to Peter Plisner re BCIMO Innovation Centre

Dear Peter - and copied to Phil Bateman who is as active as ever, I'm sure.  For your side of the story; it would be wonderful to get a response from both of you, please.  Let's have a correct history for future generations to read and learn from.

Metro - The 1980s "Solution Looking for a Problem" (a professor interviewed by Peter(?) whose name escapes me)

I have read Peter's piece on the Dudley Innovation Centre in 'Rail'.  It prompts these questions:

1. Over the decades, Peter has been covering transport and rail matters in the West Midlands.  Can you recall or could you look back in your records, please over what is the truth about the Merry Hill monorail opening about 1990 and then closing two or three years later.  In particular,
2. Did the monorail have the agreement and support of Centro/PTA who were wanting the Metro WBHE built from the early 1980s?  Wikipedia once said 1981 was when the 'West Midlands Metro' was born under the prompting of Cllr David Sparks and Cllr Phil Bateman as WMCC councillors.
3. Can you throw any light on why Don and Roy Richardson in working with Centro, presumably, did not press for the monorail to be extended to the former principal mainline railway
    "of national strategic significance".pdf
   at that time, in readiness for the mainline to be opened to bring shoppers to Merry Hill by train and monorail, in due course, then?
4. Have you ever questioned why Metro trams were given top priority over reinstating passenger commuter trains on existing freight only or, mothballed railway lines like the Black Country's London to Edinburgh mainline - successful for about 100 years?
5. What response did you get, Peter?
6. On 'Midlands Today', you asked Laura Shoaf about that wasted but existing mainline.  She said, "passive provision" was being built in to enable the former successful liine to be reopened one day.
7. Did you challenge her at anytime as to why the vast extra expense was to be incurred with building a tramway over 7 Kms when there were 56 Kms available between Stourbridge Jct and Burton on Trent?
8. Or, why trams to get trains was ever a sensible and efficient and a competent use of taxpayers' money to reopen the most important mainline railway in the very heart of England, while we all sit in traffic jams on motorways and main roads?
   
9. How can the railway "of national strategic significance" be reopened, as the authorities wish, now they have put the BCIMO HQ on the site of Dudley railway station?
10. Would you please be so good as to check over and correct or comment on what I have written here, Peter and Phil?
     Trumpland Transport in the West Midlands since 1981

Best wishes to you both.  And clarification from both of you would enable this old man to die in peace!!