OUR VERY OWN LOCAL SCANDAL

OUR VERY OWN LOCAL SCANDAL - photos, below

National HS2 scandal = Local Metro scandal and misuse of a good railway and, taxpayers' money

Thanks, Rosanne for your "HS2 is STILL going forward... can you believe it.    Could we bombard Susanne Webb???"

I am as flabbergasted as you are that £106 billion is still being spent on such an irrelevant, wasteful and such an alarming crisis deepening matter that simply makes everything worse, especially the exhaustion of all finite resources like fossil fuels - and, climate horrors.

But what is equally shocking and our own, local, HS2 scandal is £15 BILLION to 2040 on mainly replacing buses with Metro under the ground and over the ground.  You should be livid!  Some of the money is to put the trains back (success) but not to finish our second mainline railway at Stourbridge as the intercity and regional service it once was.

• Why are you all and everyone, not up in arms at your own mainline railway sitting there for 50 years doing nothing?
• NEXT YEAR, now, the main works start in completely stopping it from it ever being the successful railway that it was for 100 years until 60 years ago.
• Why are you all, in Stourbridge, so laid back at the UK's last and your very own supposedly safeguarded, already built and available railway, still being converted to tram line and test track after nearly 40 years of Metro planning and work?
• All the effort going in to get Dudley MBC to declare a climate emergency (to make it officially hypocritical, by the way, because nothing will change) should be going into doing something positive and practical to lessen the emergency by stopping Metro, the test track and the extended cycle-walkway wrecking the 120 Kms railway.
• Why, when the middle half is missing all trains but is fully built and available, you good Stourbridge people, still are so relaxed and allow yourselves to be walked all over?
• You should all be scandalised that Dudley gets hundreds of million pounds spent on a rundown Dudley town shopping centre when Metro will make it even easier for Dudley town people to nip on the tram to Merry Hill!
• And Stourbridge is still left out on a limb, isolated, with the unused railway between Brierley Hill and Stourbridge Junction sitting there empty - apart from the goods trains.

BY THE WAY

Return to the good ol' cottage industry of the past, as my wife is doing in churning out hospital uniforms/scrubs.  Let's keep people working from home, when at all possible.

Tim - 3 photos to drool over, below, in case you haven't already done so!