edwin_m
Veteran Member
Surely that becomes an advantage - especially at the eastern side of the city (e.g. the Radcliffe-on-Trent, Bingham corridor) - the A52 is heavily congested at peak times and the obvious place for a P&R site would be at Saxondale, but you're then stuck in the same traffic as everyone else. With housing also planned to go all the way from Newton to Bingham there is the potential for that corridor to be massively overloaded in the coming years.
That is, if anything, a reason to provide a better heavy rail service - extension of the Robin Hood Line to Bingham is suggested from time to time.
The only significant benefit of tram-train service from these places would be to get into the centre of Nottingham, but as pointed out the walk from the station is quite short (and would be made psychologically a lot shorter if the Broadmarsh area was made more pedestrian-friendly). To get a tram-train from the east onto the tram line at Nottingham would involve demolition of brand new buildings and major construction of new viaducts roughly mirroring the old Great Northern link. And as I mentioned somewhere further back, existing tram-train designs couldn't cope with either the platforms designed for a 2.5m vehicle width, or the 18m radius curve they would encounter just beyond Lace Market stop.
Also, one other point I forget, is that right next to EMP is the Radcliffe-on-Soar power station, which if government policy actually follows through will be wound down in the next decade or so, and that land would make an ideal location for an edge of city business / industrial park, and as we've seen up at Newton may well become a site for new housing.
This is quite possible and would be a good thing in my view - if Rushcliffe council had been a bit more aware they could probably have got the HS2 station located here. However the Parkway provides fast and reasonably frequent heavy rail links to all the major towns in the region so the demand for a tram would be very small indeed.
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