Laudable campaign. We need a government incentive and directive to protect former rail routes and infrastructures and a nationwide plan and funding to reinstate and restore local rail links which could make a difference including modal shift more from road - based everything with pollution and land take, to cleaner, smarter and bulk people and goods by rail more saving land, speeding end-to-end up more and cutting the bads associated with excessive dependency designs on road-based usage en masse. Indeed, I feel the campaign for #Hunstanton rail reopening should have carried on - #Bude hasn't given up (!) and that we need a marriage whereby the Norfolk Orbital Railwaay aims support opposing the Wensum Road Scheme and vice versa, so we see more of a joined-up call to switch by reinstating the railway and stop the rot by opposing environmentally intrusive road schemes.
Lincolnshire is ina worse position, whereby they build roads on former trackbeds and then build more roads (strings of bypasses) because they cannot envisage rebuilding missing rail links or new-building alongside road infrastrcture which could be tailored e.g. #March (Cambs)-#Spalding area (South Holland/Lincolnshire area) and A16 East Lincs Rail Corridor Spalding-#Boston-#Louth-#Grimsby. We need a new approach with these goals in mind, otherwise we get bogged down in a quagmire/a 'slough for despond' as John Bunyan puts it in Pilgrim's Progress! Realisms are relelative. Studies start upwards of £50k. Government has a pivotal role in policy, frameworks and action terms.
Alas all is at sea and the tides come in and bury these key strategic structural issues under a myriad of other priorities, when if tiltering polcy to favour local, conventional rail (not #HS2), then money allocated to new roads £27 billion could inform a load of rail reopenings, currently been sold to advocates as unaffordable and makes vulnerable to land-grab other uses agendas and believe me #Bedford-#Sandy proves, a cycle scheme designed to retain the corridor for a railway, now rejects the railway reinstatement in the name of safeguarding a cycle way.
The reality is cycle ways are a lot easier and cheaper to redirect/relocate than railways, but a lack of political will, apprehensions of scale and complacency means market and Big Brother decides regardless of public or environmental needs-must issues. Cuts to buses compounds a sense of isolation, broken links and disenfranchisement across the regions. This is the sort of thing ERTA is trying to address with others respectively. https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/23254358.norfolk-cycle-track-row-disused-railway-bridge/?ref=fbshr
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