As Steve and I said last month, the HS2 project puts our aims for the Woodhead route into a totally new context. What it doesn't do is change our objectives. We are still determined
- to restore a strategic rail link between Manchester and Sheffield
- to fight any attempt to build a new motorway over the Dark Peak.
HS2 needs revision in all sorts of ways, but our specific interest as a Woodhead campaign is to put our disused track to its proper use as the HS2 approach to Manchester and create the link with Sheffield that way. The current government proposal envisages (if you can believe this) seven miles of tunneling under the douce south Manchester suburbs. Think of that when I say that we are no longer focused on preserving existing tunnels, either the old ones or the 1953 one. The kind of traffic that HS2 will have to accommodate needs bigger tunnel provision altogether, but it doesn't even begin to compare with the cost of the HS2-to-Manchester tunneling proposal as it stands right now.
Our particular interest fits in with wider strategies, especially with the development of the Woodhead route as the basis of a rail-freight corridor from the east coast ports to Liverpool. Let me make it clear that I am not trying to widen our objectives. Our supporters who have paid to join our campaign were not invited to underwrite any comprehensive national transport plan, and they are not going to be.
It's all a matter of getting the bigger proposals to work in our own favour. Our doughty civil engineer Colin Elliff has done simply colossal amounts of work in demonstrating the very serious shortcomings of the present HS2 proposals. What we now need is 'muscle'. For all its faults, HS2 at least concedes the principle of adding extra rail capacity, and we need access to commercial and political backing. For a start we could do with some competent peer-reviewing of Colin's scheme so that we can put it forward with full confidence.
So you can see what needs to be done. It's not something that can be done by a handful of enthusiastic activists. It needs expertise and above all it needs contacts in the right places. Who can help? Who is up for it?
Best to everyone
David Bryson
Chair, Reopen the Woodhead Line
