Saturday 24 July 2021

RailNOfuture!

 Hi David


You wrote,"I think someone said too that the trackbed is still owned by Network Rail and leased to WMCA for 12 (?) years, after which time it could be taken back???"  This does sound like guessing.  I have had no reply to my FoI request for the price that WMCA paid to Network Rail.  I have found in one document an indication that the transfer took place last year.

"I would strongly advise you to bite your lip and find a way to "make friends and influence people", it's a great skill to learn."

Very true, but it is great fun pointing out the bleeding obvious and making fun of the mess all these big VIPs and experts are making of transport!  In addition, my thoughts have always been that if the Emperor has no clothes you ought to tell him.  Or, if a man has his flies undone, you should tell him to avoid further embarrassment.  It is exactly what I prefer people to do with me.  As you have done!

Since the 1990s, RDS/Railfuture has always prided itself on its "make friends and influence people" policy.  They have some of the top people in the railway industry as their members.  They have had some of these top people speaking at their excellent conferences, too.  Railfuture has always fully supported HS1, HS2, Crossrail 1 and 2.  I think, it has fully supported all the tram network rebuilding in the UK, even as Beeching's closed railway lines have been built on and completely destroyed - partly by trams, as with Metro One in 1999.

When HS2 is finished, including the E arm to Leeds, the train will only stop at five stations, two of which are airports.  Therefore, those passengers might just as well use the plane.  What a scandalous expenditure to escalate the climate emergency that is doing us all down, just to give a minority the choice of plane or train!

Did Railfuture support the reopening of the Borders Railway and get behind the woman who was the leading light in that successful campaign (but not for full double-tracking - yet another blunder!)?  They certainly did after she succeeded because I was at their Brum conference at the Quaker Meeting House in Bull Street when she was given some special award/accolade by them.  Excellent!

Don Payne and Peter Hughes and, now yourself, have been the only members who have indicated any kind of appreciation for my insistence that saving and rebuilding the railway network must come before rebuilding the tram network.  Now, of course, the tram network has taken over so much of the railway network that capacity has been lost, so that gives Railfuture further arguments for wanting and strongly supporting HS2 and Crossrail 2.  This, despite the fact that railway congestion and railway bottlenecks are not helped one iota with HS2 because the thing goes so fast it only stops at two airports and three stations.  So, even after HS2 is fully finished and operating, you still need every single intercity train to also operate to stop at all the many stations that HS2 does not stop at!!!

HS2 is simply a greenhouse gas gorging equivalent to the plane.  Metro, similarly but, as an alternative to the bus.  Both are ecocidal projects.  Railfuture and FoE, Campaign for Better Transport, Greenpeace, Transport for Quality of Life, Clair Haigh of Greener Transport Solutions all support HS2 and trams because they are public transport.  Hopeless! 

What a waste of £106 billion to speed climate catastrophe and to hasten our undoing as a species!  Do listen, Dave to this evening's 'Briefing Room', here:

In the 1980s/90s, RDS did not support me over my opposition to the KBH and did not appear at the public inquiry into the KBH, if I remember correctly.  Chris Baines; and, of course, Chris Crean and Brum FoE were brilliant, however.  I was arguing for the money to go on finishing the Black Country Railway, instead.  RDS was nowhere to be seen, however!

Railfuture produced this excellent colour brochure but Steve Wright wrote and told me not to promote it.  Hopeless!
Best wishes

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