Hey - you could be onto something there
Give that chap £50bn (and a shovel)!
True
I'm not intending to single you out - just making a broader point about how the people who seem to want to re-open every old line seem less likely to support the current HS2 plans (possibly as it does the ugly thing of linking the biggest cities in the UK on a new alignment rather than linking villages in Cumbria/ North Yorkshire/ Borders/ Devon/ Cornwall/ Lincolnshire etc).
As I say, not a personal dig, just a general point about enthusiasts.
Shame no private companies are biting your hand off, given these reports that come up with such supposedly high figures for rebuilding old lines... funny that.
Pre-Hatfield, there was a lot of optimism, a lot of "thinking outside the box". I could get quite nostalgic for it!
True, but it's a clear bottleneck on the nation's roads, yet nothing seems to be done about it - just picking examples where road building isn't quite as straightforward/ guaranteed as some rail enthusiasts would like to think.
As usual, your list of priorities are little market towns.
Thorpe Park sounds an excellent place for a station.
Getting my crayons out, I'd suggest it'd have made a great turnback station for the multitude of services from the south/west that terminate in Leeds (but appreciate that there's not the capacity to squeeze much more past Neville Hill).
I'm the one changing the goalposts?
In post 18, I mentioned Newcastle's connection to the rest of the country by continuous motorway.
I've since been corrected, in that the missing section in North Yorkshire was completed earlier this year.
But the section of Motorway from the fringes of Gateshead was not continuously connected to the rest of the UK's motorway network until 2018.
The A1 north of the Tyne does down to a single carriageway road.
Yet some rail enthusiasts think that roads are built willy-nilly.
Part of the problem is that we are lumbered with our legacy infrastructure that requires high subsidies. The Chinese probably aren't spending the kind of money to keep a parliamentary service open that we are - they have the advantage of starting with a fresh sheet of paper so don't need to maintain old branch lines.
If we were building rail from scratch, we could use our existing budget much more efficiently and spend much more of the existing pot on infrastructure, but every quid spent on subsidising a rural branch line is money that could have been funding a new InterCity railway (that would be expected to run without subsidy).
Which slew of road projects?
Have they built the M62 by-pass so that traffic can get around in Northern England to avoid the worst motorway in the UK?
Have they removed the problems of lorries on the motorway to channel ports?
Have they resolved the jams on the M25?