The GCR is a funny one. As far as I see it, there's no priority for it and no hope of it reopening (especially if we can't find the money/skills to electrify the MML)
But there's some argument for part of it - unlike the usual "lets reopen a line to a village in Devon/ Cumbria/ Carmarthenshire/ Galloway (etc)" stuff that we get a number of threads about.
A line from the MML to the WCML would link some relatively large places (e.g. Nottingham/ Leicester to Rugby/ Northampton/ Milton Keynes) - the kind of journeys that the M1 currently dominates the market for.
The rest of the scheme seems to be more about nostalgia and conspiracy theories (e.g. the Facebook page talking about "vested interests" in HS2, "the Midland dominated BR was said to want to finish off the Great Central") and wild optimism (e.g. a Grimsby - Liverpool line to remove freight from the M62).
Woodhead seems a non-starter (without worrying about the feasibility :
- Passenger services from Sheffield to Manchester are two/three/four coaches long, so there's plenty of scope to increase capacity on them (before we need to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on a new line).
- Much of the freight on the Hope Valley route is running to/from Hope itself (so a Woodhead route wouldn't be much help for that).
- It currently takes over half an hour to get from Hadfield to Piccadilly (just over a dozen miles away), so you won't be able to squeeze any fast passenger services over Woodhead.
- You'd have to build a new station at Sheffield, which doesn't connect to Midland (and would have no tram either).
- Running Sheffield - Penistone - Manchester is a fairly indirect route.
- The 'putting lorries onto a wagon in Yorkshire and running ro-ro services through to somewhere near the M60 doesn't stand up to much scrutiny (it's not long enough to warrant those kind of delays to the "just in time" economy that lorry drivers work in).
There's no capacity at the London end (which is why HS2 needs to be a new route)
Maybe you don't agree with 47802 but I don't see his view as ridiculous. I doubt if the government seriously intends to reopen one inch of the lines closed by Beeching - they just wanted some favourable headlines and they got them.
Agreed.
It was a useful way of getting a "good news story" into the press, without spending a penny. Much easier to generate some nostalgia from journalists who can write a simplistic story than understand the complexities of the VTEC "partnership"/ "handing back the keys" announcement that came out on the same day.
So we had a few pages of "Beeching" in the papers, because it distracted newspapers from investigating the awkward situation on the ECML.
It's like "fox hunting" or "grammar schools" - a simple thing for a Government minister to start a national conversation about to get easily-excited people excited (and demanding that we sign petitions etc). Some people will get their hopes up, there'll be debates on the letters pages of some local newspapers, social media will get clogged up with several petitions, but little ever changes.