Analysis: billions for railway schemes… but will it be enough?

Mayors were celebrating windfalls in the Chancellor’s announcement of cash for local transport schemes. Yet the new money won’t go far, says Howard Johnston.

The government’s £15.6 billion promise for more and better urban transport, plus an extra £2.2bn announced for London, has been well received across many parts of England and Wales.

It has also come under attack - for supporting the haves and for giving nothing to the have-nots.

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has every reason to be pleased that Chancellor Rachel Reeves has put trams, urban railways and the London Underground near the top of her priority spending list for the next seven years, doubling last year’s spend.

Much of the money, however, is actually just writing cheques for schemes that have been around for decades, many of them approved by the last Conservative government.

Reeves’ June 4 statement delighted the Tyne & Wear Metro, Manchester Metrolink, West Yorkshire Mass Transit and West Midlands Metro, each of which will get large slices of the £15.6bn cake to expand and improve their systems (RAIL 1037).

Just seven days later, as Reeves announced her Spending Review in the House of Commons, Transport for London learned that it will also get £2.2bn by 2030 to fund its capital renewal programme - although this is well short of how much it needs to replace the life-expired Bakerloo Line fleet with a run-on order of Siemens’ new Piccadilly Line stock, to refurbish the current Central Line cars, to buy new trams for Croydon, and to prepare for taking the Docklands Light Railway into Thamesmead.

London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan has diplomatically recorded his dissatisfaction, knowing that his £5bn-£9bn, five-mile extension of the Bakerloo Line to Lewisham and beyond is not going to happen any time soon.

Transport for Wales is equally unhappy at getting £445 million, which will only pay for five new stations and for more work on the Cardiff Valley Lines. What has happened to the £1bn scheme announced in 2023 to electrify the North Wales Main Line?

There are several reasons why we have to exercise caution with the latest cash handouts.

What if the economy takes a severe downturn and/or Reform sweeps into power in 2029?

Reform leader Nigel Farage’s election manifesto last year was widely criticised for its ‘back of an envelope’ transport policy, and its call for the immediate scrapping of HS2.

And although they are currently political outsiders, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are unlikely to cloud Labour’s transport vision.

Labour has not been averse to U-turns in the past, especially on urban transit, and major cities have been seriously wounded.

Back in summer 2000, then-Deputy Prime Minister and Transport Secretary John Prescott announced a £180bn, ten-year plan to build 25 new tram lines, 100 town bypasses, and to widen 360 miles of motorways and trunk roads.

Manchester Metrolink would get six new routes, the West Midlands two, the Tyne & Wear could extend to Sunderland and South Hylton (this actually happened), and the Docklands Light Railway would run into London City Airport. New tramways would also start up in Leeds, Bristol, South Hampshire, and Nottingham.

As we now know, most of it was just hot air/wishful thinking.

Prescott’s successor Alistair Darling had a different view, citing value for money as the reason for cancelling Liverpool, Leeds, Bristol and South Hampshire (Portsmouth and Southampton) to save just over a billion pounds for all of them. Manufacturers and suppliers who had already won contracts are still furious at how they were treated.

More cash for the haves…

To return to the 2025-32 investment programme, let’s start with the Tyne and Wear Metro.

Creating a new southern loop to Sunderland, kick-started with £1.8bn from the taxpayer, realises the long-held ambition to complete the missing link from Pelaw to Washington (a high crime and unemployment area) and eastwards to South Hylton.

This requires reinstatement of seven miles of the northern part of the trackless but protected Leamside Line (not the further 14 miles to Ferryhill, which may come later). Will there eventually be dual light and heavy rail operations?

Before that, will Tyne and Wear Metro operator Nexus exercise its option for four extra Class 555s beyond the present 42, presumably with bi-mode battery and electric traction packages?

Manchester has traditionally done well with central funding and has received £2.5 billion this time around.

The two-mile Stockport extension from East Didsbury has always been a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ - and finding a decent town centre spot for a new terminus has been discussed over and over again.

For cross-country rail travellers from East Anglia and the Midlands, you will be able to change here for Manchester Airport without having to go all the way into Piccadilly.

While a new Metrolink interchange for Bury and additional stops is just restating old news, the ordering of 1,000 new electric buses is a new and welcome boost for Greater Manchester’s popular Bee network, and we now wait to hear about the possible integration of heavy rail suburban routes.

Sources inside Metrolink say that it is keen to procure a fleet of longer two-car trams, to reduce the wasteful double-heading of the current fleet of 147 ‘M5000’ Bombardier/Alstom units.

On the other side of the Pennines, it is widely acknowledged that the aborted 1980s Leeds Supertram scheme was too narrow-minded (as was the £70m study into trolleybuses).

The popular new Leeds-Bradford light rail system, with other destinations such as Halifax, Huddersfield and probably Wakefield and Pontefract, now seems unstoppable. Construction could begin as early as 2008.

Although it is still well behind Manchester, West Midlands Metro (WMM) is gaining ground with the announcement of another route - this time taking the Eastside line to the Sports Quarter in Solihull, providing the planned new Birmingham City football stadium with a six- to eight-minute service in the peak.

Meanwhile, WMM has to make the emerging Wednesbury-Dudley-Merry Hill extension work… and no more time-wasting Town Hall talk about an underground system, please.

In the East Midlands, Derby has watched as rival city Nottingham, just 15 miles away, increased its prosperity due to the success of its Express Transit tramway.

Until two years ago, a light rail connection between the two seemed a dead cert, to ease pressure on the congested A52 main road via Beeston (currently part-closed at its eastern end for repairs).

A tramway was planned as part of the HS2 branch through the midway point of Toton. Could it now happen, thanks to the new £2bn grant, much of which is already allocated to improve bus routes and the under-performing railway?

Ever since South Yorkshire Supertram opened for business in March 1994, it has rattled ratepayers in Doncaster and Barnsley, who pay for it despite it not running through their streets.

That may not change for a long while yet, such is the maintenance backlog and the need for new trams, although the £1.5bn that’s on the way should help to sort this out.

Liverpool has always wanted trams, but they’re still not on the horizon.

Merseyrail has its new Class 777 trains, and the next priority is to spend a £1.6bn grant on three rapid transit road-based routes to John Lennon Airport, St Helens and the Wirral.

The top football clubs of Liverpool and Everton (the latter at their new stadium) will only get buses for the present, but at least they will be new ones.

Around 1985, it was estimated that a tramway between Bristol’s Temple Meads and Parkway stations would cost £200m (£600m today). Local councillors chose instead to divert some of the money to keep the rates down, while Transport Secretary Alistair Darling was also disinterested.

Today, Rachel Reeves’ £800m is nothing like enough to revive the scheme, although elected mayor Helen Godwin and others would like to do something, as well as reach out to Bath, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset.

The new money will primarily fund railway infrastructure improvements and better bus services.

Teesside has set aside a modest £20m to research trams for Middlesbrough. Much of the £1bn destined for this area is to improve public transport on local roads, provide better railway stations, and repair the Transporter Bridge.

Middlesbrough station was given special mention for a £60m grant.

The ongoing acute congestion was partly resolved by a £34m platform extension in 2021 for longer LNER Azuma trains.

The latest idea is to create a third platform on the northern side of double tracks. It will be expensive because of the likely need for track modelling and an extra-long footbridge.

…nothing for have nots

Spare some thought for English cities with a quarter of a million residents, including Leicester, Bournemouth, Brighton, Plymouth, Preston, Hull and Southampton.

Like Cambridge, one of the UK’s biggest revenue generators and with an elected mayor, government cash for tramways has been… nothing.