Thursday 11 August 2022

MERRY HILL IS AND CAN BE MERRY HEAVEN EVEN MORE MERRILY ​

All of this nature gets wiped out for immoral, "bus on rails" Metro trams - greedy, grandiose, shamelessly extravagant and so unnecessary:-

​are wiped off the face of the earth for energy intensive, GHG emitting, concrete and steel viaduct on the embankment.  The only public open space at Merry Hill!

This great shopping centre was one of the earliest, after the 1970s Metrocentre on Tyneside.  It was built by Don and Roy Richardson throughout the 1980s and took good farming land in the south and Round Oak Steelworks in the north that had closed.

For three years from 1991 to 1994, it had a Swiss engineered and built monorail from the Waterfront East offices to the heart of the shopping centre and on to the southern stores.  A distance of over a kilometre. A station, too, that still exists and can be seen in the roof of M&S from the Dudley No 1 Canal towpath - and still visited by lift when open!

An enigma - why did Don and Roy not link it to the mainline railway at Round Oak steel terminal, next to the Waterfront and only 400 metres from the terminus monorail station, Waterfront East?
Did they never realise there was a railway "of national strategic significance" only a quarter mile away?
Did they really think that no-one would want to arrive at the Waterfront offices by train, with shoppers too continuing their journey by monorail into the mighty shopping centre?

As good Black Country men, was this all part of the post war consensus that trains and railway lines were old hat and only cars were what was wanted and would, forever, be the future?  After all, this was the attitude that destroyed seven Dudley railway lines, with two still not finished even as cycle-walkways!  I'm referring to the UK's longest urban-rural-urban, most important but badly neglected, 22 Kms Black Country Cycle-Walk Mudway.  It starts at Fens Pool Avenue, in the DY5 Enterprise Zone and only 200 metres from the forgotten mainline railway.  The 22 Kms ends in NW Wolverhampton but continues north on a canal towpath into Cheshire.  It does not even have an NCR number!!

Another blunder - It was not just Richardson Properties who were asleep on the job.  Dudley Council and the transport authority, Centro also never realised that the monorail could be linked to the mainline railway to help ease road traffic congestion and pollution.  Or, that the railway even existed and should be used.  And this was Transport HQ, too slumbering into a blunder!

MAP here:   https://explore.osmaps.com/pin?lat=52.472508&lon=-2.104538&zoom=14.0749&overlays=&style=Leisure&type=2d&placesCategory=

An easy solution - The Midland Metro is coming to Brierley Hill from this same railway "of national strategic significance" and, on its double tracks that the freight trains no longer use, from Dudley town.  The steel trains from Port Talbot via Stourbridge Jct Sta only use one track.  The Metro can save over £100 m in construction costs by using the other track of the mainline railway from Round Oak Steel Terminal to link up with the national railway network at Stourbridge Junction station.  The Waterfront tram stop can bring office workers and shoppers onwards by electric bus or, but this is not compatible with climate action, by the reinstated 1990s monorail.

In this way, nature is saved and the public can continue to use the 400 metre grass and tree-covered Dudley No 1 Canal embankment.  Merry Heaven is SAVED!!

Tim Weller

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