Re-rail Great Central Corridor needs local councils of all tiers to support the principle and protect the remaining route

The English Regional Transport Association (ERTA) is pro public transport and all for a better environment. We disagree that HS2 is a green project, rather at huge cost and intrusion seems to miss the point that speed is not everything, capacity needs links south of Leicester and as for Birmingham needing more links, HS2 only caters for passengers not passenger and freight which conventional railways do. HS2 is therefore a 'wrong type of railway' and is likely to deliver ribbon development and create brownfield sites but with no station between Old Oak Common (OOC) and Solihull, will force the growth of transport onto existing roads and railway which are at capacity. Therefore with others we continue in our opposition.

However it is quite clear that two things are apparent to us:

1. M1 and West Coast Main Line are at capacity/nearing gridlock congestion

2. Growth and development bit by bit goes in across the regions but a lack of infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions/air pollution and land take of widening roads means we must have some of our closed railway back albeit with slight reinterpretations where the subsequent years have lost the original routes. Everything costs, there is a cost to doing nothing too.

We believe that a rebuild Great Central south of Narborough and Rugby to Calvert with a new spur onto the Oxford line would enable Leicester-Aylesbury and Oxford for onwards access to Heathrow, Southampton and Bristol for example - passenger and freight and vice versa. Intermediate Parkway Stations at Brackley (expanding place), Woodford Halse and Willoughby, a new link with the West Coast Main Line via the canal corridor and onwards a new build solution to parallel the M1 to join the existing Nuneaton-Leicester line at the Narborough area. Another new link could be Leamington (south of) - Southam-Daventry-Northampton Loop Line.

Land needs protection and a new bore for Catesby Tunnel unless relocation packages can be done needs consideration.

But the gains would be immense. Indeed you could still have a conventional new line to Birmingham linking off the Great Central north of Calvert or off a link to the Daventry-Southam-Leamington Line, saving intrusion as currently the case.

We are calling for route protection, councils to support the principle and club together to pool resources to commission a feasibility study to look at local and regional gains.

We welcome news that there is a consideration for a Northampton-Market Harborough Rail Link to reopen. This would boost rail usage linking large places like Milton Keynes and Northampton with Leicester and the East Midlands and vice versa for work, commuting, wider travel and essentially logistics choice to roads only dependency cultures which add to congestion and pollution. However the West Coast Main Line has few spare paths and trains vie for baying capacity currently non available from Bedford, East Croydon, West London and Aylesbury/Oxford (2023) for Milton Keynes Central and were capacity bouyant aspirations to run into Rugby from West London would not have been trunkated to MK Central terminal only due to capacity issues and that was 20 years ago (Connex). So clearly good ideas have to be thought through and ensure they are deliverable. In any case, it only deals with the eastern flank of the West Coast Main Line corridor and leaves the western flank wide open to speculative development and implications. 

Please add your voice to our calls and see diagram below. Copiues of our mini report can be emailed free as a pdf on request richard.erta@gmail.com.  We hope you will consider joining as either individuals or as a organisation or council body please. More information can be found via our website: https://www.ertarail.com/ and our Blogspot: https://ertarailvolunteer.blogspot.com/ Thank you.