Honestly the railway infrastructure in the entire valley is a mess.
Ideally we would rip it all up and start again.
Noone woudl concieve of having three lines up the valley, all slaloming all over the place.
With an unlimited pot of money, and no other competing projects, either rail or anything else, there's a simple answer.
At least it would be an answer to getting the best possible journey tine between Sheffield and Manchester City centres. I'll come back to that.
Massive cross Alpine tunnels are being completed. In India they're building a line through the lower slopes of the Himalayas to Kashmir. The Japanese will tunnel below the sea and the Norwegians tunnel everywhere.
Drive a straight tunnel between our two northern cities. A possible station at Glossop, but otherwise a line of about 32 miles as level and straight as you like. Journey time 20 minutes, better than halving the best times at present. No over bridges, level crossings, embankments, cuttings, rain, snow, gales, trespassers, rivers, canals or congested buildings to get in the way.
Back to the first paragraph, it would cost a fortune and there are many competing projects of many kinds.
Paragraph two brings us to how many may want to travel between city centres. Of course I'm biased as I live 10 minutes walk from Dore. If I had to go into Sheffield to go to Manchester it would probably take me longer than now. Not everyone would get ful benefit.
However a journey time of only 20 minutes would revolutionise the relationship between the two cities, a real Northern power house. Joined to similar schemes (money and competing projects no object) to link Leeds with Sheffield and Manchester that would be truly transformational. The triangle of the North. The freight and local traffic could then have the old tracks to themselves.
In my lifetime such a project will not get onto the drawing board. Shame. We're stuck with what we've got, and decades of patching up and preserving the work our Victorian ancestors had the foresight to build. Reopening old branch lines is emotive, but investing in the ones that remain open may be better investment.