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Trains from Manchester to Leeds to ‘take 30 minutes’ thanks to ‘revolutionary’ rail upgrade
The government says the £11bn upgrade will ‘address this historic lack of balance’ between spending in the north and south
The travel time for trains from Manchester to Leeds are set to be halved thanks to a ‘revolutionary’ rail route upgrade.
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has this week announced a budget between £9bn and £11.5bn for the Transpennine Route Upgrades, which will improve the rail links between Manchester, Leeds and York.
Shapps said the extra cash would enable the routes to be electrified, cutting travel times by up to half and ‘revolutionising’ the journey across the Pennines, as per the BBC.
He said: “This is the single biggest investment any government has ever made in Britain’s railways.”
According to the government, the improvements will see a journey from Manchester to Leeds take just over thirty minutes instead of up to an hour.
The plans will also see the route be fitted with digital signalling as well as extra track to combat the long-standing technical faults, slow speeds and delays experienced by passengers.
Shapps said the upgrade will ‘address this historic lack of balance’ between spending in the North and South.
He added that the North would receive more investment per head than the Midlands or the South, which was ‘all part of our plan to level up the whole country’.
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He went on to acknowledge that these services had not ‘kept pace with the times’ but the upgrades would make them more reliable, less crowded, better for the environment and more like commuting in and around London.
Also as part of the plan, almost £1bn will be spent on the remaining electrification of the railway between Stalybridge and Manchester.
The upgrades are set to begin next year, and are predicted to be complete in the next ten-fifteen years.
Tony Miles, from Modern Railways magazine, has welcomed the news, saying: “It’s good news the government has formally committed the money needed to complete the project.
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“Network Rail now needs to keep a tight control on costs to make sure the project can be delivered.”
However, the plans have also been met with criticism, with Manuel Cortes, general secretary of transport union TSSA, saying it is ‘yet another re-announcement of existing funding from a headline-seeking Transport Secretary’.
He said: “The funding is of course welcome, but if this government was serious about backing our railways, then it needs to do much more to tackle rip-off ticket prices and improve reliability and end-to-end journeys.”