DESPICABLE, IMMORAL METRO EXTENSIONS

Each "bus on rails" tram is £4 m, compared with an electric bus straight on the roads (without the railway tracks) being £350,000 each. Construction was £75 m/Km for Westside extension; £133 m/Km for Eastside extension. Compare that with Borders Railway in southern Scotland rebuilt and opened 6 yrs ago this month for £7 m/Km over 50 Kms. WMCA/TfWM are into selfish, greedy, self aggrandisement while the poor suffer and even go hungry. Despicable, immoral behaviour by our politicians and officers. PLEASE PROTEST to Ian.Ward@birmingham.gov.uk; MayorsOffice@wmca.org.uk; andy.street@wmca.org.uk

Common misunderstandings over Metro trams

To be fair this isn’t my area of understanding.  If I get elected, I don’t believe this will be a subject I will be invited to contribute towards.  Because the vast majority are oblivious to the phenomenal cost of trams to replace buses and trains and to push buses out and to turn our local mainline railway into a piddling little shuttle tram line, a test track, a trail of trees and a cycle-walkway.  If the money can't be used to get Network Fail and TfWM/WMCA to FINISH the railway with the forgotten trains and stations, then the money should go to offset years of cuts to the Police, NHS/social care, education.

Trams of course seem to be very much part of WM combined authority vision. Because they have been improperly influenced by vested interests.  The national tram promotion group is in the same building as TfWM/WMCA that have easily been influenced to go for trams instead of the more obvious and sensible measures to reduce urban congestion and air pollution.  Earlier this decade, three top people in UK Tram Ltd were also top people in Centro.  Complicity + collusion = corruption.  And since their introduction they have been very popular as a form of rapid transport.  PTA/Centro got the money in the 1990s by declaring (exaggerating/lying) that passenger numbers would be 15 to 20 million every year.  Only with the extension, that misses out Snow Hill and goes straight to Grand Central Shopping Centre did it rise to 6 million a year.  They got the money because the sole reason for the extension was to connect Snow Hill with Grand Central - NOT to bypass Snow Hill as has been shown to be the true objective!  They have become the WM version of the Tube.  Yes.  The WM version of putting Tube trains on the Eurostar, HS1 line to Paris, in the case of the Wednesbury to Brierley Hill extension.  Pretty idiotic!  They have more money than sense.

Rail is an alternative means of transport and reintroducing the historic lines is an infrastructure cost that perhaps should be argued in addition to rapid light transport, from memory the Wolverhampton segment utilised a fair amount of former rail infrastructure.  Please read my:

 THE TRAGEDY OF TRAMS WRECKING OUR RAILWAY NETWORK

and,

 Railfuture's full map.pdf

 Raillfuture text 01.pdf

 Raillfuture text 02.pdf

Thanks for responding.  I am a fan of trams, although I don't like the cheap and nasty hard, plastic seats on our Metro trams!  If the 1950s was today, I would be insisting that the authorities should NOT dismantle the tram network for diesel buses.  Simply modernise the trams instead of destroying them.  Wise and sensible expenditure.  Like my proposals for seeing a sea change in social attitudes towards bus/bike commuting instead of car commuting to free up the road space for essential business vehicle users.  My family has started!

GOOD NEWS

GOOD NEWS

Twelve months ago, in the  December 2015 Strategic Transport Plan, the plan for "buses on rails" on the 9 Km Camp Hill line was reversed and now it is down for passenger trains and stations to be, eventually, reinstated.

From September 2016, the DfT is wanting the tocs, that are up for franchise renewal or commission, to see if Worcester, Black Country, Derby man line could be progressed and delivered in the future." (W Mids Stakeholder Briefing Document, Sept 2016, paras​ 5.49 and 50)
In October 2016, Chris Grayling talked of "a looming capacity crisis on our railway network."  Completing the 120 Km strategic railway between Worcester and Derby would be a huge help to him, if you could please mention it to him when you next meet him, Stephen.
In November 2016, a TfWM/WMCA report spoke of "the expansion of the West Midlands Rail franchise."  (See quote 1, below.) But, it meant only passenger trains on Brum's double track railway lines, not ours in the Black Country!

EVIDENCE:

106 Kms = 56 Km Stourbridge to Burton - still nothing after 50 years

            +39 Km Camp Hill and Sutton lines - now all down for trains and nothing for "buses on rails" even after 35 years of being very trying.

            +11 Km Walsall to Wolverhampton - still nothing after one failed attempt (it went off half cock) at a passenger train service last decade.  They chose the wrong line. It should have been Stourbridge to Burton but, that was down for "buses on rails" on 20 Km, to be achieved in tiny, nibble sized chunks.

Meantime, over the last 50 years, London and the SE got

• new underground and overground lines
• Eurotunnel
• HS1
• Cross Rail 1 - and, Crossrail 2 to go ahead.
• Docklands Light Railway - superb, driverless, automatic trams swinging in, out and through buildings and linked at both ends to the London Underground.
• Thames Link

The Black Country and Brum got:

• "buses on rails" as second best, on a train line, after Terry Davis MP of Hodge Hill stopped Midland Metro going through his constituency of Hodge Hill in the 1980s or 90s.
• Wolverhampton Low Level railway station demolished and 2 Kms of double track railway line lost.
• Only one railway re-opening of 6 Km between Moor Street and Smethwick Galton Bridge
• The Brum, north-south, Cross City line was upgraded, with two or three new stations, I believe (University, Five Ways - any others?)
• Brum is still bereft of its desperately needed additional tunnels and platforms at New Street.  But, a £3/4 billion, magnificent, 'all that glisters is not gold' shopping centre and diesel perfumed railway station tagged along as an afterthought in the basement of the John Lewis store.
• A 1990 (circa) monorail at Merry Hill Shopping Centre that soon closed when it fell short by 400 metres of the Worcester, Black Country, Derby nationally important railway line that was never reinstated then or, still to this day.  This must be the absolute exemplification of both stupidity and incompetence! Or, was it meant to be one ever so funny joke by the authorities and I have missed the humour of it all?

The rest of the UK got:

• 6 trams systems - Blackpool, Manchester Metrolink, Sheffield Supertram, Croydon Tramlink, Nottingham NET and Edinburgh (Edinburgh cost for 14 Km and 15 tram stops is over one billion pounds over the 30 years of loan repayments and, the bus is quicker and cheaper, anyway - in 2016!)
• UPDATE: In April 2018, 6 out of the 7 have extensions planned or being built.  Not Croydon.