A high speeed railway to Leeds
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Fabian Hamilton met with George Mudie MP (Labour Leeds East), John Battle MP (Labour Leeds West) and Greg Mulholland (Liberal Democrat Leeds NW) on September 10 2009 to lobby Lord Andrew Adonis the Secretary of State for Transport minister and press the very strong case for the proposed second UK High Speed Railway Line to be built from London directly to Leeds.
That is where it has got to get to! From left to right John Battle, Fabian Hamilton, Lord Adonis and Greg Mulholland are of the same mind. It has to be Leeds. |
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| Considerable anxiety and anger in Yorkshire was generated when Network Rail, the not-for-profit company that maintains the UK railway network published its proposal for a line running to Manchester via Birmingham and running far from the cities along the M1 corridor towards Leeds. |
Find out about the disappointing Network Rail proposal. |
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Lord Adonis was able to assure Fabian and the other Leeds MPs that the Network Rail proposal was a simple business proposal and did not represent government thinking where political, common sense and vision had to be important parts of the argument to determine a future new rail route. Reaching Birmingham is an imperative as the London - Birmingham railway routes are at near capacity and Scotland is an ultimate goal. There is also a requirement to reach the Liverpool - Manchester Region. Fabian stressed to Lord Adonis that a route that left Manchester to cross the Pennines to Sheffield and then Leeds before heading north would look ridiculous to travelers and also incur very high engineering costs. The answer is to follow the M1 from London and connect the other Midlands centres such as Leicester, Nottingham / Derby before Leeds. Two branches would be needed. A short spur to Birmingham from near Rugby and a second towards Manchester via Sheffield. The main route towards Scotland on the east of the Pennines would also reach the large centres of population around Newcastle. The red line indicates schematically the route preferred by Leeds MPs. |
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Fabian and his colleagues also discussed the urgent need for some immediate improvements in the existing infrastructure such as the now obvious case to electrify the transpennine route from Leeds to Manchester via Huddersfield and the extension of the existing electrified network around Leeds to reach Harrogate and York.
A vision of the future. The photograph shows a French High Speed train running on a purpose built track and travelling at 300 kilometres per hour (185 mph). |
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