Rudderless, Well-meaning Leader Patrick is a great improvement on Dangerous Deluded Donald Trump
This week, Councillor Harley said: “It could have been planned better, members and the public have to acknowledge this is not a Dudley Council project, we did not control the pace these guys moved.” For decades, I have been warning leaders like Patrick, cllrs and MPs of their shameless, stupid incompetence in converting railways and bus routes into tramways - and, for the highest costs per Km of any other tram scheme in the world. *
"It could have been planned better" said Patrick Harley, who is exactly the leader responsible for the bad planning.
- Since 1981, all our councillors over these 45 years have been meticulously planning the Dudley Tram to Merry Hill Shopping Centre.
- Patrick and the leaders' plan has always been to put trams on the Black Country Railway in order to get the mainline railway up and running again! Have you ever heard of such a cuck handed way of doing things?!
- Always planning for trams to take over the UK's last London to Edinburgh mainline railway with a 56 Km 'Mind the Gap' in the ready built railway where there are no trains between Stourbridge Jct and Burton on Trent via Dudley Castle Hill.
- Dudley Leader, Cllr Fred Hunt told me in all seriousness in the 1990s that it would be up and running through Dudley town by the year 2000. That was 26 years ago and it's STILL not open - AND, a tramway on an existing, ready-built, important railway too, of all things!!
Donald Trump does not know what he is talking about. Nor does our Patrick Harley. It has been a Dudley Council project from the start to the glorious, ignominious finish - a finish that never comes!
- Patrick and the other six W Mids council leaders, plus Mayors since 2017, have always been responsible for Midland Metro. It was Cllr David Sparks of Dudley Council and Cllr Phil Bateman of Wolverhampton Council who started the bizarre scheme to rebuild the tram network, that they had destroyed 20 years earlier, by using the railway network.
- Over the decades, all the councillors have had presentations at their committees about Metro from time to time.
- I have sat in on a few of them and I never heard a word said against the trams. All the councillors accepted their coming instead of putting back commuter and regional trains.
- The councillors living near to the six Dudley destroyed railway lines all voted for roads, every kind of building imaginable and for trams to be put on them instead of trains, which had been so successful for 100 years!
- Yet, they wanted trams, first, in order to get the TRAINS BACK!!**
- Only Cllr David Stanley has expressed pretty lily-livered criticism, compared to my more robust offerings.
"we did not control the pace these guys moved” sounds so Trump-like in dear Patrick shovelling off the blame to everyone else but himself. Leader Patrick had the power to control the pace. He failed to use it.
- Patrick knows full well, as part of the WMCA/TfWM Senior Leadership Team, he has been at the very heart of Metro developments destroying our regional and commuter railways.
- Patrick is the guilty man. He is to blame.
- Patrick should have been actively working to find out what the hell first Centro and then TfWM have been up to over these 45 years.
- He should have been cracking the whip and vigorously arguing for the immediate suspension of over £1 billion of taxpayers' money disappearing down the plug hole, for 10.7 Kms of tramway destroying 120 Kms of the double track railway between Worcester and Derby, one of only two north-south railways between Brum and the Irish Sea.
** "Light rail investment provides the basis for restoring heavy rail services at the appropriate time." Tom Magrath, Passenger Services Director, Centro in a letter to me, dated September 2000.
TIM WELLER
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