Trams destroyed then rebuilt on train network!!

Why have all the trade unions spent 70 years destroying trams then trains and then rebuilding trams on the train network?!

• Tahir Latif, CACC, author of transport chapter in Climate Jobs: Building a Workforce for the Climate Emergency
• Kerry Abel, Organiser, Transport Salaried Staffs' Association
• Simon Shaw, Author of Climate Jobs Technical Companion on Cycling and Walking
• Alethea Warrington, Campaigns Manager, Possible, and co-author of The Right Track for Green Jobs: cutting aviation emissions while boosting employment and climate-friendly travel

Pledges, trains and footpaths - to address the climate emergency

Dear Sharon and Geo

Would you put on the agenda, please these items of mine?

• Personal, voluntary pledges to cut our own greenhouse gas emissions.
• Write to officers, members of Worcs CC, MPs to get behind the mainline, Derby to Devon via Dudley Railway, on the 47 Kms section that can still be used for passenger and freight trains, despite Dudley doing Metro trams on two nibble sized sections, totalling 6.7 Kms in the Black Country.  (It goes through Worcester and Kidderminster and would be a useful, alternative route to avoid Brum)
• Write to officers, members of Worcs CC, MPs to get behind the national Right to Roam campaign to allow less able-bodied walkers (like me!) to use public rights of way (PROWs) where there are rickety stiles, especially, stiles without steps and, closed/missing footbridges on PROWs.
  

Many thanks

Tim

THINGS ARE LOOKING UP!

A word of encouragement to our transport, planners, strategists, managers and politicians

Only for the last fifty years our dear transport, planners, strategists, managers and darling politicians (from councillors to MEPs) have been resolute and persistent in thinking that urban railway lines were for cars and lorries to use and, for homes and hotels to be run down them.  An intriguing departure from normal transport practice.  About 80 Km in the Black Country and Birmingham have gone this way.

More by accident than design, one main line railway was not destroyed for homes, trading estates and roads.  Indeed, such is progress that our terrific transport personnel are now turning the UK’s most important, unused but easily reinstated, double track intercity line into use by two different kinds of slow trams.  We are now to have Very Light Rail and Light Rail, very slow and slow - a shuttle tram and a Midland Metro tram - going on 9 Km out of 65 Km that are unused - unused for passenger trains, would you believe - on this nationally vital but overlooked 120 Km main line railway between Worcester and Derby.

Yet, the lot of them do, ultimately, want the trains.  They genuinely think that Metro trams “are the basis for restoring heavy rail services at the appropriate time” (letter dated July 2000 from Tom Magrath, Passenger Services Director, Centro and repeated last year).  This is complete idiocy!

However, things are definitely looking up.  From being drunk and incapable with their success in putting cars, lorries and buildings instead of trains down rail lines, they have now improved to an E grade.  From F grade to E grade in now being only less than competent by running slow trams that stop almost as frequently as buses on double tracks that are desperately needed for commuter and intercity trains between London and the North via the Black Country.

£55.7 billion for HS2.  Not a dickey bird for the 115 Km double track railway lines in the West Midlands without a single passenger train or station.  Homebase was built on one station in Brum - Kings Heath!

£6 million per Km for Scotland’s new, rural, rail line last year, according to RailNews.

£106 million per Km for Birmingham - Brum getting all the money, yet again - for road running Metro trams to replace buses to grandiose Grand Central Shopping Centre and diesel perfumed, basement station.  A similar sum of £106 million per Km for the status symbol trams to the even more prestigious HS2 stations for Brum.  The £128 m for 1.2 Km did include 21 new trams to replace the 16 year old trams, according to RailNews. So, say £80 m per Km for trams to the HS2 station and beyond.

Enough said.

Midland Metro for never!

* Nearly thirty years of little action have gone by. Only one line out of the three was achieved since 1980 - and that was on a rail line!

* There is even more traffic choked roads alongside empty rail lines.

* Electrification of the rail network is nowhere near complete even after 50 years of trying. It doesn't help when nearly everyone wants electric trams instead of electric trains on these 38 miles of Brum rail lines.

* The train/tram idea of 2008 was, years ago called track sharing or double running. This is something that is impossibly complicated for our rail industry that has trouble in running an efficient and well run rail network as it is. This resurrected idea is way beyond their abilities.

* Keep it simple, keep it plain; keep it obvious.

* Get the two main public transport modes at least as good as the average on the mainland of Europe. Then, extend the tram network further. We now have, not two, but three failing public transport modes - bus, train and tram.

* The green movement's traditional stance of accepting anything as long as it is public transport, is nowhere near good enough when issues of priority, value for money, least impact on climate change and resource depletion and, discrimination and discernment should be uppermost in our minds, I think.

* Even the very long established wish to put freight trains back on the full length Stourbridge, Dudley, Walsall rail line is impossible for our rail industry to achieve. Astonishing!

* Still, a rail line goes past the Waterfront complex of offices that are next to Merry Hill Shopping Centre but, office workers and shoppers still have to use their cars, a minority go by bus and I go by bike! This is a scandalous state of affairs because of the supposed popularity of trams everywhere.

* Trams on the middle section of this rail line has been developed for nearly thirty years but nothing has happened in even three decades of desperate transport bigwigs trying so hard. It also prevents, for ever, passenger trains returning to the 13 miles through three Black Country boroughs. This is transport negligence and incompetence, in my opinion.