Dear Chris - and this is also intended for Alex Lane at the Brum and Black Country Wildlife Trust for his interest and action, please Alex! I've also copied in TfWM who are well and truly fed up with hearing from me and, I'm sure, would love to hear from you both!
Terminating Phase 2 of WBHE at Level St tram stop, between the Waterfront and Merry Hill SC (WBHE is Metro Wednesbury to Brierley Hill Extension)
I've been wanting to write to you, Chris for a long time and missed my opportunity to give you my email address, last year, when you so very well and fairly chaired the hustings for candidates for Combined Authority Mayor. I was one of them, you may remember, until I had to pay the deposit!
Like me, you were horrified in the 1980s at the continuing, never ending tarmac, brick and concreting of farmland and countryside at Merry Hill, as well as that open space lost at Narrowboat Way, north of Saltwells Wood Nature Reserve and north of Highbridge Road, Lodge Farm. Only a narrow buffer zone for nature is now left. Wildlife gets pushed out for humans!
Since the 1990s, I've been writing to 16 Summer Lane B19 3SD (Transport and Combined Authority HQ) objecting to Metro trams taking over perfectly good railway lines that should have had commuter and regional trains reinstated. I soon lost the Snow Hill to Wolverhampton to Shrewsbury mainline that was given to trams when Metro One opened in 1999. Last decade, I lost the more important, 120 Kms principal mainline railway "of national strategic significance"
that runs between Worcester, the Black Country and Derby. That line has been given over to light rail Metro on two short sections and, on the site of the former Dudley Castle Hill Station, to a Very Light Rail Innovation Centre at the foot of the road called Castle Hill, Dudley town, below the zoo and castle.
There is one last battle that you and I might still be able to win with the help of both of you, please Chris and Alex! The Metro tram rejoins the former principal mainline railway at the Cinder Bank roundabout on the Dudley Southern Bypass. Where the trams come off the railway after Canal Street tram stop, Hart's Hill, I am suggesting it still goes into the Waterfront and almost all the way to Merry Hill Shopping Centre but, it should terminate at a new Level Street tram stop. This slightly shortened route is to
- save £100 m by not needing to build the 400 metre, steel and concrete, double track, standard gauge, tram viaduct on the 400 m long and high canal embankment;
- save my 'magnificent' guerrilla garden from being wiped out;
- save the only public open space at Merry Hill;
- everything (and more) in this photo between the road and the canal gets bulldozed for the massive viaduct;
- save nature - of which we are part and depend on for our very existence;
- save the view of five lovely hills from the canal towpath and from the boats on the high canal embankment; and
- save all the 10,000 sq metres of land designated for housing - after some decades, is still available for very low cost energy apartments for the poor, as here:
Other maps and full details are found here:
What do both of you think? Please could you write and support me? I'd be very happy to show you my own landscape enhancement scheme that is about to be wiped out - anytime after these next three weeks.
The most important email address is customerservices@tfwm.org.
Best wishes for helping with this positive, practical and helpful suggestion.
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