THE TRAGEDY OF EVERYTHING BUT THE KITCHEN SINK WRECKING OUR RAILWAY NETWORK!
For 100 years, we had a passenger railway line from platform 4 at Snow Hill Sta to Wolverhampton Low Level Station. Instead of returning commuter trains to this 20 Kms railway at a fraction of the price of trams, they chose the trams. This resulted in one platform out of four that can no longer be used at Snow Hill, with the tram now bypassing Snow Hill Sta completely with the over £60,000 per metre extension to 'Grand Central Shopping Centre and Diesel Perfumed Station Tagged Along As An Afterthought In the Basement of the John Lewis Store' - a rather long winded but accurate new name for the old New Street Underground Principal Station!
In Wolverhampton, the magnificent, Victorian Low Level Station is now a conference and events centre. It can never again be a much-needed railway station, because 3 or 4 Kms of double track railway line either side of the station was used for roads and buildings when trams made the station useless. Oh, we also have a pretty garden where trains ran for 100 years! Only now, at more vast expense, is the tram being extended from St George's Square to the one remaining railway station in Wolverhampton. And the buses are pushed out to make way for the trams, too. All of this expense and inconvenience and, extra greenhouse gases to help turn planet earth into planet venus, could have been avoided if our awesome politicians and officers in charge had simply put the trains and stations back on the line from Snow Hill to Low Level Station that they should never have closed in the first place! And, we would now have additional train services from Snow Hill to Shrewsbury via Wolverhampton Low Level. The absolute worst follows:
These same irrepressible (BLANK) are STILL intent on repeating that blunder with trams on an even more important railway line. This one is the 120 Kms Black Country Mainline Railway, between Worcester and Derby, "of national strategic significance" (Network Rail on 8 March 2018 letter). Just 6.7 Kms of trams will wreck any chance of the UK's last, easily reinstated, half used, mainline railway from ever being finished. And, they are planning a suite of buildings on the only feasible site for Dudley Castle Hill railway station. TRAGEDY! Yet, the line is still desperately needed to reduce the road and railway congestion and poisonous air in Birmingham. Even needed to ensure the Camp Hill line reopening works. Freight and even some passenger trains on this line might well need to be diverted onto the Black Country Railway. Impossible once trams, at six to ten every hour, are on a total of 6.7 Kms between 0600 and 2300 hours every day.
From 1981, our councillors, MPs, MEPs have had as their top priority the return of the trams they dismantled in the 50s. Since Beeching, some even had the cheek to blame him when they gave planning permission for roads and buildings on over 100 Kms of urban railway lines in the Black Country and Brum. Homes, offices, shops, gardens, beautiful landscaping, cycle-walkways, buses, roads all on railway lines. In addition, they kept commuter, regional and intercity trains OFF 106 Kms of freight only or mothballed lines. Whatever is the matter with them?
REPLY to: timweller1@gmail.com 25 January 2019
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