from Jane Haynes

Hi Tim 

I think this is definitely worthy of your time and energy. The new stretch of tram planned to connect curzon street station to the new Birmingham sports quarter, less than a mile, is estimated to cost £4-500 million. It does appear to involve (sic; much) money, when cheaper transport options seem to exist. 

I’m currently laid low with a holiday-acquired virus that’s caused a bad throat and chest infection so my return to work may be delayed a few days but badger me again soon if I’ve not been back to you. 

Kind regards 

Jane 

Help the poor by giving them half a dozen transport modes and fares to pay when I pay nothing!

David, as a person wanting social justice and the Kingdom of God on earth, how does our taxes bringing trams (a wealth flaunting, fabulously expensive "bus on rails", as the UK Tram promotion group in Transport HQ puts it) to the B'ham City Football ground in yet another "deprived area", help the people there with high food and energy bills in their leaky, uninsulated, fossil fueled homes?  The colossal expense of trams to the smart new Sports Quarter (to help the poor pay their bills!).

How do trams replacing trains and buses bring money to the poor of Chelmsley Wood who are wanting help with everyday bills?

Why not use the billions to give the lot of them the Fare-Free Public Transport I've had for 18.5 years?

After Operation Noah green investment workshop

Dear David (Hewlett)

Very many thanks for sending me your piece.  I love writing, too much, as you see below so please ignore/delete what is of no interest!

Yours is a quite proper, ethical and ingenious interpretation of the parable.  However, is it really the kind of parable that someone like Jesus or St Francis of Assisi would have told?  And what is the significance of it being placed immediately before the death of Christ, unless it is all to do with his Return.  Yet, the teaching has nothing to do with the Second Coming, it seems to me.  My wife, who is one of the three leaders of our church, says it is all to do with Jesus' Return.  But I don't get it!

On the face of it, the parable is a strange one for Jesus to tell when all the rest of His teaching is exactly in line with what you are teaching from it, viz: money is a fat lot of use once life support systems are so wrecked from human exploitation and greed they cannot support life on earth.

I also want our faith leaders to be as brave as me in denouncing what I see as sheer greedy wickedness.  The UK is one of the top five or six wealthy nations in the world out of nearly 200.  We are so close to the USA we cannot distance ourselves from them to become more like non-aligned Switzerland or the ROI which is wonderfully standing up to that despicable, very wicked pariah and rogue State of Israel.  Fully backed by America and 90% fully supported by Labour, LibDem and Tory governments in our own land.

There is more greed with our wealth being misused on yet more modes of transport to complicate and slow a public transport journey - six or seven rail modes and three or four bus modes I have now recorded!

My ancient 'Lion Handbook to the Bible' (first published in 1973) says, as you have, "the talent was a large amount of money" and "Our future depends on how we use what we have been given in this life."  Therefore, fair enough for Jesus to say this at the end of his own life.

What we have been given in this life are vast reserves of finite fossil fuels which took 350 million years to be formed and which gives the top rich nations untold wealth. In our folly and hubris, we are ripping through the lot in less than 500 years of burning to change the chemical composition of the atmosphere for the worse.

I am disappointed by my faith leaders who seem unable to stand up to clear wrong doing in our transport policy as I have recorded here:

The Oxford Botley Road Bridge Scandal is WIDESPREAD

Black Country (Wolverhampton, Walsall, Dudley, Sandwell) transport scandal of monorail destroyed for future tramway, now being built on the railway (featured in my photos, below of the line in Staffordshire)

 "of national strategic significance".pdf

This goes back to 2003 - nothing has changed for the better!

 Railfuture's full map.pdf

Metro tram destroys grass embankment taking Dudley No 1 Canal and my vertical guerrilla garden from the 1990s.

 6 glorious white trees.jpg

MASSIVE COST FOR THE TOTALLY WRONG SCHEME!:  Over £1 billion for 10 Kms (6 miles) when this, so far, 40 year old project is completed in the 2030s after 50 years of hard endeavour!

 M6 Toll photos folder

Bridges, tunnels, underpasses, flyovers built to take fast intercity trains between London and Edinburgh now take:

• dog walkers and cyclists;
• two short tramways totalling 6 Kms;
• 2 Kms test track for Very Light Rail trams;
• freight trains between Port Talbot and Round Oak Steel Terminal, Brierley Hill.

Thus, HR (heavy rail), LR (light rail) and VLR (very light rail) on a former Paddington to Edinburgh railway.  Three rail modes for the latest craze of Multi-Modal Mixed Up Railways at the Dept for Transport and Tram/Transport HQ at 16 Summer Lane, Birmingham.

Twenty years ago, three directors of UK Tram Ltd were senior officers in Centro (now Transport for West Midlands).

No wonder we are getting the UK's tram renaissance in the W Mids:  Jan 2020, £15 billion announcement for 150 miles, 8 lines and 380 trams stops.  UK's £3 TRILLION debt is thriving.

TIM WELLER  28 Hunnington Cres  HALESOWEN  B63 3DJ    0791 380 4363

PS   More scandal here to add to the gaiety of the nation:

 Trumpland Transport in the West Midlands since 1981

and transport consultant, Mat Taylor:

 "these costs are reportedly three times the global average." Transport Consultant

UK has eviscerated international humanitarian law

Campaign Against Arms Trade launches today its report: "Dead Letter: how the UK government’s arms export policies have eviscerated international humanitarian law", by Katie Fallon and Sam Perlo-Freeman..

Over the past 10 years or more, the UK has continued to arm Saudi Arabia during its brutal bombing campaign and blockade of Yemen, and Israel during its genocide in Gaza. Drawing on the experience of three court cases challenging these decisions, the report unravels the reasoning and approach to decision-making successive governments have used to justify these egregious arms sales, and shows how this has effectively rendered international humanitarian law - the laws of war, designed to protect civilians in conflict, irrelevant, while also nullifying the UK's obligations under the Genocide Convention and the ATT.

to WWCT - Sustrans

SCANDAL, ABSURDITY AND WASTE par excellence!

I met Stephen Ralph (I think that was the name he said) on the former principal mainline railway between London and Edinburgh, now the Walsall to Lichfield Cycle-Walkway (!!) yesterday.  See map, here where I've written 'Passenger line still wasted':

 Railfuture's full map.pdf

He was supervising, on behalf of WWCT, the work you had paid the tree clearance company to do.  Is that correct?

Are you helping out Network Rail in funding tree clearance work on the cycle-walkway in Clayhanger, Brownhills?

  

Which organisations are responsible, as owners of the trackbed, if it is not Network Rail?

Why is a registered charity which is dependent on donations, legacies and charitable activities to raise money, paying for necessary work which the owner should be funding?

Why is your organisation failing to point out to the authorities the grotesque absurdity and waste of all the bridges, flyovers and tunnels, built for heavy rail, on this "railway of national strategic significance"

 "of national strategic significance".pdf

not being used for passenger and freight trains to relieve chronic and worsening road traffic congestion on surrounding motorways and main roads but, is being turned into a dog walkers and cyclists paradise?

By next decade, on completion of a truncated HS2, £100 billion of taxpayers money will have been spent on pointlessly adding to the UK's £3 trillion national debt.  By destroying the 56 Kms of double track railway between Stourbridge Jct and Burton on Trent you are wasting resources and further accelerating the planet's human caused Climate Emergency.  What you have done is called, the latest craze, Multi-modal Transport and Mixed Up/Use Railways - officially by the DtT!

In addition, on this principal mainline railway, between the A5 and M6 Toll, I saw for myself, that years ago work had started to electrify the line.  SEE MY PHOTOS in this folder: 

 M6 Toll photos folder

Are you able to view them?  PLEASE REPLY!

Why is your guilty silence so deafening in failing to accept the truth and accuracy of what I have been writing about since about 1990?

To Back the Track

Back the Track has converted the former mainline railway between Walsall and Lichfield into a cycle-walkway, rather than campaigning for commuter, regional and intercity trains to return on the line. View these two photos:

Turning a principal mainline railway "of national strategic significance" into a wonderful cycle-walkway in order, at a later date, to convert it back to its previous 100 year success as a mainline railway, is as nonsensical as this: converting the SAME railway further south into a Light Rail Metro tramway and Very Light Rail test track, as the best way to return the commuter, regional and intercity trains on the UK's last mainline between London and Edinburgh via the Black Country!

Here is the official rationale for such Trump-like stupidity from a Top Senior officer at Tram HQ, 16 Summer Lane, Brum:-

"Light rail investment provides the basis for restoring heavy rail services at the appropriate time" - Tom Magrath, Passenger Services Director at Centro, in a letter to me, dated September 2000.

Does dear Tom now work for Alstom or Back the Track? He must do! Or for Emperor Trump? 

23 Kms of Metro by 2023 took 42 years of MPs and councillors oversight/incompetence!

I started planting the trees, shrubs and climbers in the 1990s.

The 1980s was the decade when I started reading and writing about Midland Metro.  In 1981 it was to be 200 Kms of tramway on railway lines and roads by the year 2000.  That never happened.  The first tramway opened in 1999 when we got 20 Kms of which 18 Kms was on the first mainline railway destroyed.  The total by 2023 was 23 Kms after 42 years of hard endeavour - supposedly!

Nothing since then, although Phase 1 of the Dudley Tram was supposed to be open to the public in 2024.  It is taking seven years to build 6 Kms of tramway, mostly on the second, this time, principal mainline railway destroyed.  A shocking and unacceptable performance.  After seven years it is still not open - perhaps, by Christmas THIS year!!

I have measured the route from Merry Hill tram stop to Cottage St.  It is 500 metres, so therefore the correct cost estimate is £50 million.  By opening in 2028 to Merry Hill, the cost from Wednesbury to MH will be over £1 billion for 10 Kms (6 miles).  This, to supposedly help get the national, regional and commuter trains back on the line.  This cuck handed way of reopening officially safeguarded railways, like ours, 

 "of national strategic significance".pdf

is unheard of anywhere else in the world.  "Light rail investment provides the basis for restoring heavy rail services at the appropriate time."  (letter from Tom Magrath, Passenger Services Director, Sept 2000).  In other words, trams first to get trains later!  Trumpland Transport, as recorded in all its horror and humour, here:

 Trumpland Transport in the West Midlands since 1981

A further scandal is that Midland Metro Alliance tram schemes appear to be three times more expensive per Km to construct than any other scheme in the world, according transport consultant, Mat Taylor, as here:

 CNNCT Costs Comment September 2024.pdf

Mat wrote on page 2:  "these costs are reportedly three times the global average."

No wonder the Climate Emergency is accelerating away so nicely!

Mixed Up/Use Railways is a section in Dept for Transport!!

Thanks, Sat for this write up.  Excellent work done so quickly and you have been, almost, the first FoE (or non-FoE!) person to take an interest.  THANKS.

As a deep Green and lifetime member of FoE from the 1980s, my own feeling is that rather than multi-modal public transport, meaning trams, which is all the rage in Edinburgh, Nottingham, West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Cardiff and Croydon, we need a first class bus and train service, with trains using the surviving railway lines and not trams, as is happening.  Plus FFPT = Fair-Free Public Transport.

When you argue for a new route for the new tramway ...

 ... (it was, once a new route for the new, devastating motorway), you are tacitly admitting defeat and inviting the thing to be built.

If the whole thing is wrong or obviously unnecessary, best to be strong and oppose it.

Make clear that a new route is your last ditch strategy when all else fails.

Some wrongs are so very wrong, silence is deafening!

A SCANDAL LAUNCHED IN 1981 by Centro and the W Midlands County Council (now WMCA) - turning two former mainline railways in congested W Midlands into tramways and, still building the second to destroy Nature further!

Some causes are so important that whether it is impossible to win, they still must be fought - always non-violently (shockingly, has to be emphasised in the violent West).

Even if it is impossible to stop our good friends and major ally from slaughtering Palestinians at the rate of 70x7 what Hamas manage at the peak of Israel's war on them, it is still the morally right thing to do to kick up a fuss about the slaughter of the wholly innocents in Gaza, Judea, Samaria and Lebanon.  Killings done by us - Jews, Muslims, Christians, all faiths and of none here in the good ol' (self) righteous UK!

Similarly, even if it was impossible to stop our fellow Christian nation Germany from their racist behaviour towards the Jews, the right action was wholesale, committed action to oppose, by all lawful means, the singling out of the Jews and the other minorities from 1933 onwards.

Our failure to criticise and oppose and use BDS in the early 30s against Germany, perhaps, contributed to the holocaust - and 6 million killed.  All to maintain a guilty silence of shocking, 'No way will I get involved.  It's not our country'.  'Nothing to do with me, Guv.'

Even in a trivial case right on our doorstep, the final 600 metres of the Dudley Tram into Cottage Street Brierley Hill, costing £60 m in price and in weight of GHG emissions must be opposed.  Because of:

1. The seriousness of the Climate Emergency.
2. We are actually accelerating the horrors when we refuse to cut back on luxuries like a tram up to the Merry Hill tram stop, still 140 metres from the main entrance to the shops.  There remains the bus from High St, Brierley Hill to Merry Hill bus station, right outside the south entrance.
3. Refusal to object means complicity in the stupidity of replacing a principal mainline railway "of national strategic significance" with 22 mph average speed trams.
4. Wasting £60 m for a tram (simply "a bus on rails", as the UK Tram Ltd conceded in 2016) is ratcheting up the runaway greenhouse effect by 60 million pounds in weight, as a very rough rule of thumb.
5. It is greedy, self indulgent, wealth flaunting at over £1 billion for only 10 Kms when the 10 Kms to Merry Hill is finally opened for the public to use (2030? would make 50 years to build it!)
6. A shocking waste of public funds when servicing our national debt is getting ever more expensive.  A deficit of £3 trillion and rising.
7. The money (£15 BILLION at 2020 prices for 150 miles of yet more trams) must be better spent on slashing GHG emissions from every building in the land, URGENTLY.
8. Or, for free regional public transport for EVERYONE which I have had for 18 years, I'm so old!

Tramways accelerating Climate Emergency

Fighting the 2020 announcement of £15 BILLION for  conversion of nature/gardens, buses, trains into 150 miles, 8 lines,  380 tram stops INTO TRAMWAYS is accelerating the Climate Emergency. It is urgent to cut GHG emissions not boost them unnecessarily. 

Please explain why you all refuse to support/help me in anyway whatsoever! Timweller1@gmail.com

Two kinds of Back the Track

The well known Back the Track is the large, hard working group which has succeeded in their aim of reopening the UK's last principal mainline railway "of national strategic significance" for walkers and cyclists between Brownhills and Lichfield.

Then there is me! My blog, 'Trains Back on the Tracks', with one train driver, have been spending very many years failing to convince others, and the authorities, to simply put passenger and freight trains back on the full length of 56 Kms between Stourbridge Jct station and Lichfield City station. 

The upshot is now six ways of getting about on ONE former, successful for 100 years, London to Edinburgh principal, mainline railway:-

Heavy rail freight trains to near Merry Hill Shopping Centre;

Light Rail Metro trams on two short sections;

Very Light Rail test track through Dudley's Castle Hill tunnel, between the two short sections;

Walking, Cycling and Wheeling  makes 6!

Please walk the new cycle-walkway in South Staffordshire but also keep writing for the Black Country Cycle-Walkway from NW Wolverhampton to Stourbridge ring road to also be finished to the same high standard throughout.

Make fun of the well meaning authorities mixed up Trump-like railway!

Make gentle fun of the authorities' so well meaning but mixed up, Trump-like railway!

There's even a Government department called Mixed (Up) Use Railway!!

On Saturday 19 Sept, 2 pm at KFC, The Boulevard, above/back of the Odeon, Merry Hill Shopping Centre. 

To see a vertical guerrilla garden and the 100 year old successful railway

 "of national strategic significance".pdf

which has been broken up into six different transport uses over 56 Kms (35 miles):

freight railway to Waterfront and Lichfield to Burton on Trent;

Light Rail tramway on two short sections;

Very Light Rail test track on 2 Kms in Dudley town;

Walking;

Cycling;

Wheeling - all 3 in Walsall and Staffordshire to Lichfield;

and healthy fresh air/nothing in places!

Thanks to our transport experts.  Involves a walk to see it from a road bridge on the Dudley Road.  This is on the north side of the Waterfront Marina, by the old Blue Brick pub now closed.  Near Wallows Road.  It is worth seeing the 100 year old successful London, Black Country, Edinburgh mainline railway - that WAS, before the scrapyard of the Dept for Transport!

Email to Jayne Pilkington, Dudley Council

Good morning, Jayne and Vicky

My previous emails have already put in writing my suggestions but repeated here to avoid any misunderstanding.

Thanks so much for your brilliant help and interest yesterday.  It was great to see the public realm improvements in Brierley Hill, too.  It was so worthwhile.  This is my understanding as to what I think you said you would do.

1. You would speak to colleagues to make progress on the multi-named but, what I call, the 25 Kms Black Country Cycle-Walkway from Stourbridge Ring Road to NW Wolverhampton.  Particularly, in the very worst 3 Kms section from the border with S Staffs DC to Pensnett Nature Reserve/Fens Pool Avenue, Brierley Hill.  In the folder below, is a photo of something I came across this year after it had decades of burial in undergrowth.  Pensnett Railway Walk and Kingswinford Railway Walk were probably created in the 70s or 80s.  Dudley Council soon lost interest - from the state of the walkways ever since.  Now, a shameful, slum-like disgrace when the route is a delight in the  other two council sections where it is well used.
2. Should there be an NCN or NCR number for, at least, the better section north of our border with S Staffs up to NW Wolverhampton and the Staffordshire Canal?
3. You would speak to colleagues about the urgent Climate Emergency measure of using open spaces on the Dudley section of the A 456, Manor Way/Halesowen Bypass, to reinstate long awaited landscaping on the wide central reservation, to extend the remnant of thick woodland opposite the Shell filling station.  In addition, the other remnant needs extending eastwards where the cherry trees are from the Manor Way/Manor Lane junction to the eastern side of the Manor Way/Lapal Lane South junction.
4. The dozen or so cherry trees were my reward for years of writing for 100% reinstatement, earlier this century.  I achieved perhaps 25%!  But I think, those cherry trees prove how right I was about the thick woodland cover, admittedly for only a short time, before carriageway resurfacing destroyed so much.
5. My £1,000 will go directly to the Woodland Trust, to offset council costs, IF the following is done:
6. Woodland Trust trees and shrubs are used for the reinstatement for these three vital areas:-
7. Extending the two remnants of woodland cover, as indicated above.  There is still plenty of space for suitable trees and shrubs, purchased from the Woodland Trust.
8. Grange roundabout is finally landscaped, not with sculptures as once intended but by Nature.  At least grass with an annual mowing to maintain visibility, of course.
9. The area of land alongside Lapal Lane South, on its western side, is smartened up with additional suitable planting.  Purchased from the Woodland Trust.  Including the triangle area in front of the 5G mast and adjoining footpath.
10. Future lawn mowing of grass alongside Manor Way on the carriageway edges only, instead of the whole central reservation width.

FUTURE PLANS I'm suggesting:

The unfortunate looking Halesowen Asda car park roundabout needs to look as wonderful as the Halesowen in Bloom plantings in the town.  Photos, here:

 Asda roundabout folder

Are you able to view them?

Our very well used Laurel subway to be left intact, please when the Pool Road car park is demolished.  It is wonderful to walk under busy roads separated from all the traffic and therefore, not adding to the air pollution from vehicles braking and accelerating for walkers to cross.

The Summer Hill Pelican crossing to also be left in its present position.  Please!

I would love to meet with Luane to hear more about her work on Geo-trails - on site, preferably.

With best wishes

Tim   (Weller 0791 380 4363)

We caused immigration and would do it ourselves under the same circumstances!

For centuries we've been all over the world to rule over other peoples, to claim them for ourselves, to make them work for us for nothing as enslaved then, indentured labour. Members of the British Empire, so Brits like us. They are here because we first went there. But there is no way we are going to take our fair share of migrants fleeing our Western wars and Western wealth bringing dangerously disturbed climates from fossil fuel burning changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

My response to Pastor Michael Youseff

Remember the Way of Jesus. Repent of the way of the world of control, domination, coercion, violence. Obey His teaching in the Sermon on the Mount - moral, lawful and always non violence without exception. 

You can't beat evil by doing a bigger evil. This is always the hypocritical, coercive, violent way of the world, the church and the state. It brings never ending violence and war and hastens the End. Totally illogical, suicidal, ecocidal and very foolish! It is the way of dear Michael Youseff.

It was Michael who was advising his flock to vote Trump in 2024 - the very antithesis of Jesus' Way. I heard the interview with Ed Stourton. Astonishing! Michael also needs to repent, especially in such an influential position. My Linda, along with 100s of thousands, hang on his every word.

Israeli rights group B’Tselem

Israeli rights group B’Tselem says Israeli actions in the occupied West Bank form part of a broader project aimed at eliminating Palestinians as a distinct people.

In a new report titled The Elimination Project, the group identifies five interconnected Israeli tactics and policies: “violence, ethnic cleansing, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction”.

Mash of FoE local action groups

Dear Masharof

This is excellent stuff.  Please add that HMG and regional governments, too, must oppose the renaissance of tramways in three out of four countries in the UK.

They are adding to the £3 trillion deficit and high interest rates to pay back these loans.

They are replacing buses and trains when it is these modes that must have the money to boost their use and to finish the conversion to electric.

And trains back on the remnant of remaining railway lines in the UK.

Remember that the tram is a highly extravagant/greedy "bus on rails" (UK tram promotion group in 2016 at the time of the Croydon tram crash).

The money saved must go for regional Fare-Free Public Transport and English free buses which I have had for 18 years (I'm now 78).

And the money used to entice/bribe car commuters out of their tin boxes onto public transport, as here:​

 Bus and businesses at the centre of a virtuous circle

​

​Keep up the good work.

Moral depravity at the heart of ...

... the Judeo-Christian world for the last 1700 years and Islam for the last 1400.

Having been steeped in the Bible all my life and read both Bowen and Bibi and the Quran less diligently, I am horrified by the behaviour of my ancestors.

Exploring, trading, grabbing land for ourselves, hijacking their people and taking them off to other parts of our world wide empire to work in appalling conditions, not for low wages but for nothing and, living in deplorable homes.  300 years of the despicable British slave trade ended by paying the millionaire slave owners yet more millions! Yet more millions in compensation and nothing for the injured party!

N​ext, coercion, force, violence; control, domination and warfare by the Western/Judeo-Christian nations on their subjugated people for so much of the world's population.