November 18th - I’ve Read The Government’s Integrated Rail Plan So You Don’t Have To. These Are The Highlights.
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2021
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The government have unveiled plans to provide 'faster' train journeys across the northern half of the country, delivered 'earlier and cheaper' under a £96bn rail plan - but have confirmed the rumours that the eastern leg of HS2 to Leeds has been scrapped. I take a look at the plans and see what's really happening and whether it does mean better train connections for northern cities.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast to bring you the latest news on travelling, |
| 0:08.5 | whether you're making a great escape or simply dreaming about one, or indeed, planning to catch a train, |
| 0:16.0 | because today I am going to be talking about the government's integrated rail plan, which I have spent |
| 0:23.8 | the morning reading so that you do not have to. And I will be bringing you the highlights of that. |
| 0:32.0 | Unlike your next train journey, this podcast is completely free, as is my weekly travel email. You can |
| 0:39.1 | subscribe to that at independent.co.com.uk forward slash newsletters, and I will be happy to send |
| 0:46.7 | that out to you at 7am every Friday morning, yes, starting tomorrow. |
| 0:53.3 | Anyway, at long last, we have got the government's integrated rail plan, in which they say |
| 1:01.6 | they will be spending nearly £100 billion of taxpayers' money on a whole range of projects. |
| 1:08.1 | But as we have kind of learnt from some government leaks over the past |
| 1:12.7 | few days, it's not going to include finishing the eastern leg of high speed two, which was going |
| 1:19.5 | to be going from Birmingham, or at least a point close to Birmingham Airport, up to Sheffield |
| 1:26.9 | and to Leeds. That has been cancelled, apart from a short-ish |
| 1:31.1 | stump from the Birmingham Interchange, up to East Midlands Parkway, one of the bleakest places |
| 1:37.0 | known to mankind. We knew that. We also didn't know quite what was going to be happening to |
| 1:42.0 | Northern Powerhouse Rail. This is the idea |
| 1:44.4 | that you spend about 40 billion pounds and you build a line from Manchester to Leeds with also |
| 1:51.4 | connections from Liverpool and in the opposite direction, stop in Bradford and then onto York and |
| 1:59.4 | Hull. Well, that has been downsized quite a lot. |
| 2:02.9 | There's going to be 40 new miles of high speed line, apparently, and that will be going from |
| 2:08.9 | Warrington via Manchester to Leeds. And it will actually be told to go from London to Leeds via Manchester, where unbelievably the train will stop and reverse in order to go on the bit to Leeds. |
| 2:26.9 | You really couldn't make it up. I haven't yet mapped out the full journey, but it will be rather more significant than the distance as the crow flies |
... |
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