Manchester Now! Is Glasgow Next?
Look at most large English, Scottish and Welsh cities and there is usually at least one line through the city so that trains can pass from one side of the city to the other. Look at these examples.
1. London is upgrading the main North-South Thameslink route and building another East-West one.
2. Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, Newcastle, Nottingham, Reading and Sheffield all have lines that fan out on either side.
3. Liverpool Lime Street is effectively a terminus on the coast, but a North-South line in the city connects stations in the North with others in the South.
When lines connect across a city, this means you don’t have so many terminal platforms in the centre of that city. As an example look at Brighton and Bedford, which have been connected for decades by Thameslink through London. There are several Central London stations where the train calls, so passengers have a lot of journey options. But there are no terminal platforms in Central London used by Thameslink.
Only two major cities don’t have a connection like this.
1. Manchester has two unconnected stations; Piccadilly and Victoria, with the former generally dealing with Southern services and Victoria dealing with the North and East.
2. Glasgow is the same with Queen Street dealing with the North and East and Central dealing with the South and West.
But with the announcement today of the final go-ahead for the Ordsall Curve in Manchester, as reported in this piece on the BBC, Manchester is finally getting the cross-city link it should have got with the building of the Picc-Vic tunnel. This plan was abandoned in 1977.
Will Crossrail Glasgow be announced before the election? I doubt it, as Alex Salmond would label it an English bribe.
But it is desperately needed!
No comments yet.
The Anonymous Widower 
Leave a comment