DUDLEY AND SANDWELL TRAMS MAKE THE 120 KMS PRINCIPAL MAINLINE RAILWAY WORTHLESS!
120 KMS WORCESTER, BLACK COUNTRY, DERBY RAILWAY "of national strategic significance" will lose its national importance. Slow, frequent stopping trams will block the mainline for faster regional trains and, intercity trains will be impossible. This is NOT what the train travellers over the first one hundred years enjoyed. This is no way to respond to the climate emergency that must be tackled. And very foolish to waste the 50 Kms for many more years, perhaps even decades. In addition, Dudley is the largest town in the UK, by population, without a railway station.
It will be the world's first train-tram-train mainline railway and no wonder! Fast trains, eventually from Worcester to Brierley Hill; change for slow, frequent stopping trams to Wednesbury for the 17 tram stops in 10.7 Kms; change at Wednesbury for quick trains to Walsall, Lichfield and Derby. This makes for a nightmare journey, forcing through passengers to continue to go via congested Brum's 'Grand Central and Diesel Perfumed Station Tagged Along As An Afterthought In The Basement Of The John Lewis Store', station!!
It really does spoil, for ever, the UK's only supposedly 'safeguarded', mainline railway "of national strategic significance", that is essential to bypass Brum's railway stations and to give something to Brum's neighbours in the equally large population of the Black Country.
MISSION STATEMENT
Burton to Bristol via Brierley Hill; Derby to Devon via Dudley - by TRAIN not "bus on rails" trams as they are wanting; nor with new extended cycle-walkway, as volunteers are working on! Trams good; trains best; very slow 120 Kms train-tram-train railway is barely better than nothing (really, a nightmare journey)!
The climate crisis means reducing expenditure to reduce greenhouse gases. It's all about treading more lightly on the planet - saving/conserving resources and connecting with nature first and foremost. NOT travel connectivity!!
Tim Weller
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