Rail reopenings: processes need greater speed
Following an exploratory meeting a month earlier, I chaired the first meeting of what became SELRAP (Skipton-Colne Rail Action Partnership) on April 10 2001, and led this campaign in its early years.
Sixteen years on, and I was delighted to read Paul Stephen’s comprehensive roundup of the project in RAIL 816, and then the additional information provided by the SELRAP committee in RAIL 820’s Open Access.
I have kept in touch over the years, and it is very satisfying to read that real progress is now being made, and that the aims and challenges of today’s committee are much the same as we considered at the start. That there are not yet visible signs of progress on the ground is no reflection on the hard-working and dedicated committee, several of whose members have devoted hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of volunteer effort over the years, for the ultimate benefit of their communities.
As other recent letters and articles in RAIL have highlighted, the time taken to bring rail infrastructure projects to completion is beyond belief. The Skipton-Colne reopening is one of the very few such inter-regional/ national projects in Britain which is truly a ‘no-brainer’ - as described by Paul Stephen in relation to the Stratford-Honeybourne link ( RAIL 819).
And yet, if the progress (or should that be regress?) being made by East West Rail, and the projects serving Tavistock, Halton and Ashington are anything to go by, it could be ten years or more before the first train between East Lancashire and Leeds finally runs.
Let us hope that the ‘investors’ said to be keen on taking both Skipton-Colne and the much larger Brighton Main Line 2 project forward, using private capital, will be able to find far speedier routes to success.
The country simply cannot wait this long for the economic benefits that new railway services unlock. A radical new methodology, firstly