At last, faster trains to arrive in north.
Rail links between three of Britain’s largest cities — Manchester, Bradford and Leeds — will be upgraded as part of the multibillion-pound Northern Powerhouse Rail project.
Plans leaked to The Sunday Times reveal how a new fast train line between Manchester and Leeds via Bradford will form the centrepiece of plans, previously known as HS3, to be published next year.
Bradford is Britain’s fifth-largest city with 530,000 residents, but has appalling rail connections. It takes 58 minutes — on the fastest trains — to travel just 30 miles to Manchester and 19 minutes for the eight-mile trip to Leeds. The route between Manchester and Leeds via Bradford on the ageing Calder Valley line takes about one hour, 22 minutes
The faster trans-Pennine route between Manchester and Leeds via Huddersfield will also be upgraded, according to the plans, in an effort to slash the fastest journey time between the two cities from 49 minutes to just 30 minutes. However, it appears a proposed new trans-Pennine rail line connecting Manchester to Sheffield and Leeds via the £56bn HS2 network, which had appeared in a 2016 plan, has been scrapped.
Westminster sources say that officials at the Department for Transport (DfT) had said it was too expensive and would not win support.
The decision is likely to spark a row with political leaders in Sheffield who have called for a new route to replace the city’s slow line to Manchester. It takes 48 minutes to travel between the two cities.
Angela Smith, the Labour MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, said: “Our Victorian ancestors understood the importance of building major rail links between Sheffield and Manchester, and yet now we struggle to get a commitment to rebuilding those links from the transport secretary, Chris Grayling.”
Transport for the North (TfN) is likely to insist that even though there will be no newly built line, upgrading the existing Sheffield to Manchester line will cut the journey times to 30 minutes.
The government’s announcement earlier this year of a £30 billion Crossrail 2 scheme for London while rail projects in the north were downgraded caused outrage. There has been growing resentment from northern leaders — including the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham — that the north desperately needs investment. Commuters in the region have for years been frustrated by slow rail services on old, overcrowded carriages, and have still seen ticket prices go up.
Research by the Institute of Public Research North reveals an estimated £59bn investment gap during the past decade for northern commuters compared with people living in London.
TfN documents show a package of road and rail improvements to boost the north would cost up to £27bn, still considerably less than London’s investment.
Alex Heywood, 34, a commuter from Burnage, south Manchester, said: “The rail network in the north is neglected in comparison to the south.
“I journey between the northern cities on business and the service is poor. It’s far too slow. And yet it’s possible to get to London in under two hours? It’s clearly a choice to neglect the north.”
The proposed network will also include upgrades to lines serving Newcastle, Hull and Liverpool. George Osborne, then chancellor, first championed HS3 as part of his northern powerhouse project.
Unlike the 225mph HS2 network trains connecting London with the Midlands and northern England, however, trains on the new east-west network are unlikely to go faster than 125mph, according to rail industry insiders.
“They don’t really need line speeds of much more than 100mph because the cities are not that far apart,” said one source. “At some point they were talking about a high-speed line. It’s totally unnecessary. Nowhere in the world is there a high-speed line between places that are so near to each other.”
TfN plans also include the possible introduction of smart ticketing for Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR), a system that electronically stores a travel ticket on a smart card that can be carried in a purse or wallet. TfN said the final NPR network had not been signed off and declined to comment.