tbtc
Veteran Member
Rather than disrupt the existing (general) thread about re-openings, I thought I’d start a new one – this is one that hasn’t been discussed as much as some, so I thought it might be worth explaining it to show why I’m conflicted about a line that has taken on political significant in recent times…
It's a very difficult one. Short answer is that it looks great on paper but there are two major problems (how to actually serve Stocksbridge and where to terminate services at the Sheffield end) so I’m not fully convinced.
There’s certainly “a problem” (like Ebbw Vale, it’s a steel town where the jobs are declining, so more in need of transport links into the nearest big city than even before – there’s a lot of traffic on the twisting single carriageway road down the valley through Oughtabridge), there’s a frequent commercial bus service, so it’s totally different IMHO to the frequently discussed Woodhead proposals (which are an over ambitious Solution In Need Of A Problem).
Generally speaking, linking a satellite town to the nearest big city is the kind of case I’d welcome for heavy rail (Ashington to Newcastle, Skelmersdale to Liverpool, Portishead to Bristol, Tavistock to Plymouth) as long as there’s capacity in the city for it (hence why Leigh makes sense as a guided busway because there’s no way you’re going to be able to squeeze sufficient paths into central Manchester – there are too many heavy rail services into central Manchester for the existing infrastructure as it is!) and the population density is okay (Washington is a big place to be without heavy rail but so spread out that I genuinely don’t know how you could viably serve it – without just building a big Park & Ride on the edge of town – and if you’re going to take that approach then you already have that facility at Heworth - it’d be much easier to build a massive car park for a new station at Birtley than recommission the Leamside to serve the edge of Washington).
It looks like textbook stuff from the outside; you've got a satellite town (Stocksbridge) and the nearest big city (Sheffield) - the satellite town being more economically dependent upon the big city than ever as the skilled jobs dry up (given how many people used to work at Fox's/ British Steel).
For those who don’t know the area, Stocksbridge is a fairly “thin” town along a narrow/steep valley. The Steel Works take up a large chunk of the land to the north, with pretty much all the housing on the southern side (i.e. a station at the bottom of the valley is going to be some distance from most houses – it wouldn’t be in the middle of the town). To the east is Deepcar (which has gone from being its own place to being part of the same sprawl). There’s a little difference in that Stocksbridge is more “old school steel town” whilst Deepcar has expanded into “modern housing estates for people unable to afford Sheffield or wanting a more tranquil place than the big city”.
At the edge of Deepcar is the confluence of the Porter (or Little Don), the river that runs through Stocksbridge and the Don (which has come down from Dunford Bridge through Penistone, i.e. the route of the old Woodhead line). So Stocksbridge wasn’t directly on the Woodhead route; any plan to re-open Woodhead would mean a Park & Ride on the far edge of Deepcar at best.
Years ago, Stocksbridge was administratively part of Barnsley (and some Stocksbridge pupils sent to school in Penistone). Then, with local government changes, it became part of Sheffield (and some Chapletown pupils sent to school in Stocksbridge) – in bus terms it was on the dividing line between South Yorkshire Transport and Yorkshire Traction.
In sporting terms, it’ll probably be most famous for being the first step on the ladder for a young Jamie Vardy, after the Hillsborough lad was rejected by Sheffield Wednesday and started playing for Stocksbridge Park Steels before moving to the bright lights of Halifax and Fleetwood and winning the Premier League at Leicester.
Politically it’s gone from being part of the same seat as Hillsborough (i.e. Sheffield) to being part of the same seat as Penistone (i.e. Barnsley). It used to be solid Labour (until sitting MP Angela Smith moved to The Independent Group/ Change UK) but has had UKIP councillors and the constituency has now gone Conservative (no doubt helped a little by the boundary changes), so it seems a pretty good constituency for a Prime Minister to be seen to be investing in (having gone from “red wall” solid Labour to Tory). The kind of “left behind/ white working class” town that possibly has more in common with a UKIP voting seaside resort than it does with the nearest big city (where all those “metropolitan liberal elites” apparently live).
Boris Johnson visited Stocksbridge during the election – unthinkable a generation ago but it’s the kind of place Labour used to take for-granted and have now lost. If they want to stand a chance, they’ll need to win back dozens of seats like Stocksbridge & Penistone before they can even think about targeting the kind of seats that Blair won on his path to government. So a canny conservative would target investment in places like Stocksbridge, being seen to be “Doing Something” after years of decline.
In public transport terms, the buses to Barnsley have pretty much dried up (used to be hourly on both the 381 and 384 – one via Penistone). The service to Sheffield used to be three buses an hour until about 1983 (SYT/ Mainline/ First) then generally four per hour until about ten years ago (ignoring a brief period where the upstarts at Sheffield Omnibus ran six per hour so Mainline upped their service to five per hour).
The problem was always how to serve the town centre and the houses high above it – how do you provide a simple bus service that gives a link from the various residential areas to/from central Sheffield (and Hillsborough) as well as a reasonably fast route from central Stocksbridge to/from central Sheffield (and Hillsborough) and some kind of local “town service” linking people’s houses with the shops (and the steel works etc).
The nature of the hills mean it’s not easy to serve all of the housing areas without making the service for some people tediously slow (e.g. you can run a route from Unsliven Bridge on the edge of town that also serves Garden Village – where the Leisure Centre is – but this means that Unsliven Bridge passengers have a big detour up and down the hill just to get to the Co-op).
When Stagecoach took over Yorkshire Traction (and, with it, the Yorkshire Terrier subsidiary, which included the old Sheffield Omnibus operation), they introduced a tram “feeder” minibus to the Middlewood terminus. It looked a strange idea on paper. There’s nothing at Middlewood (compared to, say, extending it through to Hillsborough, only marginally further down the valley, which is at least a bit of a destination for Stocksbridge people). To keep things simple, it was a ten minute clockwise loop around Deepcar/Stocksbridge, so people had a frequent service from some of the residential areas to the shops/jobs at the bottom of the valley but no return service back up the steep hill.
But, it worked, or at least did well enough to take a chunk out of First’s market. Stagecoach’s Optare Solos were replaced by larger E200s and the long running First service reduced in frequency.
As part of the “Sheffield Bus Partnership” (which either “removed competition in an unfair carve-up between greedy businesses” or “simplified the network and introduced inter-available ticketing”, depending on whether your glass is half full or half empty), Stagecoach took over the Sheffield – Stocksbridge bus service from First. It’s since been cut back to just hourly off peak (and effectively no evening/Sunday service) but the “feeder” service to Middlewood now has clockwise and anticlockwise versions, so there are local links around Stocksbridge/ Deepcar in both directions.
Annoyingly, this change happened as the trams were cut back to every twelve minutes (off peak – still every ten at rush hour), so the local service in each direction around Stockbridge/Deepcar has twenty four/thirty six minute gaps in the daytime, which isn’t particularly passenger friendly, but is probably the least worst option.
So, that’s the status quo. A ten/twelve minute feeder service to the tram at Middlewood (but that tram will serve central Hillsborough, the University of Sheffield and the actual city centre). Plus an hourly bus from Unsliven Bridge to Sheffield Interchange (serving central Hillsborough).
What about heavy rail though?
Firstly, a station? Presumably it’d be at the Fox Valley retail park. This is much better than it would have been a few years ago before the shopping centre opened – at least there’s *something* at the bottom of the valley other than steel works – it’s a lot more attractive than it would have been (albeit the place was descoped a bit and the anchor tenant Tesco abandoned plans so there’s an Aldi instead as consolation prize). The retail park people seem quite proactive (hosting the finishing line of the Tour De Yorkshire cycling race). There’s just the problem (like at Parkgate) of whether they’d be happy seeing their parking spaces taken up by commuters instead of shoppers.
Then maybe a station at Deepcar? It’d be a long way from where most people live but I can’t imagine a scheme *not* having a Deepcar station (you can just about see the distant houses from the railway line - https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.4...=42.66141&pitch=0&thumbfov=100!7i13312!8i6656)
Further down the valley, the railway is on the wrong side to be of much use for most people at Wharncliffe Side/ Oughtabridge/ Middlewood (the railway runs on the north eastern side of the river, whereas the bus route is on the south western side as are the vast majority of houses). If it sounds like I’m too obsessed about hills, it’s worth noting that the Tour De France was routed through Oughtabridge to test cyclists on the tortuous inclines – these aren’t minor gradients.
Then, once in Sheffield, the rail route does a pretty amazing job of managing to avoid any areas of population – on a flat map it might look close to Shirecliffe etc but the steepness of the hills don’t help. Maybe there’s scope for a Park & Ride where it crosses the A61 near Wadsley Bridge but you’d need a fairly high frequency to justify that (in hindsight maybe the tram should have been sent that way instead of Middlewood).
It passes close-ish to Kelham Island but the run as far as Victoria doesn’t touch near many houses (and how many people are going to take an hourly train from Kelham Island to a city centre station when they could walk it in ten minutes?).
Ah, yes, Victoria… it’s a terrible site for a city centre location – nowhere near the heart of the city – up on a viaduct near a few kebab houses but little else. There’s not going to be much room for parking, it doesn’t connect with any other train services, there’s no tram stop anywhere near. So, it’d be a poor place to dump people out of trains and it wouldn’t be part of the national network.
You could extend it beyond Victoria towards Darnall. I could see an argument for building a simple station near the Supertram depot at Nunnery Square (an existing Park & Ride), and passengers get a tram from there into the city centre. But if the plan is to make people change like this then how is it better than the current arrangement of changing (from bus to tram) at Middlewood? Or you reverse the train on the line near Nunnery Square (like the “semi fast” London – Sheffield trains did to avoid them taking up platform space at Sheffield Midland). That’s probably the least worst option (a chord down from the viaduct at Victoria to cross the river and canal and Sheffield Parkway to get to the Sheffield Midland without reversal would be a huge engineering feat if done to heavy rail standards!). But this adds on more time to the journey and means fighting for space through the northern throat and into one of the precious bay platforms.
Here's the next problem. If you are competing with a ten/twelve minute tram service (and want to have a good enough frequency to tempt drivers off the A61 at Wadsley Bridge) then you need to be providing a frequent train service… but you’d be struggling to find one additional path into Sheffield Midland per hour, yet alone the number required (bearing in mind that a train heading out of Sheffield towards Nunnery Square crosses the path of a Meadowhall – Sheffield service on the flat junction).
There’s talk of a tram or tram-train up the valley. That sounds okay in theory – the line doesn’t need to be 100mph – but people are a bit vague on whether this would be an extension of the current Middlewood trams (building a new alignment from the existing terminus over the Don at Winn Gardens to join the old Woodhead route?) or a spur from the Supertram line at Shalesmoor (e.g. past the Wickes at Rutland Road and joining the Woodhead near the old Stones Brewery?) or tram-trains all the way to Nunnery Square (maybe with a reversal in the tram depot?). At least a tram-based solution would remove the need to feed into Midland (or leave passengers high and dry at Victoria).
But it still leaves the problem of being a long way for Stocksbridge residents to walk home, potentially necessitating a shuttle bus – so spending huge sums just to give people somewhere different to change from rail to bus.
Is it great for the environment if people give up the bus service (that connects with the trams) and instead *drive* to a Stocksbridge train station (for their journey into Sheffield)? If you had a frequent enough train service you could probably attract motorists from some of the villages in the Penistone line’s catchment area (Penistone is less than fifteen miles from Sheffield but it takes forty five minutes on an hourly 150 which is pretty unattractive for most people!) but it’s a fairly empty part of the country (one well worth exploring, don’t get me wrong – if you enjoyed Last Of The Summer Wine then you’ll know what I mean).
Verdict? Fairly unconvincing, without it being an outright no. There’s certainly a need there, but I don’t know if there’s a way of meeting it with heavy rail (or light rail). I wouldn’t be angry if it opened, I wouldn’t be surprised if money was at least spent on a feasibility study (to show the Tory commitment to “left behind towns” that used to be Labour). But, despite living in South Yorkshire, I’d still vote for Ashington/ Porsithead/ Tavistock etc ahead of Stocksbridge in the list of potential re-openings (and vote for HS2 ahead of any re-opening).
There’s a problem in need of a solution. I just don’t know that an hourly train service from Sheffield Midland (that has to reverse at Nunnery and only serves the bottom of the valley) will attract people from a ten/twelve minute bus service that connects to a tram that serves the city centre much better than Sheffield Midland does. For a fraction of the cost of building a new heavy rail line (which will presumably cost over a hundred million pounds by the time it opened) you could probably achieve a lot more through other means.
If you assume there will be no freight trains from Aldwarke (and abandon hopes of re-opening the entire Woodhead line), could the journey north of Middlewood be sped up by converting the alignment to guided busway, permitting much faster speeds than they currently manage, but allowing them to penetrate suburban Stocksbridge? But people don’t want small solutions, they either want a proper full on railway or nothing. Which is part of the problem with these schemes, there’s not a lot of middle ground.
It's a very difficult one. Short answer is that it looks great on paper but there are two major problems (how to actually serve Stocksbridge and where to terminate services at the Sheffield end) so I’m not fully convinced.
There’s certainly “a problem” (like Ebbw Vale, it’s a steel town where the jobs are declining, so more in need of transport links into the nearest big city than even before – there’s a lot of traffic on the twisting single carriageway road down the valley through Oughtabridge), there’s a frequent commercial bus service, so it’s totally different IMHO to the frequently discussed Woodhead proposals (which are an over ambitious Solution In Need Of A Problem).
Generally speaking, linking a satellite town to the nearest big city is the kind of case I’d welcome for heavy rail (Ashington to Newcastle, Skelmersdale to Liverpool, Portishead to Bristol, Tavistock to Plymouth) as long as there’s capacity in the city for it (hence why Leigh makes sense as a guided busway because there’s no way you’re going to be able to squeeze sufficient paths into central Manchester – there are too many heavy rail services into central Manchester for the existing infrastructure as it is!) and the population density is okay (Washington is a big place to be without heavy rail but so spread out that I genuinely don’t know how you could viably serve it – without just building a big Park & Ride on the edge of town – and if you’re going to take that approach then you already have that facility at Heworth - it’d be much easier to build a massive car park for a new station at Birtley than recommission the Leamside to serve the edge of Washington).
It looks like textbook stuff from the outside; you've got a satellite town (Stocksbridge) and the nearest big city (Sheffield) - the satellite town being more economically dependent upon the big city than ever as the skilled jobs dry up (given how many people used to work at Fox's/ British Steel).
For those who don’t know the area, Stocksbridge is a fairly “thin” town along a narrow/steep valley. The Steel Works take up a large chunk of the land to the north, with pretty much all the housing on the southern side (i.e. a station at the bottom of the valley is going to be some distance from most houses – it wouldn’t be in the middle of the town). To the east is Deepcar (which has gone from being its own place to being part of the same sprawl). There’s a little difference in that Stocksbridge is more “old school steel town” whilst Deepcar has expanded into “modern housing estates for people unable to afford Sheffield or wanting a more tranquil place than the big city”.
At the edge of Deepcar is the confluence of the Porter (or Little Don), the river that runs through Stocksbridge and the Don (which has come down from Dunford Bridge through Penistone, i.e. the route of the old Woodhead line). So Stocksbridge wasn’t directly on the Woodhead route; any plan to re-open Woodhead would mean a Park & Ride on the far edge of Deepcar at best.
Years ago, Stocksbridge was administratively part of Barnsley (and some Stocksbridge pupils sent to school in Penistone). Then, with local government changes, it became part of Sheffield (and some Chapletown pupils sent to school in Stocksbridge) – in bus terms it was on the dividing line between South Yorkshire Transport and Yorkshire Traction.
In sporting terms, it’ll probably be most famous for being the first step on the ladder for a young Jamie Vardy, after the Hillsborough lad was rejected by Sheffield Wednesday and started playing for Stocksbridge Park Steels before moving to the bright lights of Halifax and Fleetwood and winning the Premier League at Leicester.
Politically it’s gone from being part of the same seat as Hillsborough (i.e. Sheffield) to being part of the same seat as Penistone (i.e. Barnsley). It used to be solid Labour (until sitting MP Angela Smith moved to The Independent Group/ Change UK) but has had UKIP councillors and the constituency has now gone Conservative (no doubt helped a little by the boundary changes), so it seems a pretty good constituency for a Prime Minister to be seen to be investing in (having gone from “red wall” solid Labour to Tory). The kind of “left behind/ white working class” town that possibly has more in common with a UKIP voting seaside resort than it does with the nearest big city (where all those “metropolitan liberal elites” apparently live).
Boris Johnson visited Stocksbridge during the election – unthinkable a generation ago but it’s the kind of place Labour used to take for-granted and have now lost. If they want to stand a chance, they’ll need to win back dozens of seats like Stocksbridge & Penistone before they can even think about targeting the kind of seats that Blair won on his path to government. So a canny conservative would target investment in places like Stocksbridge, being seen to be “Doing Something” after years of decline.
In public transport terms, the buses to Barnsley have pretty much dried up (used to be hourly on both the 381 and 384 – one via Penistone). The service to Sheffield used to be three buses an hour until about 1983 (SYT/ Mainline/ First) then generally four per hour until about ten years ago (ignoring a brief period where the upstarts at Sheffield Omnibus ran six per hour so Mainline upped their service to five per hour).
The problem was always how to serve the town centre and the houses high above it – how do you provide a simple bus service that gives a link from the various residential areas to/from central Sheffield (and Hillsborough) as well as a reasonably fast route from central Stocksbridge to/from central Sheffield (and Hillsborough) and some kind of local “town service” linking people’s houses with the shops (and the steel works etc).
The nature of the hills mean it’s not easy to serve all of the housing areas without making the service for some people tediously slow (e.g. you can run a route from Unsliven Bridge on the edge of town that also serves Garden Village – where the Leisure Centre is – but this means that Unsliven Bridge passengers have a big detour up and down the hill just to get to the Co-op).
When Stagecoach took over Yorkshire Traction (and, with it, the Yorkshire Terrier subsidiary, which included the old Sheffield Omnibus operation), they introduced a tram “feeder” minibus to the Middlewood terminus. It looked a strange idea on paper. There’s nothing at Middlewood (compared to, say, extending it through to Hillsborough, only marginally further down the valley, which is at least a bit of a destination for Stocksbridge people). To keep things simple, it was a ten minute clockwise loop around Deepcar/Stocksbridge, so people had a frequent service from some of the residential areas to the shops/jobs at the bottom of the valley but no return service back up the steep hill.
But, it worked, or at least did well enough to take a chunk out of First’s market. Stagecoach’s Optare Solos were replaced by larger E200s and the long running First service reduced in frequency.
As part of the “Sheffield Bus Partnership” (which either “removed competition in an unfair carve-up between greedy businesses” or “simplified the network and introduced inter-available ticketing”, depending on whether your glass is half full or half empty), Stagecoach took over the Sheffield – Stocksbridge bus service from First. It’s since been cut back to just hourly off peak (and effectively no evening/Sunday service) but the “feeder” service to Middlewood now has clockwise and anticlockwise versions, so there are local links around Stocksbridge/ Deepcar in both directions.
Annoyingly, this change happened as the trams were cut back to every twelve minutes (off peak – still every ten at rush hour), so the local service in each direction around Stockbridge/Deepcar has twenty four/thirty six minute gaps in the daytime, which isn’t particularly passenger friendly, but is probably the least worst option.
So, that’s the status quo. A ten/twelve minute feeder service to the tram at Middlewood (but that tram will serve central Hillsborough, the University of Sheffield and the actual city centre). Plus an hourly bus from Unsliven Bridge to Sheffield Interchange (serving central Hillsborough).
What about heavy rail though?
Firstly, a station? Presumably it’d be at the Fox Valley retail park. This is much better than it would have been a few years ago before the shopping centre opened – at least there’s *something* at the bottom of the valley other than steel works – it’s a lot more attractive than it would have been (albeit the place was descoped a bit and the anchor tenant Tesco abandoned plans so there’s an Aldi instead as consolation prize). The retail park people seem quite proactive (hosting the finishing line of the Tour De Yorkshire cycling race). There’s just the problem (like at Parkgate) of whether they’d be happy seeing their parking spaces taken up by commuters instead of shoppers.
Then maybe a station at Deepcar? It’d be a long way from where most people live but I can’t imagine a scheme *not* having a Deepcar station (you can just about see the distant houses from the railway line - https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.4...=42.66141&pitch=0&thumbfov=100!7i13312!8i6656)
Further down the valley, the railway is on the wrong side to be of much use for most people at Wharncliffe Side/ Oughtabridge/ Middlewood (the railway runs on the north eastern side of the river, whereas the bus route is on the south western side as are the vast majority of houses). If it sounds like I’m too obsessed about hills, it’s worth noting that the Tour De France was routed through Oughtabridge to test cyclists on the tortuous inclines – these aren’t minor gradients.
Then, once in Sheffield, the rail route does a pretty amazing job of managing to avoid any areas of population – on a flat map it might look close to Shirecliffe etc but the steepness of the hills don’t help. Maybe there’s scope for a Park & Ride where it crosses the A61 near Wadsley Bridge but you’d need a fairly high frequency to justify that (in hindsight maybe the tram should have been sent that way instead of Middlewood).
It passes close-ish to Kelham Island but the run as far as Victoria doesn’t touch near many houses (and how many people are going to take an hourly train from Kelham Island to a city centre station when they could walk it in ten minutes?).
Ah, yes, Victoria… it’s a terrible site for a city centre location – nowhere near the heart of the city – up on a viaduct near a few kebab houses but little else. There’s not going to be much room for parking, it doesn’t connect with any other train services, there’s no tram stop anywhere near. So, it’d be a poor place to dump people out of trains and it wouldn’t be part of the national network.
You could extend it beyond Victoria towards Darnall. I could see an argument for building a simple station near the Supertram depot at Nunnery Square (an existing Park & Ride), and passengers get a tram from there into the city centre. But if the plan is to make people change like this then how is it better than the current arrangement of changing (from bus to tram) at Middlewood? Or you reverse the train on the line near Nunnery Square (like the “semi fast” London – Sheffield trains did to avoid them taking up platform space at Sheffield Midland). That’s probably the least worst option (a chord down from the viaduct at Victoria to cross the river and canal and Sheffield Parkway to get to the Sheffield Midland without reversal would be a huge engineering feat if done to heavy rail standards!). But this adds on more time to the journey and means fighting for space through the northern throat and into one of the precious bay platforms.
Here's the next problem. If you are competing with a ten/twelve minute tram service (and want to have a good enough frequency to tempt drivers off the A61 at Wadsley Bridge) then you need to be providing a frequent train service… but you’d be struggling to find one additional path into Sheffield Midland per hour, yet alone the number required (bearing in mind that a train heading out of Sheffield towards Nunnery Square crosses the path of a Meadowhall – Sheffield service on the flat junction).
There’s talk of a tram or tram-train up the valley. That sounds okay in theory – the line doesn’t need to be 100mph – but people are a bit vague on whether this would be an extension of the current Middlewood trams (building a new alignment from the existing terminus over the Don at Winn Gardens to join the old Woodhead route?) or a spur from the Supertram line at Shalesmoor (e.g. past the Wickes at Rutland Road and joining the Woodhead near the old Stones Brewery?) or tram-trains all the way to Nunnery Square (maybe with a reversal in the tram depot?). At least a tram-based solution would remove the need to feed into Midland (or leave passengers high and dry at Victoria).
But it still leaves the problem of being a long way for Stocksbridge residents to walk home, potentially necessitating a shuttle bus – so spending huge sums just to give people somewhere different to change from rail to bus.
Is it great for the environment if people give up the bus service (that connects with the trams) and instead *drive* to a Stocksbridge train station (for their journey into Sheffield)? If you had a frequent enough train service you could probably attract motorists from some of the villages in the Penistone line’s catchment area (Penistone is less than fifteen miles from Sheffield but it takes forty five minutes on an hourly 150 which is pretty unattractive for most people!) but it’s a fairly empty part of the country (one well worth exploring, don’t get me wrong – if you enjoyed Last Of The Summer Wine then you’ll know what I mean).
Verdict? Fairly unconvincing, without it being an outright no. There’s certainly a need there, but I don’t know if there’s a way of meeting it with heavy rail (or light rail). I wouldn’t be angry if it opened, I wouldn’t be surprised if money was at least spent on a feasibility study (to show the Tory commitment to “left behind towns” that used to be Labour). But, despite living in South Yorkshire, I’d still vote for Ashington/ Porsithead/ Tavistock etc ahead of Stocksbridge in the list of potential re-openings (and vote for HS2 ahead of any re-opening).
There’s a problem in need of a solution. I just don’t know that an hourly train service from Sheffield Midland (that has to reverse at Nunnery and only serves the bottom of the valley) will attract people from a ten/twelve minute bus service that connects to a tram that serves the city centre much better than Sheffield Midland does. For a fraction of the cost of building a new heavy rail line (which will presumably cost over a hundred million pounds by the time it opened) you could probably achieve a lot more through other means.
If you assume there will be no freight trains from Aldwarke (and abandon hopes of re-opening the entire Woodhead line), could the journey north of Middlewood be sped up by converting the alignment to guided busway, permitting much faster speeds than they currently manage, but allowing them to penetrate suburban Stocksbridge? But people don’t want small solutions, they either want a proper full on railway or nothing. Which is part of the problem with these schemes, there’s not a lot of middle ground.
