Grandiose, greedy Brum is bankrupting Britain - and it's not funny.

Perhaps, as my contribution on 13 March, it might be best to read out this, please Ed:

Grandiose, greedy Brum is bankrupting Britain - and it's not funny

You are all stupidly bankrupting Britain with the world's two most expensive transport projects, High Scam 2 and Metro trams.

The first is so fast it can't pick up or drop off a single passenger between London and Brum, apart from at Brum airport.  What use is that?

The second is so slow as it trundles so smoothly through the city centre that it is quicker to walk between the two city centre stations of Grand Central and Snow Hill.  Connecting them was the sole reason for doing it, would you believe!  Yet, you can't get off at Snow Hill because there is no tram stop there and the nearest, in Bull St is a 300 m walk to the Snow Hill platform - selfish, unnecessary, immoral Metro expenditure!

The next extravagant, greedy Metro extension is to connect Curzon St High Scam 2 station to Brum Airport when there is already a perfectly good and fast railway connection between Grandiose Central station and the airport already.  The tram is the greedy and slow connection.  Sheer stupidity!

At the most colossal expense, the tram connects Grandiose Central station with grandiose Centenary Square and Broad Street when an ordinary electric bus, without the rails, could have done the job at a fraction of the price and continued on the no 9 bus route to replace the diesel bus.

The future tram extension up Hagley Road nicely fells 1,000 trees and shrubs when millions more are needed to capture carbon dioxide to slow our ecocidal climate emergency you all so piously declared years ago - and then never acted on.  Hopeless!

SCRAP extensions to both High Scam 2 and greedy, immoral Metro.

Tim Weller

The very last of Dudley's railways bites the dust!

Please explain, Simon why you put the BCIMO VLR centre on the UKs last, mothballed, half finished, mainline railway!!

Since 2014, I was advising the authorities to use the site at Moor St, Brierley Hill and the 3 Kms Pensnett line for the test track. Far more sensible, don't you think? I told Nick Mallinson, too but no-one listened. Yet another transport tragedy.

And, I was lied to that Metro "LR would provide the basis for restoring HR services at the appropriate time." (letter 18 Sept 2000 from Tom Magrath, Centro's Passenger Services Director)

And, where is the illusory, fake "passive provision" from MD Laura Shoaf, that we were all so glibly promised in the 'Midlands Today' TV interview with Peter Plisner? Another scam.

Quite disgraceful behaviour from you all, when I expected honesty, integrity and the highest standards. Buck your ideas up.

Governance changes to involve councillors BEFORE going to CA

Proposed items for discussion

I would like us to talk about these matters, please at our Teams meeting on Wed 17 March at 11 am.

1. Governance - full, frank and fair discussion to involve all councillors, and at full council, to hear both/all sides of every issue before voting.  Edinburgh City Council did that over their tram last decade and the tram extension to Leith and Newhaven in 2019.
2. Greater scrutiny of construction costs of innovative transport modes like Metro and Sprint and, greater scrutiny of Metro track maintenance costs before a decision to proceed is put to the WMCA Board members.  And only after the seven councils have properly, fully considered and voted on whether or not to proceed.  Those seven decisions are then brought to the Board meeting.
3. Disadvantages of proceeding to be fully laid out as well as the advantages, eg the extremely high greenhouse gas emitting in construction, of the two biggest concrete crash barriers I have ever seen, put in the Five Ways underpass that, with the trams, means that buses can never return.  And, possibly not to Broad Street, either.
4. Aside: I love trams because they look great, glitzy and glamorous. The problem is that for all their attraction, we now have a slower and worse journey into the city centre from the west. We either have to change and wait for the tram or stay on the bus and have a longer and slower ride. This is not progress!
   
5. Construction cost comparison, as here:
    Like for like comparison of infrastructure buil...
6. Was the demolition of Perry Barr flyover because of Sprint?
7. What are the full implications of ULR (Stourbridge Shuttle), the LR test track for 2.2 Kms, Metro LR all being put on a former mainline railway that, for 100 years, brought passengers from London and Oxford to Dudley Railway Station and the Black Country?
8. What are the implications for freight that might need to come off the Camp Hill line in Brum and be diverted via the 120 Kms, half-finished but already built, Worcester, Black Country, Derby mainline?
9. Why has it taken 70 years, to only now for Andy Street to be able to make headway with the railway industry over the joint running of passenger and freight trains, when this was the norm for about 100 years?
10. Is the joint running of fast regional trains over the full 120 Kms mainline railway between Worcester, Dudley, Derby, with slower tram-trains, all on one set of double tracks, seen anywhere else in the world?
11. What plans do you have for the 3 Kms Pensnett branch line from Moor Street, Brierley Hill north to A4101 High Street, Pensnett?
12. Comparison study of Fare-Free Public Transport (FFPT) that is now seen in Dunkirk, Tallinn and Luxembourg - and many more in E Europe and around the world.

 

Transport blunders in the Black Country and Brum

Rubbish railway policy in the Black Country and Brum

Bullring Shopping Centre was opened in 2003.  With rising rail passenger numbers throughout the 1990s and continuing to this day, your colleagues should have realised that additional tunnels were needed at the eastern approach to Grand Central basement station, then.  The new rail tunnels could have gone in after the demolition of the old Bull Ring and before the shops and stores were built for the new Bullring Shopping Centre.

£750 million of railway money for what is, mainly, yet another brand new shopping centre is a misappropriation of public money.  In other words, corruption.  From the BBC, I heard that Grand Central is likely to be sold to the owners of the Bullring and, Birmingham City Council will profit, as a result.  It will profit from the misappropriation of railway money when, like yourselves, they were also partly responsible for the blunder of failing to build the new rail tunnels in the 1990s.  This, when for years there had been much talk (but never any action, of course) of building an underground railway in Brum!

Both the railway industry, the DfT and Brum City Council are responsible for destroying our original tram network in the 1950s, for destroying about 100 miles of our urban rail network in the 1960s and building roads, offices, houses and trading estates on about 50 miles of former railway line.  There remains 78 Km that the transport authorities refuse to re-open for passenger trains.

78 Km of double track rail lines, some literally alongside roads with bumper to bumper traffic is complete idiocy.  But, this stupid transport policy has gone on for 50 years!

These sincere and well-meaning politicians and officers also demolished not one but two of our magnificent Victorian rail stations.  A third remains standing.  This is Moor Street Station, the closest to Grand Central but it was overlooked for connection to Grand Central in favour of the further away, Snow Hill Station.  Every train that stops at Snow Hill also stops at Moor Street.  Yet, another blunder, Snow Hill was chosen and Moor Street will never get its £100 million per mile (for construction costs) tram!

After 34 years of wasted endeavour to get Midland Metro, some rail lines remain unused and waiting for electric trams that never arrive.  The network of 15 tramlines and 200 Km by the year 2000, never arrived.  They were never delivered in that year or, even fifteen years on!

Grand Central Shopping Centre and station - the station tagged along as an afterthought and shoved in the basement of the John Lewis store - remains one of the UK's worst rail and road congestion bottlenecks.  So much for £750 million of railway money that is mostly wasted!

Please correct me, if I am wrong in any detail, above.  If no-one puts me right, I will assume that my information, here remains accurate.

Railfuture is also 'wowed' by the basement station that is the Grand Central Shopping Centre, Birmingham

Dear Lloyd

I have just read Michael Tombs glowing report on the redeveloped Birmingham station that he so approves of.  Here is another point of view.  Please could you forward this to Michael for his comment:-

36 escalators, Michael wrote but, are there any stairs from platforms to concourse?  Surely, there must be!

Bullring Shopping Centre was opened in 2003.  With rising rail passenger numbers throughout the 1990s and continuing to this day, the authorities should have realised that additional tunnels were needed at the eastern approach to Grand Central basement station, then.  The new rail tunnels could have gone in after the demolition of the old Bull Ring and before the shops and stores were built for the new Bullring Shopping Centre.

£750 million of railway money for what is, mainly, yet another brand new shopping centre is a misappropriation of public money.  In other words, corruption.  From the BBC, I heard that Grand Central is likely to be sold to the owners of the Bullring and, Birmingham City Council will profit, as a result.  It will profit from the misappropriation of railway money when, like yourselves, they were also partly responsible for the blunder of failing to build the new rail tunnels in the 1990s.  This, when for years there had been much talk (but never any action, of course) of building an underground railway in Brum!

Both the railway industry, the DfT and Brum City Council are responsible for destroying our original tram network in the 1950s, for destroying about 100 miles of our urban rail network in the 1960s and building roads, offices, houses and trading estates on about 50 miles of former railway line.  There remains 78 Km that the transport authorities refuse to re-open for passenger trains.

78 Km of double track rail lines, some literally alongside roads with bumper to bumper traffic is complete idiocy.  But, this stupid transport policy has gone on for 50 years!

These sincere and well-meaning politicians and officers also demolished not one but two of our magnificent Victorian rail stations.  A third remains standing.  This is Moor Street Station, the closest to Grand Central but it was overlooked for connection to Grand Central in favour of the further away, Snow Hill Station.  Every train that stops at Snow Hill also stops at Moor Street.  Yet, in another blunder, Snow Hill was chosen and Moor Street will never get its £100 million per mile (for construction costs) tram!

After 34 years of wasted endeavour to get Midland Metro, some rail lines remain unused and waiting for electric trams that never arrive, let alone the once popular passenger trains!  The network of 15 tramlines and 200 Km by the year 2000, never arrived.  They were never delivered in that year or, even fifteen years on!

Grand Central Shopping Centre and station - the station tagged along as an afterthought and shoved in the basement of the John Lewis store - remains one of the UK's worst rail and road congestion bottlenecks.  So much for £750 million of railway money that is mostly wasted!

Please correct me, if I am wrong in any detail, above.  If no-one puts me right, I will assume that my information, here remains accurate.

Position statement on rail re-openings

The VLR project to go at the former Brierley Hill Steel terminal site on Moor Street, with the extra 1 Km of line, instead of preventing, for ever, the return of inter-city and local trains to our last remaining, UK north-south, high speed line.

There is no need for Dudley Council and ITA/Centro to shuttle passengers to the high speed line in the neighbouring borough (Dudley Port in Sandwell) when, in so doing, they destroy their own high speed line they are using to shuttle the passengers the one mile.

They should use their own high speed line (Stourbridge, Dudley, Walsall, Lichfield) to increase rail capacity and to reduce road and rail congestion.

Please get down to, urgently re-opening all our 72 Km of former passenger lines in Birmingham and the Black Country, instead of keeping them for freight only and for LR and, now, VLR tram projects that never, ever materialise.

Where is the morality in your policy of keeping unused, double track rail lines, devoid of trains and stations, alongside bumper to bumper commuter traffic?  This is literally the case in Dudley and Birmingham.  This is your long term strategy and has been for decades.  Will you change it, please?

For me, it is a scandal that we are spending £100 million per mile for Midland Metro extensions in Brum city centre and £54 million per mile for Wolverhampton but, only £10 million per mile for the return of passenger trains, rail structures and stations (the 29 miles costing £294 million for a rural rail line reopening, this September) in southern Scotland!!  What on earth is going on in this supposed age of austerity, of prudent use of depleting resources and of frightening, human caused climate change?

Am I right in thinking that all UK rail groups support your policies, plans and priorities?  Please give me their names.

Why was there no public consultation over VLR (while still keeping LR) for the Black Country inter-city Line?