To all those pro-Snake Pass line, what’s so bad about the Hope valley line, other than the odd capacity issue?
I'm not pro-Snake Pass (for a start, how is it going to serve Sheffield? The western end would be fine, since you have the existing line from Manchester to Glossop but... are you going to knock down chunks of Hillsborough and approach down the Rivelin Valley? Complete non-starter) but the existing Hope Valley line means that trains between the two city centres take just short of an hour to cover around thirty miles as the crow flies - pretty poor considering the size of the two cities. Plus, you've got the capacity problems through Dore, the slow freight, the flat junctions... there's a lot of focus on Leeds - Manchester but not much on the Sheffield line.
You could certainly run longer trains on the Sheffield - Stockport - Manchester bit of the route, but I suppose there are problems with the fact that the services also serve stations to the east/west that may not be able to accommodate much longer trains
Why should the government spend millions on brand new lines such as this one, to make it quicker than the existing line? It doesn’t make any sense. Manchester has a sufficient service to Sheffield and vice versa.
You've hit upon one of the Forum's main reactions. Building lines is great as long as they follow the paths of old routes (Something Something Beeching Something). But trying to solve problems by building on new alignments is a definite no-no.
For example, it's fine to suggest building a Sheffield - Manchester line via Woodhead (because that's an ancient line) but there seems a lot of hostility to the idea of building a Sheffield - Manchester route via Snake Pass (because that'd be a brand new alignment - at least in the middle section).
I'm not in favour of this Snake Pass suggestion but I'm sure that there'd be a lot more people on here in favour of it if there was a Victorian entrepreneur who went bankrupt after his SSMR (Sheffield Snake Manchester Railway) proved to be a financial disaster, or if Beeching had closed a Snake Pass route in the 1960s - then it'd regularly feature along with the other dozen lines that are always brought up for re-opening.
But then, if HS2 followed the GC route then a lot of the people who are against it at the moment would suddenly be in favour... funny.