Railnews Magazine December 2021 Back Issue

RAILNEWS for December leads with the newly published Integrated Rail Plan, which has sparked a fierce debate. Transport secretary Grant Shapps confirmed a budget of £96 billion for his Plan, saying that HS2 had been designed ‘in isolation from the rest of the transport network’. It will now terminate at East Midlands Parkway rather than Leeds.

Mr Shapps added: ‘This plan will bring the North and Midlands closer together. It will rebalance our economic geography, ’ but Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram responded: ‘What we have seen is a government pretending to deliver that transformation but doing it on the cheap.’

Meanwhile, improvements to the West Coast Main Line north of Crewe are one of the key recommendations in Sir Peter Hendy’s new Union Connectivity Review.

In other news, a National Rail Contract has been awarded to Arriva to run Chiltern Railways until 2027, work has started on the construction of the new station at Winslow, work to upgrade the railway has been planned by Network Rail over Christmas and the New Year holidays at 370 sites, and the £30 million restoration of Barmouth Bridge is taking longer than expected, because engineers found that the condition of the timber structure is worse than they had thought.

The Mayor of London has warned that without more funding Transport for London might be forced to close an Underground line, while figures from the Office of Rail and Road reveal that passenger travel by train dropped by 78 per cent during 2020-21, although the number of passengers has been rising again recently.

Several industry businesses have announced plans to develop low-emission trains in the wake of the COP26 climate change conference, and the first daily trains between Exeter and Okehampton for almost 50 years started running on 20 November.