to Cllr Roger Bailey of Coventry

Dear Roger

Thank you so much for engaging and debating with me.  It is such a refreshing change to get someone writing back, from the normal silence, uninterest and even apathy and acquiescence!  Your reward is what has turned out to be a very long email.  Please persevere!

I've lived exactly fifty years in heavenly Halesowen and in the same house (and wife!)

Yes!  Do please pass on my emails to officers for them to correct or confirm what I've written.  I would be only too relieved to be proved wrong and that, in fact, LR and VLR trams are the best things since sliced bread.  Throughout the UK, the rebuilding of the tramway network, which your predecessors wiped out in the 1950s, has meant the money has not been there to finish electrification of the railways or to get our heavy rail network up to the standard seen on the mainland of Europe.  We went haring off into LR, VLR, ULR that then led to yet more taxpayer funding for tram-trains and train-trams to allow the use of LR on the HR (heavy rail) tracks and vice versa.  All I wanted, from our cllrs/MPs, was to work with the professionals to get the HR and the bus routes as least as good as the average in Europe.  And preferably, extend Fare-Free Public Transport (FFPT) from old geezers like me on our way out, to all you younger people.  This would be your reward for leaving your car at home to free up the road network for essential road users.  More here:

 Bus and businesses at the centre of a virtuous circle

There is a great barrier between the public and the professional officers.  At least, councillors have contact details for the public to see because all you elected members decide policy for the officers to implement.  In theory!  The practice is somewhat different!

From many years ago, delving into the history of Midland Metro on Wikipedia and in speaking last year with Cllr Phil Bateman of Wolverhampton, (copied in) I have always been under the impression that it was he and Cllr David Sparks of Dudley who first suggested trams for the W Mids in 1981.  Both are Labour Party members.  However, you good and very much better Conservatives have been equally enthusiastic to break up our railway network into LR and HR (and the HS tragedy into a dead end siding to the detriment of Coventry!) and to bring in more modes of public transport to complicate my journey.

I don't think it is true to say that HMG instructed or even suggested that our region should have Metro trams and, in addition for Coventry, VLR and LR.  But I don't know the history of how VLR got started.  My impression has always been that Centro/TfWM officers and members of the seven councils have always been much more enthusiastic for LR/VLR than the Treasury and the DfT.  I thought this was because of the enormous expense in turning roads into railway lines and good railway lines into tramways.  Even more waste of public money comes from developing tram-trains and train-trams on railway lines and tramways - yet more good money thrown after bad!!

Over ten years ago, I had talks with the guy at the Warwick Manufacturing Group - Nick Mallinson CEO, Black Country Innovative Manufacturing Organisation - in the failed attempt to get the VLR test track moved off the former, principal mainline Black Country Railway.  It is now at Castle Hill, Dudley and the BCIMO HQ is on the site of the former mainline station!  I was suggesting the site at Moor Street, Brierley Hill and using the 3 Kms closed railway from Moor Street to Pensnett High Street via Brockmoor and Bromley.  'Station Hotel' at Castle Hill needs to be renamed 'Tram Stop Hotel'!

Below is my weekend's attempt to summarise the sorry history of Midland Metro in a readable way for you.  A little fuller attempt, that has never been challenged or corrected when I sent it out to TfWM and Dudley, Brum and Sandwell councillors, is this:

 Trumpland Transport in the West Midlands since 1981

This is shorter, I think:

Rediscovering trams has been at the expense of reusing railway lines for railway trains!

ALICE IN WONDERLAND RAILWAY/TRAMWAY MIX UP!

Wot! Not another right mess they've got us into, surely?!!

The 200 Kms and ten lines of the West Midlands Metro drive began in 1981, according to Wikipedia years ago, to be completed in the year 2000 CE.

However, in that year, after 18 years, it came to a miserly 20 Kms with 18 Kms on the first, former mainline railway between Brum Snow Hill and Wolverhampton destroyed for trams! 

Work began in 1981 only twenty years after the first electric tramway network had finished being utterly destroyed to make way for more diesel buses.

The first three Midland Metro tramways were to go on two former mainline railways and one existing.

Perhaps, because of the shortage of railways because of their conversion to roads, buildings and tramways, the decision was made to build HS2 in 2009 by Lord Andrew Adonis and Gordon Brown.

Like Metro, HS2 has also been a fiasco, ever since!  Coventry may get a downgraded intercity service with the top priority for attention going to HS2.

Only in 2016 was the decision made not to put trams on the Bristol to Birmingham mainline through Kings Heath and Moseley but to rebuild the three stations demolished in the previous century - in favour of diesel buses of all things!

From an unknown date last century, the former principal mainline railway from Worcester to Derby of 120 Kms (74 miles) via the Black Country, was turned into a cycle-walkway on the section between Walsall and Brownhills in S. Staffordshire.

From earlier this decade, the decision was made to turn the rest of the railway, from Brownhills to Lichfield, into a cycle-walkway, too.

Yet, all the bridges, tunnels, flyovers and underpasses had been built to take freight and passenger trains BUT, they never put in an appearance!

Just evermore congested and slow moving motorways and roads as road transport and railways have trams taking them over or railways unused!

This London to Edinburgh railway is now to be a dog walkers' paradise of a railway line, devoid of any kind of train - and even trams!

However, trams are to go on this same mainline railway on the section between Wednesbury and Merry Hill Shopping Centre.  It is taking from 2019 to do the first half of 5 Kms and it's still not open!

In the 1990s, Leader of Dudley Council, Cllr Fred Hunt, in all seriousness told me, "Don't worry Tim, it will be up and running in 2000."  That was 26 years ago when half of it MAY open this year!!

120 Kms between Worcester and Derby via the Black Country on the railway

 "of national strategic significance".pdf

56 Kms unused between Stourbridge Jct, and Burton on Trent on the London to Edinburgh railway.

56 Kms of the Black Country Railway "of national strategic significance", according to Network Rail and the Dept for Transport, broken up into one tramway, one cycle-walkway, one Very Light Rail test track, one National Innovation Centre for VLR and fresh air!

In Jan 2020, ANDY STREET, Mayor announced 150 miles (240 Kms), 380 tram stops and eight tramway lines in total by the year 2040 for £15 BILLION in price and in weight of GHG emissions!

In 45 years of NOT getting Metro trams, about 100 Kms of railway lines in the West Midlands remain wasted - Camp Hill line, Sutton Line, Walsall to Wolverhampton, Walsall to Lichfield, Walsall to Sutton Coldfield to Water Orton to Brum.

You wrote, "I believe there are good reserves of both oil and gas. Its just that this country has decided to eliminate use of such fuels and is moving quickly to halt total use of such things asap and to totally focus on solar and wind only."

There are good reserves, Roger.  Great lagoons of oil in the Earth's crust.  But one day it will be too expensive to pump out of the ground and the ocean depths.  Then, we really will be snookered, very nicely.  Oil is far too important to be burnt.  There are 101 other uses in the petro-chemical industry for oil.  We are greedily burning it up as if there is no tomorrow.

We are foolishly living infinitely on a finite planet and unnaturally on a natural planet.  We are part of Nature and cannot survive without her.  Trump knows better, of course.  One day we will come a cropper and my wife and I are trying to be good ancestors (as is the King and, son and heir William).