!"
My banner near Brownhills:
The steel train tracks nicked by metal thieves! Looking towards your city, David. This is the planned cycle/walkway:
David, Can you and your wife, with Jed and I, promote the UK's only unfinished railway "of national strategic significance"? Is there any chance of us working together to get something done? Since the 1990s I've been working on my own but, since last decade, with the help of a wonderful train driver, Dave Parsons who lives nearby, understands and agrees with me.
Very best wishes, whatever you both think!
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