Labour’s Great Rail Revival Has Already Hit The Buffers
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article in The Telegraph.
This is the sub-heading.
The decision to relaunch just one defunct train line has sparked anger and frustration across Britain
These four paragraphs summary the article.
Labour came to power with a pledge to improve Britain’s creaking railways, spearheaded by a headline-grabbing commitment to renationalisation.
But a year on, the Government stands accused of blocking the resurrection of dozens of routes across England, most of them mothballed since the Beeching cuts of the 1960s.
The decision to relaunch just one defunct train line out of dozens was announced by the Government earlier this month.
In doing so, it has sparked anger in communities across the country, many of which were given hope by ministers who pledged to reconsider a fleet of reopenings, despite scrapping Boris Johnson’s Restoring Your Railway programme last year.
I find this particularly disappointing.
- The two railways, that have been reopened in England in the last few years; the Dartmoor Line and the Northumberland Line have done very well.
- The Levenmouth Link in Scotland appears to be going the same way.
- Merseyrail Extension to Headbolt Lane appears to be well-used.
- The government wants to build lots of Starmer’s semis.
Surely, a few more rail reopenings will help the last objective.
The Anonymous Widower 
Northumberland was an existing railway but cost nearly £300m. You forgot that Portishead is now approved another one largely over an existing railway but needs 180m. Simple fact its costing far too much to reopen even lines largely in existence let alone ones that have been largely lost to nature. However the real issue is the utter fiasco that is HS2 is basically drained the govt coffers for the next five years leaving nothing left for anything else hence MML elecn now stalled again.
Comment by Nicholas Lewis | July 24, 2025 |
Yup, I agree with Nicholas. This is not the Labour government’s fault, but the inevitable result of the mess left behind by the previous lot. It’s not just HS2 where so much money was wasted. The previous government started the reopening scheme, but without any funding. Lots of local governments put large amounts of money into creating business cases for local lines, but this was a complete waste of everyone’s time and money, as nothing resulted from it.
It doesn’t, though, surprise me at all that the Telegraph is trying to push blame on to Labour and neglecting to mention the real cause. Just illustrates the complete lack of objective reporting in much of the national press.
Comment by Peter Robins | July 24, 2025 |
As a follow-up to this, I happened to be reading the April 2020 issue of Railfuture’s Railwatch mag, where the chair writes “Railfuture welcomed the Government announcement of funding for “Reversing Beeching”, but £500 million will be enough to reopen only about 25 miles of railway at today’s typical Network Rail costings.” It’s been clear from the start that the money involved was nowhere near enough.
Comment by Peter Robins | July 29, 2025 |