The man charged with creating a new high-speed link that could get passengers from Liverpool to Manchester in 21 minutes says it WILL happen - and that it could help bring "decades" of economic growth to Liverpool.
Transport for the North is pushing for the building of "Northern Powerhouse Rail" (NPR) to allow
high-speed travel across the North.
It would see a new line built from a new
Liverpool city centre station to Manchester Airport, Manchester city centre and beyond.
As well as giving Liverpool faster links to Manchester, Leeds and other Northern cities, the line would also connect to HS2 - meaning the city would also get faster high-speed services to London.
If the NPR plan and HS2 went ahead journey times from Liverpool to London would fall to around an hour and a quarter, down from 1 hour 33 under the current HS2 plan and more than two hours at the moment.
A graphic showing the impact of "Northern Powerhouse Rail", produced by Transport for the North (Image: Liverpool ECHO)
The project would cost billions of pounds and needs Government backing. TfN is preparing a detailed masterplan to prove to ministers that the scheme would be worth an investment of more than £24bn.
It today released its latest research into the boost NPR could give local economies and has called on business leaders to back the plans.
Today Tim Wood, programme director for NPR at TfN, told the ECHO the line was a "once in a lifetime" opportunity. And he said he was confident work could start as early as 2024.
He told the ECHO: "This will put 1.95m people actually within 90 minutes' travel time of the centre of Liverpool.
"It would put an extra 100,000 businesses within one hour of the city centre. And there would be 46% more people within an hour of the centre of Liverpool.
"It’s a major transformation for the north."
And asked if NPR could ever become reality, Mr Wood said: "It is definitely going to happen, as will HS2 Phase 2 (from Birmingham to Manchester).
He said: £24bn is their estimate. We know it will cost a little bit more than that.
“But it would all be funded by the £50 per person extra for the next 30 years.
"We receive £100 per person from the Government for transport. That’s what we want to go up by another £50 per person. And we are asking the Government for that. That would fund our projects - smart ticketing, highways, and NPR."
Transport for the North is promoting the benefits of the proposed Northern Powerhouse Rail scheme (Image: Liverpool ECHO)
TfN calls it Northern Powerhouse Rail but others - particularly Labour politicians wary of using George Osborne’s phrase Northern Powerhouse - prefer to call it Crossrail for the North.
Mr Wood said all 11 Local Enterprise Partnerships on the route - including the Liverpool City Region LEP - had signed up to support it.
The high-speed rail line is also being backed by Liverpool city region metro mayor Steve Rotheram.
He said: “England is the most politically centralised and economically unbalanced country in the Western world and a large part of that imbalance has been caused by decades of underinvestment in the North’s transport infrastructure, by governments of all political hues.
“Delivering Crossrail for the North, as I call it, is a vital part of addressing that underinvestment and has the potential to deliver a huge boost to the economy of the Liverpool City Region. Northern Powerhouse Rail must be delivered in its entirety, with a new station for Liverpool, a new twin-track rail line between Liverpool and Manchester, and full connectivity into the HS2 network.”
), and of those who connect onwards to London, Manchester etc people are generally happy to take the walk from Lime St to Central above ground which barely takes 10 minutes (or use the Loop, but it only saves any time if you use the lifts at both ends). Personally, I'd take the Merseyrail Electrics "service package" over anything any of the City Lines get - it really is very popular and well-regarded these days.
