The next SMART meeting will be taking place at 19:00 on Wednesday 20th September 2017 at Slaithwaite Civic Hall
Agenda will include feedback and responses from TPE & Northern consultations on the May 2018 timetable, and report back on meeting with Network Rail.
Looking forward to seeing those of you who can make it
At last – a government minister who has recognised that it’s not ok to make local train services worse in order to provide faster journey times from city centre to city centre.
Hammond interview: ‘Northern Powerhouse is a 30 year task’
[from The Yorkshire Post, 5 September 2017]
The main trans-Pennine rail route connecting Leeds to Manchester could yet be electrified, according to Chancellor Philip Hammond. Hammond leaves door open on Yorkshire devolution Mr Hammond insisted no final decisions have been taken on trans-Pennine electrification and all options for improving journeys are being considered. Transport Secretary Chris Grayling prompted an outcry before the summer when he scrapped electrification of the Midland Mainline between Nottingham and Sheffield and later suggested the long-promised electrification of the trans-Pennine route could be downgraded.
A summit of northern leaders in Leeds last month called for full electrification and a clear Government commitment to develop a high speed rail link in the longer term.
Mr Hammond told The Yorkshire Post:
“Just to be clear no decisions have been taken on electrification, the Government’s position hasn’t changed.”
He said Network Rail was looking at “different options” for improving journeys on the trans-Pennine route.
“My own view is, and I was transport secretary at the very beginning of my ministerial career, my own view is that we should start from outputs and work backwards.
“What are we trying to deliver? On this particular route we are trying to deliver an increased frequency, higher capacity, shorter journey times and greater reliability.
“That may well be delivered through electrification, that may well be the way to do that, but I think we should be clear that what we are trying to deliver is a result for passengers not some conceptual thing based on inputs.
“It is a difficult piece of railway between Manchester and Leeds and people won’t want to sacrifice the benefits of local services stopping at the intermediate stations but at the same time they want faster journey times overall between Manchester and Leeds,” he said.
The controversy over rail electrification led to wider questions from council leaders on both sides of the Pennines over the Government’s commitment to the so-called Northern Powerhouse. What does ‘devolution’ mean and why have the politicians of Yorkshire taken so long to sort themselves out? Mr Hammond’s comments on electrification and his similarly conciliatory tone on Yorkshire devolution made during a visit to Leeds yesterday appeared designed to try and draw a line under a summer of damaging headlines for the Government. Earlier in the day the Chancellor had met the metro-mayors of Greater Manchester, Liverpool and Tees Valley where he promised the “commitment” to the Northern Powerhouse idea remains.
“Northern Powerhouse is not going to be one year or one parliament, it is a very long term project the objective of which is to get productivity levels in the northern cities up to the levels we see in London and the South-East,” he said.
“Doing that will do two things, it will help close the productivity gap with our foreign competitors, very important for our national economy, and it will help to close the North-South gap in incomes which is very important for national and social cohesion.
“Getting this right is a big part of our economic challenge for the next 20, 30 years, it’s that sort of timescale. We are not going to deliver this overnight.”
Mr Hammond is expected to set out more detail of the Government’s commitment to the Northern Powerhouse idea in the Budget this autumn when he may also review its approach to public sector pay. Strict limits on public sector pay rises became an issue in this year’s general election after an NHS worker questioned Theresa May in a television debate broadcast from York. Mr Hammond described public sector pay as a “complicated, dynamic, balancing act” which needed to protect taxpayers while ensuring public services remain “sustainable”.
http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/hammond-interview-northern-powerhouse-is-a-30-year-task-1-8736816
[from the Yorkshire Post, Wednesday 23 August 2017]
Political leaders from both sides of the Pennines called for the North to join forces to make sure the Government delivers its promises on transport improvements today.
A transport summit in Leeds heard calls for the creation of a Council of the North to balance the lobbying power of London and the devolved nations
The event also called for a major overhaul of the way the Government decides which transport schemes to fund to ensure the process is fairer to areas outside London. Business and council leaders met in Leeds in response to a series of Government announcements which appeared to downgrade its transport commitments to the North.
Leeds City Council leader Judith Blake said: “We’ve done so much research, we’ve done so much thinking, what we have to do is make sure from now on we speak with one voice, one North, and really getting out there and making the case for the step change in investment in the North that we need.” She said transport improvements were the key to achieving the North’s economic ambitions. “You would not be having these conversations in the South-East,” she said.
Greater Manchester metro mayor Andy Burnham, a cabinet minister in the last Labour government, told the summit the country was “inherently London-centric” but Brexit was an opportunity for change.
“We have to get ourselves organised so it is as easy for the Government to speak to the North of England as it is to speak to the London business community,”
he said. Mr Burnham said his experience as a Treasury minister was that the system is “rigged” in favour of the capital because of the way major transport schemes and their potential economic impact are analysed by government officials. He called for a “social weighting” to be included in the process so areas which already have strong economies do not enjoy an unfair advantage.
Greater Manchester’s mayor said the extra money secured for Northern Ireland by Unionist MPs in return for supporting the Conservatives showed how political pressure could be exerted on the Government.
“I think we’ve got to, yes, have a respectful conversation with the Government but at the same time show our political steel and bring MPs together across the North from all political parties and ask them to start organising in Parliament,”
he said.
In a letter to Mr Burnham on the morning of the conference.Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said the current government was the first “for decades to make Northern infrastructure a priority”. He claimed frequently quoted figures showing the gulf in transport spending between the North and London were “flawed” and “inaccurate”. IPPR North, the thinktank behind the figures, stood by their analysis. In his letter, Mr Grayling defended his suggestion that using trains which can run on both diesal and electric power could be an alternative to electrifying the entire length of the trans-Pennine route between Manchester and Leeds.
“I want the best possible improvements for passenger journeys as soon as possible,” he said.
Writing in The Yorkshire Post yesterday, Mr Grayling said:
“I’m hugely excited about the prospects for transport in the north of England. “Tremendous opportunities are opening up to connect the major Northern cities with modern new links, and deliver the extra capacity to tackle congestion and overcrowding. “But ultimately, it is not up to central government to grasp these opportunities.”
On the last day before the parliamentary recess, the Transport Minister Chris Grayling sneaked out the announcement that various electrification schemes would be cancelled, in the North West (the Windermere branch), in Wales (Cardiff to Swansea) and in the East Midlands( Midland Main Line, from Kettering north to Derby, Nottingham and Sheffield).
The following day he gave a press interview indicating that electrification of our route would probably also be cancelled or at the very least scaled back (once a report is published in Autumn). Our resident cynic thinks this will also be sneaked out on a busy news day in the hope that no-one notices or that the inevitable furore is diminished.
The project to electrify the entire train line between Manchester and Leeds could be cancelled because it is “too hard”, according to Transport Secretary Chris Grayling.
He said it was too difficult to run electric pylons along the whole line between the two cities, and that bi-modal trains could instead operate with diesel engines on part of the network.
“We don’t need to electrify all of every route. There are places that are built in Victorian times where it is very difficult to put up electric cables,”
Mr Grayling said on a visit to Manchester, according to the Financial Times.
“If there are bits of the TransPennine network that are complicated to do and we have a bi-mode train, we can say: ‘Here is a section we can have a diesel.’ We will be electrifying TransPennine but we can do it in a smarter way.”
Once again, the minister explained his decision by saying that the introduction of new bi-mode trains means that electrification was not needed, since the units could travel on parts of the existing network on diesel as well as on the electrified sections.
In a move guaranteed to make northern passengers even more betrayed, the minister announced his full backing for the second Crossrail project in London, projected to cost £30bn. Although he thought this price too high, he committed to working with the mayor of London to enable the scheme.
While it is true that technology has moved on in recent years and the bi-mode trains appear to be more reliable than first thought, this move can only be seen as a betrayal of the north to allow the south to have the full benefit of electrification.
The trains are heavier and more expensive because they run on two differing methods of fuelling, electric motors fed from the overhead power supply and a tank of diesel to power a series of small on-board engines throughout the train. These provide power for the electric motors driving the wheels.
Later reports suggest that the government announcement was issued prematurely and that the minister had not said that the Transpennine electrification was in doubt.
It is disingenuous of the government to say that the overhead wiring spoils the countryside as the pollutants which will be spewed out by the diesel engines of the bi-mode trains will have more impact on people’s lives than the look of a few gantries and wires.
It is a clear betrayal of years of promises that finally the north would get the rail network it deserved has been placed in doubt.
Then the following day Mr Grayling stated his support for London’s Crossrail 2, a project costing may times more than Trans Pennine electrification and one that directly benefits his Surrey constituency. Insert cynical comment here about the DfT and the minister cutting back projects in the North because they don’t know or care about it, whilst spending ever more on London and the south east.
In fact here’s a comment from someone with years of experience within the railway industry, someone who really knows what they are talking about.
“Not electrifying between Manchester to Leeds on an otherwise electrified route between Liverpool to Edinburgh is not smart.
“Dual mode trains need the additional weight of diesel engines distributed through the train, so sub optimising performance and fuel efficiency over the much longer electric sections.
“Mr Grayling may not be aware of the Pennines between Manchester and Leeds. This is the section where performance is needed most. This is not smart.”
Ian Brown CBE FCILT, Railfuture Policy Director
This has implications for us. Electrification, although not sufficient in itself, was one of the key actions necessary to enable us to have the half-hourly service that we have been campaigning for.
