One of the drawbacks of the tram system we now have in Manchester is its slow running speed (for safety reasons) through the streets in the city centre. In that respect it can't really be described as "rapid" transport, since it takes nearly 15 minutes to get from Victoria to Piccadilly by tram, and at 0.9 miles it is walkable for many people in around 20 minutes. An underground link presumably would have been able to enable travel much more quickly.
The slow running is more down to congestion on the line, they overloaded it with more capacity than it can handle, it used to be much quicker ( don’t forget Shudehill didn’t exist originally either, that was put in when the Cannon St bus station closed after the 1996 bomb)
Most of the routes seem to average between 25 km and 29 kmph (including stops). I think that's pretty good for a light rail system and it wouldn't be atypical in an actual metro system. Our better Luas line in Dublin is only something like 22 kmph even though most of it is off-road
It's still not beyond the scope of reason that an underground route for the metrolink could still happen one day. The system is becoming incredibly congested now, and some kind of tunnel run through the city could take a bit of that pressure off.
Even though I'm on the other side of the world in Australia, the footage makes me so nostalgic. We get so much British television here that I somehow feel I 'grew up' with this kind of stuff. I lived in the UK for a while and have visited Manchester twice. It's a great city. I'm always surprised by how small the rail based public transport systems within cities are over there. Manchester has roughly the same population as Perth or Brisbane, but the Metrolink system is tiny compared to each cities' rail networks. London gets so much investment but it never really appears to go anywhere else in the UK, whilst nearly ever major city, bar Adelaide and Hobart, is either rapidly expanding its heavy rail network or building light rail lines. Thanks for the video - that old footage put such a huge smile on my face.
@TD B wrote: _"London gets so much investment but it never really appears to go anywhere else in the UK, "_ Liverpool has over 4 miles of tunnel and overground trackbed awaiting trains, after Thatcher cancelled large parts of their Merseyrail metro extension over 40 years ago. After 40 years they are still waiting. In the meantime London had built: *1)* The Overground metro; *2)* Crossrail (Elizabeth Line); *3)* Underground extensions; *4)* The DLR metro; *5)* Thameslink; *6)* Heathrow link, *7)* Trams in Croydon; *8)* Crossrail 2 is being seriously considered. Leeds is the largest city in western Europe without a mass transit network, having only buses. So they spend an *obscene* level of money on a new line from London to Manchester via Birmingham, when fast trains, which can be much faster, already cover these routes. The existing trains would be faster if bottlenecks are removed, in-cab signalling used in the trains, and faster trains used (trains are becoming faster and faster - the Alstom Liberty reaches 180mph on existing tracks). You couldn't make this garbage up.
You're totally right. The UK has been way too London focused for way too long (and I say that as someone who's lived within earshot of London for most of my life). Boris claimed the government were going to "level up" the North....then they cancelled the HS2 eastern leg. Way to go Boris!!
@@mdhazeldine It is no good for London with London overheating with the likes of accommodation, house prices and rents, through the roof. Not to mention prices in the shops rise as well. The best thing for the north of England is local & regional rail, not another fast line to London. Currently London to Birmingham is getting a *third* line. No kidding. That will level up? Only the hard of thinking will think that.
@@johnburns4017 Well that's where you're actually wrong. The main benefit of HS2 (at least the original plan) was to move fast trains on to a new line, which would have massively increased capacity on many other lines, allowing for more local and regional services. Now the Eastern leg has been scrapped, it's going to seriously reduce the effectiveness of the plan, but what is going ahead will still help somewhat. It's better than a poke in the eye but it could've been so much more.
@@mdhazeldine The initial aim of HS2 was to connect all main cities to the continent and the prime airport Heathrow. These two were dropped at an early stage. Its _raison d'etre_ dissolved. They also said it will create another faster inter-city network as an offshoot. All it is, is a fast line to London. The existing mainline can be *much* faster, for pennies to what HS2 offers. Liverpool cannot even use HS2 to get to Birmingham, so much for being a link between major cities. Liverpool's massive port needs trains off the lines to use for freight, so they ignore the city. HS2 can never do what they proposed as it is only 2-track on the main spine from Birmingham to London. It needs to be 4-track to take full inter-city and all cities having continental access. The MML and ECML are being upgraded with the ECML running at 140mph. That mean shorter links from London to the eastern cities. Newcastle on the ECML will equal HS2, Edinburgh will be a few minutes longer than HS2. London-Sheff is same as HS2 time on the direct MML. That is why the eastern HS2 has been dropped. Not needed.
I’m not convinced it was cancelled due to lack of funding. The money was there for similar projects on Merseyside (Loop and Link) and Tyneside (Tyne & Wear Metro), both of which involved greater infrastructure spending than the simple Picc-Vic. At the time British Rail wasn’t interested in local suburban rail operation outside of London; it wanted to concentrate on its much more remunerative Inter-City brand. Both the Merseyside and Tyneside schemes enabled BR to divest itself of unwanted suburban services by giving them to the local PTE. Picc-Vic did the opposite: it would have increased the volume of local services on the main lines out of Piccadilly that BR felt could be better used for Inter City traffic. Thus I’m not convinced that BR ever had much enthusiasm for the scheme.
Similarly in Tony Blair’s time a tramway system for Watford was mooted using the old Croxley Green line and basically to relieve the amount of traffic in the town sadly dumped. Labour or Tory they don’t like public transport systems
@@likklej8 I think it's more a product of national organisations generally not being especially good at suburban/regional rail - if you want good commuter rail, it's best to have strong regional bodies to push for that
If you look at the proposals, the full scheme would have had 18tph each way through Stockport, so not an awful lot of room left for anything else. Plus at the time, PiccVic to Bolton would have come at the cost of PTE funding of local services on the existing Bolton route (with Intercity Manchester-Scotland diverted via Chat Moss/Parkside, which was then to be electrified with the rest of the northern WCML in the 1970s (based on reading a Selnec transport study from the time).
@@ianhenderson4560 The Picc-Vic tunnel would have had far too many stations. It may as well been a moving walkway giving the distance between the two stations. It was considered poor value for money. The ideal way to merge existing infrastructure was _Merseyrail._ The Ordsall Chord giving a crossrail, costed a lot of money yet has a few trains a day. Indicative of the money HMG wastes on this city. HMG are running HS2 into the heart of the city via a 10 mile long gold plated tunnel as well, when Manchester has a direct line to Crewe already. The Ordsall Chord, done properly, in the 1960/70s was all Manchester needed.
Yes it was and due to the oil crisis. Also the MerseyRail and Tyne & Wear Metro systems were late and over budget with key sections not delivered until later or at all. IF Picc - Vic had been built it would have probably suffered the same fate.
The Ordsall Curve with its elegant bowstring bridge should have been accompanied by four tracking of the line to Piccadilly Station, but this bit of the project was cancelled by, as I remember, Chris Grayling who seemed to spend all his time as transport minister cancelling projects. Thus the Ordsall Curve is now a complete white elephant and will remain so until the additional infrastructure is built.
Very interesting video, and gives an insight to how disjointed the transport system in Manchester was until the arrival of Metrolink. Even the "Windsor Link" between Deansgate and the present day Salford Crescent station was only constructed in the 1980s, around 5 years before the first Metrolink lines opened I remember the one time I did a cross Manchester journey in the 1980s there was a bus shuttle (free to holders of rail tickets) between Piccadilly and Victoria. If I'd known my way round Manchester at the time, it would have probably been quicker to walk
It’s a damn shame this line never happened, especially considering the stops earmarked were already there (more or less). Market Street ended up with an underground market, Central turned into an exhibition centre and Piccadilly got a Metrolink stop. I think only the incorrectly named Ardwick stop didn’t have anything, but there was land cleared. And the link into Victoria, if memory serves, was ripped out entirely. Funny then, how the Metrolink’s first venture was to recreate the originally planned line. The Ordsall Chord is, by comparison, mere lip service to linking the main stations. Without beefing up the Castlefield corridor, it’s next to useless as it fights with the existing mainline services. But I can’t see that upgrade ever happening. Oh, and the chord cut through the heritage line at MOSI, so they can’t run the trains on it any more. Booo! Incidentally, the Metrolink is mass transit, not rapid transit. Trams are not rapid by any stretch.
This was an excellent historical document. Thank you for putting it together. Anyone who remembers the aftermath of the 1996 city centre bombing will remember the "big hole" outside the Arndale centre, as the "Market Street Low Level" station box became visible.
Well researched and explained! Even with the successful trams, a Picc-Vic link would still make a lot of sense. The planning is there, the rolling stock is there, only the tunnel needs digging. The cost element of this is comparable with the direly needed quadrupling of the Castlefield corridor, extra platforms at Piccadilly and resignalling that would otherwise need to happen to provide capacity for a S - N intercity gauge rail link. The Ordsall Chord bridge alone fails to cut the mustard.
That Ordsall Cord is one of the biggest wastes of money I’ve ever seen, it’s hardly used and serves no purpose that other public transport options don’t already serve
@@Mikeb1001 Because it feeds into one of the most intensively used bits of railway in the UK - the Castlefield Corridor. That point has been made countless times to the penpushers at the DfT, but they're incapable of rational thought.
Excellent film about Manchester's lost Picc-Vic project. Congratulations to Ruairidh MacVeigh. Nothing like this has been put onto the internet about Picc-Vic before. A good way in which we can all learn about what was proposed and can compare it to what we have now.
The problem with British Rail is although nationalised they still played pre grouping games between the railway regions. This can be seen in the Beeching and other railway closures.
Manchester will always achieve, despite politics and London-centric thinking. All the towns around Manchester, and one city, Salford, never think in terms of out-doing Manchester. They co operate. Hence, things happen. The current system is better than most, well managed and used - even through lockdown. This video demonstrates how that was the case in the 60s. The SELNEC team were ahead of their time.
Great video. There were also plans for an East-West rail. This would have utilised the Deansgate - Oxford Road - Piccadilly corridor utilising displaced Bury line Class 504s converted to 25kV AC overhead. There were also options for an underground line from Deansgate to Piccadilly station via an interchange at the proposed Market Street/Royal Exchange (Arndale Centre) station. I believe stations were planned at Crown Square and Piccadilly Gardens.
As a visitor to the area in the late 70's I found the whole transport system in the Manchester area a real eye opener. Coming from Canada I marveled at the user friendly aspect of the trains (still today one has to climb into VIA RAIL cars, often with the help of a Sherpa) and how everything was integrated with busses. Landing in London, there was (well, after a long moving sidewalk trip) to the subway. It's just in the last couple years that Pearson Airport in Toronto added a rail link to downtown. So, as bad as what it may have seemed in Manchester in those days, I found it awesome. Which is not to say that the U.K. and Manchester in particular was perfect, rather how backwards (and not since improved) public transit in Canada is.
It's worth noting that in the same period (1970s) Liverpool and Newcastle had similar schemes approved, which were both more ambitious in scope than Pic-Vic. Liverpool got its Merseyrail system, and Newcastle got its Tyne and Wear Metro, both with new city centre tunnels and underground stations. Manchester seems to have been rather unlucky in its timing. You wonder why nobody today proposes schemes as ambitious as these for provincial cities today.
Loving all the shots of the brown and orange buses, Manchester's transport colours for many years !! Brings back a lot of memories.. All of those economic issues sound familiar don't they ??
There's a very good chance that those colours or similar may return from 2023 onwards, as the GMPTE is being reformed. Buses, trains and metrolink will all come under the same roof, so at the very least, there will be no mish mash of liveries. Essentially an undoing of deregulation which was certainly a plague upon Manchester.
@@marksinthehouse1968 I think there still as many as 50 Leyland Atlanteans in existence, with a couple still in Manchester orange and cream, and orange, cream & brown liveries. Most are in private ownership, but they also turn up in transport museums too. I was driving Olympians just a few years back, battered and old on private school services, and I may have seen one Mancunian, but I don't know if or where any might still exist. It's very true that when Leyland were falling, it certainly wasn't because of their bus construction. They lived on in two directions. The buses you see today from Alexander-Dennis, were previously Volvo-Alexander, and they took what was left of Leyland Buses (the first Volvo-Alexanders were almost all Leyland parts). A group of redundant workers also pooled their money after Leyland ended, and they set up just outside Leeds. They built a very successful little enterprise, that continues to grow even today. The grandchild of Leyland Buses is Optare 😁
Sadly most of the bus footage relates to the post-deregulation period which effectively destroyed any chance of Manchester having a coordinated public transport system for a generation. As a result, Manchester can claim to have a greater percentage of car-borne commuters than any other city in Europe. Another triumph for political dogma.
@@davidjones332 State your source please? I think you couldn't be more incorrect. That is the entire point of the amalgamation in 2023, but it is not because of anything other than providing a singular organisation for better efficiency. Besides, you fail to even mention the massive growth Manchester has seen in the same period of time.
Well i clicked on this video only having heard of the picc-vic tunnel and finished watching the video knowing all about it. And i think im a fairly knowledgeable guy on trains and metro systems and their history particularly in manchester because im a manchester resident
Most interesting, thank you. I lived in the Manchester area for 30 years from the mid 1960s, and had heard of the tunnel scheme, but your video taught me so much that I didn't know. Brilliant period footage too.👍👍
Very interesting video and a cool insight into the issues Manchester had / has with its rails. Metrolink still needs to expand further... large areas of north west Manchester are still not connected and the Bolton - Bury line was never reinstated. Deansgate to Piccadilly has needed 4 tracks for as long as i can remember. The question comes... if this was London it would have been built.
Many thanks for this. I can remember having to traipse between Victoria and Piccadilly on the journey between Leeds and Crewe via the Caldervale line in the late 1980s. There was a free bus service, or you could get a taxi (black FX4 cabs in those days) or walk if you fancied a look round the shops. Via the Huddersfield line you had to change at both Stalybridge and Stockport but this avoided Manchester. From memory they started running the Huddersfield line TransPennine trains directly into Piccadilly via Guide Bridge and Gorton following Sprinterisation starting with I think the Winter 1988/89 timetable. Could be wrong about the date but I'm fairly certain it was around this time.
I don't often comment on your videos but I just wanted to say thank you. I've been a subscriber for years. I really enjoy your videos, I find them really informative entertaining and professionally done. Again thank you have a great one ! 😁
I second the motion. I read about Picc-Vic about ten years ago when I visited Manchester & walked to both train stations. It’s nice to have my memory jogged & I always find your channel picks up topics of relevance & interest me.
I knew of the PIc-Vic line but didn't know that it was intended to the the centre of of some miniture version of what we now call Metro Link. Especially the line from Bolton to Manchster via Bury which would havce meant re-opening some previosly closed line. Now that would have been quite something.
As a kid in the early/mid 70s I went to an event while visiting with my grandparents at the Bus Dept on Hyde Road it was for the GMPTE launch I think and it included a mock-up underground station(I think it was supposed to be the one for the Arndale Centre, but I might be wrong). The irony was that at the time there was a cord that linked Piccadilly to Victoria that didn't have the viaducts removed until the 1980s so they could have linked the 2 for a fraction of the cost.
There is one thing you have failed to mention that the Manchester Victoria to Bury line would need to have been converted from 1500V DC third rail to 25kV AC overhead.
Great subject, research and presentation. Disappointing how the most useful projects are sidelined and useless projects promoted on political grounds, doesn't matter who we vote for we always end up with the same type of people at the top. Keep the stories coming.
Amazing video as always, it would be super interesting to hear about the creation of the creation of the Mersyrail network and what it took to get it built, or the Tyne and Wear metro too, I had never realised the Picc-vic tunnel would have created such a similar style network for Manchester
Fascinating information as in the 80's I regularly had to travel between the two stations. Quickly learned the best walking route. You do need to learn how to pronounce the town name of Bury though.
I do quite like the Manchester Metrolink, and when I visit Manchester, I am sure to take a ride on it to wherever I need to go. It is a shame that the Picc-Vic project was a victim of financial and political circumstances of the 70s.
Another down side to the Ordsall Chord was that it has cut off the main line connection to the original Liverpool & Manchester railway terminus at Liverpool road located inside the Museum of science & industry.
Greater Manchester has some shocking rail services that are under capacity, slow, unreliable and disjointed. The Picc-Vicc tunnel was such a missed opportunity that Metrolink stuck a sticking plaster over the problems but the Castlefield Corridor shows how little progress has been made.
9:18 have a kind of 'emotional connection' to the 313s because they used to run local services out of Moorgate and kings cross through my local station and so i miss the units
Very well done throughly enjoyable as always. Perhaps something similar to this could be looking at metro systems in other U.K. cities as well the lack of one in the 4th largest city, Leeds.
Another reason to argue for English regions to have their own autonomy is fund raising and decision making. This would have opened up much more than just the local benefits.
Yes...the Tunnel would have been a good solution, and the passing of time only strengthens its case. I think it would have been much better than the replacement solutions - a tediously slow tram service between Pic & Vic, or the Ordsall curve which is a long way out and congested, giving slow journey times. If only!
Still could be built now with modifications lots of projects like this one is needed to be looked at but in the U.K. we take forever and by the time they decide to build it the cost has shot through the roof.Bakerloo line extension planned in the 35-40 new works still not built the wood head route closed when now it’s needed ,great video of a subject I’ve always followed. 😊👍🏻
11:35 I love hear about companies and other 3rd party outfits going out their way to provision a space for a train station only to have their hopes dashed. In Philadelphia, we had something similar. There was a proposed subway (underground) line from Broad St to Red Lion, PA known as the Northeast or Boulevard Subway (it would've followed the proposed Roosevelt Blvd Expressway). In prepartation of the line, Sears Company opened a box store in 60s with a void underneath it's parking lot for said subway station. In hingsight, they kind of built the station void in a way where trains would've had to divate from their route to serve it and to top it, the city cancelled the Highway/Subway project in the 70s in favor of linking our regional railway systems together with a new downtown Tunnel (essentially The American Picc-Vicc Tunnel). The Sears Store was imploded in 1994 and the void for that station under it was greatly reduced and turned into a meter room for the very-American strip shopping center that replaced Sears.
Glad someone else mentioned the correlation between the Picc-Vic and the Commuter Tunnel between Suburban Station and Reading Terminal (which I thought would never get done). IIRC, that Sears store was the Philadelphia Distribution Center, one of the five distribution centers Sears had (my mom worked there briefly in the 70's).
There has recently been talk of a new tunnel under Manchester this time for trams using almost the same route as Pic-vic to increase capacity on the city section of metrolink. I wonder if it ever happens that the Arndale station is finally used?
Wouldn't hold your breath on that one. Government have become notorious for pegging back or cheapening Northern projects or cancelling all together. Looks at HS2 government wanting the line into Piccadilly running along a viaduct as opposed to the tunnel idea. Of course nothing is getting cheapened or cut back on city of London side of the line.
@@nigelhorsley7395 they are also scaling back the London terminal from 11 platforms to 10 which will inevitably screw up the timings as it restricts dwell time and removed any spare capacity to absorb delays.
The PEP units seem to have been designed for underground metro lines as all except the 315s ran into underground tunnels. The original PEP units had 3 doors on each side rather than the 2 on the production units so would have suited London Underground for sub surface lines...
I wonder why the best example of non-London Rapid Transit system which used not one but two new tunnels under a city centre - that of Liverpool City regions Merseyrail!
this was a very fun episode to watch and i really didn't know a lot about the pic-vic project.... leading onto the metrolink we have today. speaking of which will there be a video on the metrolink sometime in the future?
Amazingly narrow minded people not seeing the bigger picture. This is so much of the way that cities are hamstrung and lives made complicated. I’m glad we have a premier in Victoria who is up to adding to the road and underground rail in Melbourne in 2022. His third term of office shows that the population mostly agrees with these large plans, inconvenient they have been for the few years it is taking to build. But yes, more can be done and should be done as Melbourne heads towards Mega-city size and numbers.
Then out came the Manchester Metrolink tram that now dominates much of Greater Manchester including Central Manchester, Altrincham, Oldham, Sale, Rochdale, Bury, Wythenshaw, Manchester Airport and Salford. And with plans to extend the Manchester Metrolink to Stockport and Salford Docks. And future extensions to Wigan and Bolton as they too are in Greater Manchester.
I hate the term "Terminal station" it sounds either as if it is going to die or is something to connect an electrical wire to, the correct Railway term is Terminus/Termini. Also the class 508s were built for the Southern region as 4 car units (costing £600,000 each) before being reduced to 3 car and transferred to Merseyside, the fourth cars being used as trailers in class 455/7 units and are still in service today, until the much delayed class 701 replacements are finally certified for use.
...And now at the prestigious 2022 UA-cam Content Creator Awards, the award for the longest average sentence across all content goes to.... ... Ruairidh MacVeigh!
The Odsall chord solved nothing. The Castlefield corridor is still the main problem with the rail system of Manchester. There is no way they can expand it to 4 tracks so eventually heavy rail is going to need the Picc Vic tunnel. I am somewhat sceptical that HS2 will ever get to Manchester in its present form.
Tony Wilson said: "This is Manchester, we do things differently here." And he's right. The cost would have spiralled exponentially. We ended up with a tram system which, apart from the Bury to Altrincham routes just duplicates the existing bus routes at many times the cost. The next proposed extension is from Manchester to Hazel Grove which already has a train every 15 - 20 minutes and a bus every 10. For the cost of the tram they could run high density trolley buses and resurface every road they run on. If they are the hybrid type seen in Rome they'd be more flexible and avoid the situation, as seen today, where a derailed tram shut down the whole of the city centre for the Metrolink.
The political background of this video shows that things never change. The Tories are hopeless at managing the economy and always have been. They've never in living memory justified their reputation as being fiscally competent.
It was too expensive and there were cheaper options like light rail and the Ordsall concord. (Light rail wasn’t really a thing in the 70s but they could and should have built the Ordsall concord back then. It did eventually get done in 2017. I still wonder though that when the Picc-VIC got shelved in the 70s, they didn’t just build the Ordsall chord then. It solves the connection between Victoria and Piccadilly. Metrolink also connects the two now and considering how much cheaper it was/is to implement Metrolink light rail and expand it, I think what eventually happened is far better value for money.
Who thought it was a good idea to put an enormous telephone exchange and nuclear bunker right in the path of the most direct route between the two stations?
It's possibly because Manchester is under resourced with open squares and parks within its boundaries. Piccadilly gardens, being the only large open space in the centre, would make it suitable to build under, rather than under existing buildings.
The Newcastle Metro was built because the council decided to give it funding rather than a second central motorway. I wonder if this would've been built if Manchester transport planners had made similar decisions. Funny that Greater Manchester has the highest number of miles of motorway of any county, while Tyne and Wear has one of the lowest.
As Britain was not capable to work within the EC, I see the big problem that Britain can not even pull on the same rope in one single urban area. Most countries in the world, of the 196 that there are, have many many decades ago completely synchronized all train operations as far and wide as is physically possible. England can't do that. Every single little shitty sideline needs to be it's own company. Your route is going directly to nowhere. Rethink, and rethink totally.
Just out of interest, where did you find the British transport films footage of Merseyrail? And is it available? If so could you provide a link? Cheers Also, is there any chance of a future Merseyrail video?
We now know that 'the economic situation in Britain' really was a long term plan by what we know as 'neoliberals' -- economic free thinkers that wanted to unwind the mixed economies developed during the 20th century for a more laissez faire approach reminiscent of the late 19th century. The process was started with the early 1970s Heath government which not only introduced systematic deficit spending but also the goal of joining the EC. This latter move caused a jump in the cost of living which is what triggered the demands for more pay. Attempts to try to mitigate this with a 'wages and prices freeze' didn't work -- wages got frozen but prices did not. All this set the stage for the main event that kicked off with the Thatcher government ("and the rest was history"). Just a FYI, though, the impact of the miners' strike, the three day week and so on was actually minimal, especially in places like Manchester. Certainly nothing like today where power cuts are more 'voluntary' -- you turn the power off because you can't afford it! Anyway, it all worked out for the best. The Castlefield curve is simple and obvious and I have no idea why it took so long to get around to putting in a rail spur to the airport. The trams -- another obvious choice.
I can see this one being picked up by the _Jago Hazzard/Geoff Marshall/Jay Foreman/Not Just Bikes_ fans. Absolutely love this channel!
are you stalking me？
Same
I think Jago Hazzard did mention it in his video about the Manchester Metrolink
hey i watch all those channels lol
I'm a fan of all of them and this channel
One of the drawbacks of the tram system we now have in Manchester is its slow running speed (for safety reasons) through the streets in the city centre. In that respect it can't really be described as "rapid" transport, since it takes nearly 15 minutes to get from Victoria to Piccadilly by tram, and at 0.9 miles it is walkable for many people in around 20 minutes. An underground link presumably would have been able to enable travel much more quickly.
The slow running is more down to congestion on the line, they overloaded it with more capacity than it can handle, it used to be much quicker ( don’t forget Shudehill didn’t exist originally either, that was put in when the Cannon St bus station closed after the 1996 bomb)
Most of the routes seem to average between 25 km and 29 kmph (including stops). I think that's pretty good for a light rail system and it wouldn't be atypical in an actual metro system. Our better Luas line in Dublin is only something like 22 kmph even though most of it is off-road
It's still not beyond the scope of reason that an underground route for the metrolink could still happen one day. The system is becoming incredibly congested now, and some kind of tunnel run through the city could take a bit of that pressure off.
Even though I'm on the other side of the world in Australia, the footage makes me so nostalgic. We get so much British television here that I somehow feel I 'grew up' with this kind of stuff. I lived in the UK for a while and have visited Manchester twice. It's a great city. I'm always surprised by how small the rail based public transport systems within cities are over there. Manchester has roughly the same population as Perth or Brisbane, but the Metrolink system is tiny compared to each cities' rail networks. London gets so much investment but it never really appears to go anywhere else in the UK, whilst nearly ever major city, bar Adelaide and Hobart, is either rapidly expanding its heavy rail network or building light rail lines. Thanks for the video - that old footage put such a huge smile on my face.
@TD B wrote:
_"London gets so much investment but it never really appears to go anywhere else in the UK, "_
Liverpool has over 4 miles of tunnel and overground trackbed awaiting trains, after Thatcher cancelled large parts of their Merseyrail metro extension over 40 years ago. After 40 years they are still waiting. In the meantime London had built:
*1)* The Overground metro;
*2)* Crossrail (Elizabeth Line);
*3)* Underground extensions;
*4)* The DLR metro;
*5)* Thameslink;
*6)* Heathrow link,
*7)* Trams in Croydon;
*8)* Crossrail 2 is being seriously considered.
Leeds is the largest city in western Europe without a mass transit network, having only buses. So they spend an *obscene* level of money on a new line from London to Manchester via Birmingham, when fast trains, which can be much faster, already cover these routes. The existing trains would be faster if bottlenecks are removed, in-cab signalling used in the trains, and faster trains used (trains are becoming faster and faster - the Alstom Liberty reaches 180mph on existing tracks).
You couldn't make this garbage up.
You're totally right. The UK has been way too London focused for way too long (and I say that as someone who's lived within earshot of London for most of my life). Boris claimed the government were going to "level up" the North....then they cancelled the HS2 eastern leg. Way to go Boris!!
@@mdhazeldine
It is no good for London with London overheating with the likes of accommodation, house prices and rents, through the roof. Not to mention prices in the shops rise as well.
The best thing for the north of England is local & regional rail, not another fast line to London. Currently London to Birmingham is getting a *third* line. No kidding. That will level up? Only the hard of thinking will think that.
@@johnburns4017 Well that's where you're actually wrong. The main benefit of HS2 (at least the original plan) was to move fast trains on to a new line, which would have massively increased capacity on many other lines, allowing for more local and regional services. Now the Eastern leg has been scrapped, it's going to seriously reduce the effectiveness of the plan, but what is going ahead will still help somewhat. It's better than a poke in the eye but it could've been so much more.
@@mdhazeldine
The initial aim of HS2 was to connect all main cities to the continent and the prime airport Heathrow. These two were dropped at an early stage. Its _raison d'etre_ dissolved.
They also said it will create another faster inter-city network as an offshoot. All it is, is a fast line to London. The existing mainline can be *much* faster, for pennies to what HS2 offers. Liverpool cannot even use HS2 to get to Birmingham, so much for being a link between major cities. Liverpool's massive port needs trains off the lines to use for freight, so they ignore the city.
HS2 can never do what they proposed as it is only 2-track on the main spine from Birmingham to London. It needs to be 4-track to take full inter-city and all cities having continental access.
The MML and ECML are being upgraded with the ECML running at 140mph. That mean shorter links from London to the eastern cities. Newcastle on the ECML will equal HS2, Edinburgh will be a few minutes longer than HS2. London-Sheff is same as HS2 time on the direct MML. That is why the eastern HS2 has been dropped. Not needed.
I’m not convinced it was cancelled due to lack of funding. The money was there for similar projects on Merseyside (Loop and Link) and Tyneside (Tyne & Wear Metro), both of which involved greater infrastructure spending than the simple Picc-Vic.
At the time British Rail wasn’t interested in local suburban rail operation outside of London; it wanted to concentrate on its much more remunerative Inter-City brand. Both the Merseyside and Tyneside schemes enabled BR to divest itself of unwanted suburban services by giving them to the local PTE. Picc-Vic did the opposite: it would have increased the volume of local services on the main lines out of Piccadilly that BR felt could be better used for Inter City traffic. Thus I’m not convinced that BR ever had much enthusiasm for the scheme.
Similarly in Tony Blair’s time a tramway system for Watford was mooted using the old Croxley Green line and basically to relieve the amount of traffic in the town sadly dumped. Labour or Tory they don’t like public transport systems
@@likklej8 I think it's more a product of national organisations generally not being especially good at suburban/regional rail - if you want good commuter rail, it's best to have strong regional bodies to push for that
If you look at the proposals, the full scheme would have had 18tph each way through Stockport, so not an awful lot of room left for anything else.
Plus at the time, PiccVic to Bolton would have come at the cost of PTE funding of local services on the existing Bolton route (with Intercity Manchester-Scotland diverted via Chat Moss/Parkside, which was then to be electrified with the rest of the northern WCML in the 1970s (based on reading a Selnec transport study from the time).
@@ianhenderson4560
The Picc-Vic tunnel would have had far too many stations. It may as well been a moving walkway giving the distance between the two stations. It was considered poor value for money. The ideal way to merge existing infrastructure was _Merseyrail._ The Ordsall Chord giving a crossrail, costed a lot of money yet has a few trains a day. Indicative of the money HMG wastes on this city. HMG are running HS2 into the heart of the city via a 10 mile long gold plated tunnel as well, when Manchester has a direct line to Crewe already.
The Ordsall Chord, done properly, in the 1960/70s was all Manchester needed.
Yes it was and due to the oil crisis. Also the MerseyRail and Tyne & Wear Metro systems were late and over budget with key sections not delivered until later or at all. IF Picc - Vic had been built it would have probably suffered the same fate.
The Ordsall Curve with its elegant bowstring bridge should have been accompanied by four tracking of the line to Piccadilly Station, but this bit of the project was cancelled by, as I remember, Chris Grayling who seemed to spend all his time as transport minister cancelling projects. Thus the Ordsall Curve is now a complete white elephant and will remain so until the additional infrastructure is built.
In his entire Ministerial career, 'Failing Grayling' spent all his time either cancelling, cutting or procrastinating.
Very interesting video, and gives an insight to how disjointed the transport system in Manchester was until the arrival of Metrolink.
Even the "Windsor Link" between Deansgate and the present day Salford Crescent station was only constructed in the 1980s, around 5 years before the first Metrolink lines opened
I remember the one time I did a cross Manchester journey in the 1980s there was a bus shuttle (free to holders of rail tickets) between Piccadilly and Victoria. If I'd known my way round Manchester at the time, it would have probably been quicker to walk
Thornaby 37 do you mean the Centreline bus service?
@@shahedmc9656 no idea on that one unfortunately
It was almost 40 years ago
@@Thornaby37 Centreline were the fleet of small buses with a standard fare of 20p which ran between Victoria and Piccadilly stations.
It’s a damn shame this line never happened, especially considering the stops earmarked were already there (more or less). Market Street ended up with an underground market, Central turned into an exhibition centre and Piccadilly got a Metrolink stop. I think only the incorrectly named Ardwick stop didn’t have anything, but there was land cleared. And the link into Victoria, if memory serves, was ripped out entirely. Funny then, how the Metrolink’s first venture was to recreate the originally planned line.
The Ordsall Chord is, by comparison, mere lip service to linking the main stations. Without beefing up the Castlefield corridor, it’s next to useless as it fights with the existing mainline services. But I can’t see that upgrade ever happening. Oh, and the chord cut through the heritage line at MOSI, so they can’t run the trains on it any more. Booo!
Incidentally, the Metrolink is mass transit, not rapid transit. Trams are not rapid by any stretch.
Those shots of wire wrapping on telephone distribution frames brings back memories. I remember doing that in the 1960's.
This was an excellent historical document. Thank you for putting it together. Anyone who remembers the aftermath of the 1996 city centre bombing will remember the "big hole" outside the Arndale centre, as the "Market Street Low Level" station box became visible.
Well I'm glad we saved British Leyland instead. That was definitely worth it.
It was?
Hahaha.
Salty but sweet
Hey leave those poorly made cars alone!
Well researched and explained! Even with the successful trams, a Picc-Vic link would still make a lot of sense. The planning is there, the rolling stock is there, only the tunnel needs digging. The cost element of this is comparable with the direly needed quadrupling of the Castlefield corridor, extra platforms at Piccadilly and resignalling that would otherwise need to happen to provide capacity for a S - N intercity gauge rail link. The Ordsall Chord bridge alone fails to cut the mustard.
That Ordsall Cord is one of the biggest wastes of money I’ve ever seen, it’s hardly used and serves no purpose that other public transport options don’t already serve
@@Mikeb1001 Because it feeds into one of the most intensively used bits of railway in the UK - the Castlefield Corridor. That point has been made countless times to the penpushers at the DfT, but they're incapable of rational thought.
Excellent film about Manchester's lost Picc-Vic project. Congratulations to Ruairidh MacVeigh. Nothing like this has been put onto the internet about Picc-Vic before. A good way in which we can all learn about what was proposed and can compare it to what we have now.
I loved the way a shot of Hemel Hempstead, and another of the Clyde near Cardross, both managed to slip into a film about Manchester!
And Ware, in Hertfordshire!
The problem with British Rail is although nationalised they still played pre grouping games between the railway regions. This can be seen in the Beeching and other railway closures.
Feels like another RER-style scheme. Shame it never got built, though the Metrolink is nice.
Manchester will always achieve, despite politics and London-centric thinking. All the towns around Manchester, and one city, Salford, never think in terms of out-doing Manchester. They co operate. Hence, things happen. The current system is better than most, well managed and used - even through lockdown.
This video demonstrates how that was the case in the 60s. The SELNEC team were ahead of their time.
Great video. There were also plans for an East-West rail. This would have utilised the Deansgate - Oxford Road - Piccadilly corridor utilising displaced Bury line Class 504s converted to 25kV AC overhead. There were also options for an underground line from Deansgate to Piccadilly station via an interchange at the proposed Market Street/Royal Exchange (Arndale Centre) station. I believe stations were planned at Crown Square and Piccadilly Gardens.
As a Mancunian born in the 1960's I remember all this well.
It was a very big thing at the time, but alas it was not to be.
Excellent video! 👏🙂
Us northerners know all too well that profits come before people here.
As a visitor to the area in the late 70's I found the whole transport system in the Manchester area a real eye opener. Coming from Canada I marveled at the user friendly aspect of the trains (still today one has to climb into VIA RAIL cars, often with the help of a Sherpa) and how everything was integrated with busses. Landing in London, there was (well, after a long moving sidewalk trip) to the subway. It's just in the last couple years that Pearson Airport in Toronto added a rail link to downtown. So, as bad as what it may have seemed in Manchester in those days, I found it awesome. Which is not to say that the U.K. and Manchester in particular was perfect, rather how backwards (and not since improved) public transit in Canada is.
Fascinating video, knew about the chord but not the plans in the 70's
It's worth noting that in the same period (1970s) Liverpool and Newcastle had similar schemes approved, which were both more ambitious in scope than Pic-Vic. Liverpool got its Merseyrail system, and Newcastle got its Tyne and Wear Metro, both with new city centre tunnels and underground stations. Manchester seems to have been rather unlucky in its timing.
You wonder why nobody today proposes schemes as ambitious as these for provincial cities today.
Very interesting.
There's always some big problem that messes with things. What a shame.
Given the similarity to Merseyrail, as you yourself pointed out, I think the story of Merseyrail would be a great followup to this video.
ua-cam.com/video/krXBdSahsEc/v-deo.htmlsi=foyRzKYuL9_RG6W5
Loving all the shots of the brown and orange buses, Manchester's transport colours for many years !! Brings back a lot of memories..
All of those economic issues sound familiar don't they ??
One of my fav PTEs northern counties bodied Atlantean fleetlines and Olympians later nice shot of a Mancunian too ,sadly gone
There's a very good chance that those colours or similar may return from 2023 onwards, as the GMPTE is being reformed. Buses, trains and metrolink will all come under the same roof, so at the very least, there will be no mish mash of liveries. Essentially an undoing of deregulation which was certainly a plague upon Manchester.
@@marksinthehouse1968 I think there still as many as 50 Leyland Atlanteans in existence, with a couple still in Manchester orange and cream, and orange, cream & brown liveries. Most are in private ownership, but they also turn up in transport museums too. I was driving Olympians just a few years back, battered and old on private school services, and I may have seen one Mancunian, but I don't know if or where any might still exist. It's very true that when Leyland were falling, it certainly wasn't because of their bus construction. They lived on in two directions. The buses you see today from Alexander-Dennis, were previously Volvo-Alexander, and they took what was left of Leyland Buses (the first Volvo-Alexanders were almost all Leyland parts). A group of redundant workers also pooled their money after Leyland ended, and they set up just outside Leeds. They built a very successful little enterprise, that continues to grow even today. The grandchild of Leyland Buses is Optare 😁
Sadly most of the bus footage relates to the post-deregulation period which effectively destroyed any chance of Manchester having a coordinated public transport system for a generation. As a result, Manchester can claim to have a greater percentage of car-borne commuters than any other city in Europe. Another triumph for political dogma.
@@davidjones332 State your source please? I think you couldn't be more incorrect. That is the entire point of the amalgamation in 2023, but it is not because of anything other than providing a singular organisation for better efficiency. Besides, you fail to even mention the massive growth Manchester has seen in the same period of time.
Well i clicked on this video only having heard of the picc-vic tunnel and finished watching the video knowing all about it. And i think im a fairly knowledgeable guy on trains and metro systems and their history particularly in manchester because im a manchester resident
Most interesting, thank you. I lived in the Manchester area for 30 years from the mid 1960s, and had heard of the tunnel scheme, but your video taught me so much that I didn't know. Brilliant period footage too.👍👍
Your videos generally get posted around 6pm here in Australia, it's become the highlight of my weekend...
7pm in NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia with Daylight Savings Time though in WA it would be around the 4pm time and QLD at as you said 6pm
my late night delight at 12am before day light savings ended. Now a later and greater delight at 1am !:-)
Very interesting video and a cool insight into the issues Manchester had / has with its rails. Metrolink still needs to expand further... large areas of north west Manchester are still not connected and the Bolton - Bury line was never reinstated. Deansgate to Piccadilly has needed 4 tracks for as long as i can remember. The question comes... if this was London it would have been built.
Many thanks for this. I can remember having to traipse between Victoria and Piccadilly on the journey between Leeds and Crewe via the Caldervale line in the late 1980s. There was a free bus service, or you could get a taxi (black FX4 cabs in those days) or walk if you fancied a look round the shops. Via the Huddersfield line you had to change at both Stalybridge and Stockport but this avoided Manchester. From memory they started running the Huddersfield line TransPennine trains directly into Piccadilly via Guide Bridge and Gorton following Sprinterisation starting with I think the Winter 1988/89 timetable. Could be wrong about the date but I'm fairly certain it was around this time.
Brilliantly researched written and narrated as always!
Excellent, well researched presentation. Thank you very much.
I don't often comment on your videos but I just wanted to say thank you. I've been a subscriber for years. I really enjoy your videos, I find them really informative entertaining and professionally done. Again thank you have a great one ! 😁
I second the motion. I read about Picc-Vic about ten years ago when I visited Manchester & walked to both train stations. It’s nice to have my memory jogged & I always find your channel picks up topics of relevance & interest me.
I knew of the PIc-Vic line but didn't know that it was intended to the the centre of of some miniture version of what we now call Metro Link. Especially the line from Bolton to Manchster via Bury which would havce meant re-opening some previosly closed line. Now that would have been quite something.
It would, however, have involved withdrawing PTE support for local services on the existing direct route to Bolton.
As a kid in the early/mid 70s I went to an event while visiting with my grandparents at the Bus Dept on Hyde Road it was for the GMPTE launch I think and it included a mock-up underground station(I think it was supposed to be the one for the Arndale Centre, but I might be wrong). The irony was that at the time there was a cord that linked Piccadilly to Victoria that didn't have the viaducts removed until the 1980s so they could have linked the 2 for a fraction of the cost.
I would love to have seen this. Does anyone know if it still exists?
There is one thing you have failed to mention that the Manchester Victoria to Bury line would need to have been converted from 1500V DC third rail to 25kV AC overhead.
It’s been converted to overheads in any case.
@@bfapple but only in 1992 for the MetroLink and at 750V DC.
@@neiloflongbeck5705 Except that Manchester - Bury used 1200V DC: it was the Altrincham line that used 1500V, but at least using overhead wires!
@@rodneymcgovern5984thanks, I knew it was something non-standard for 3rd rail.
They would have ran it like the original Thames Link with stock that works by third rail and overhead wire
Great subject, research and presentation.
Disappointing how the most useful projects are sidelined and useless projects promoted on political grounds, doesn't matter who we vote for we always end up with the same type of people at the top.
Keep the stories coming.
So happy you have covered this topic! Always wanted a channel to talk about it, feels like a Christmas has come early.
Amazing video as always, it would be super interesting to hear about the creation of the creation of the Mersyrail network and what it took to get it built, or the Tyne and Wear metro too, I had never realised the Picc-vic tunnel would have created such a similar style network for Manchester
This line would have been amazing. So much better than the congested and delay inducing Ordshall Chord area.
Liverpool, the second largest underground system in Great Britain after the Smoke. 👍
Fascinating information as in the 80's I regularly had to travel between the two stations. Quickly learned the best walking route. You do need to learn how to pronounce the town name of Bury though.
Also "Cheadle Hoome" lol. Overall this was a really interesting and informative video however! :)
I do quite like the Manchester Metrolink, and when I visit Manchester, I am sure to take a ride on it to wherever I need to go. It is a shame that the Picc-Vic project was a victim of financial and political circumstances of the 70s.
Another great vid, most informative... and no pointless background music. Excellent, thanks Ruairidh.
Thank you for an ever informative video.
As always, your narration and enthusiasm for the topics you discuss creates an engaging watch. Thanks for your efforts.
Never knew about that, great video.
Keep up the good work 👍🏻
Another down side to the Ordsall Chord was that it has cut off the main line connection to the original Liverpool & Manchester railway terminus at Liverpool road located inside the Museum of science & industry.
Bury is pronounced berry, otherwise great stuff. (A Bury native here)
Also Cheadle Hulme is pronounced Hewm
@@ben_jam And ordsall is odsall
Greater Manchester has some shocking rail services that are under capacity, slow, unreliable and disjointed.
The Picc-Vicc tunnel was such a missed opportunity that Metrolink stuck a sticking plaster over the problems but the Castlefield Corridor shows how little progress has been made.
9:18 have a kind of 'emotional connection' to the 313s because they used to run local services out of Moorgate and kings cross through my local station and so i miss the units
Possibly his best video yet. Would love to see more like this covering the evolution of transport systems in other urban areas outside of London
Nice seeing some footage of those Leyland Atlantean's with their 1980's brown orange white livery.
Very well done throughly enjoyable as always.
Perhaps something similar to this could be looking at metro systems in other U.K. cities as well the lack of one in the 4th largest city, Leeds.
Another excellent video. Thank you!
Another reason to argue for English regions to have their own autonomy is fund raising and decision making. This would have opened up much more than just the local benefits.
I'd love to see a video about the class 504 Bury electrics.
Yes...the Tunnel would have been a good solution, and the passing of time only strengthens its case. I think it would have been much better than the replacement solutions - a tediously slow tram service between Pic & Vic, or the Ordsall curve which is a long way out and congested, giving slow journey times. If only!
Loved seeing the archive footage of Merseyrail. Particularly Birkenhead Central Station. 😊
Oi
Still could be built now with modifications lots of projects like this one is needed to be looked at but in the U.K. we take forever and by the time they decide to build it the cost has shot through the roof.Bakerloo line extension planned in the 35-40 new works still not built the wood head route closed when now it’s needed ,great video of a subject I’ve always followed. 😊👍🏻
Every time they plan to do the Bakerloo extensions there's an economic downturn and the plans get shelved !!
Another great video! Thanks!
11:35 I love hear about companies and other 3rd party outfits going out their way to provision a space for a train station only to have their hopes dashed. In Philadelphia, we had something similar. There was a proposed subway (underground) line from Broad St to Red Lion, PA known as the Northeast or Boulevard Subway (it would've followed the proposed Roosevelt Blvd Expressway). In prepartation of the line, Sears Company opened a box store in 60s with a void underneath it's parking lot for said subway station. In hingsight, they kind of built the station void in a way where trains would've had to divate from their route to serve it and to top it, the city cancelled the Highway/Subway project in the 70s in favor of linking our regional railway systems together with a new downtown Tunnel (essentially The American Picc-Vicc Tunnel). The Sears Store was imploded in 1994 and the void for that station under it was greatly reduced and turned into a meter room for the very-American strip shopping center that replaced Sears.
Glad someone else mentioned the correlation between the Picc-Vic and the Commuter Tunnel between Suburban Station and Reading Terminal (which I thought would never get done). IIRC, that Sears store was the Philadelphia Distribution Center, one of the five distribution centers Sears had (my mom worked there briefly in the 70's).
There has recently been talk of a new tunnel under Manchester this time for trams using almost the same route as Pic-vic to increase capacity on the city section of metrolink.
I wonder if it ever happens that the Arndale station is finally used?
Wouldn't hold your breath on that one. Government have become notorious for pegging back or cheapening Northern projects or cancelling all together. Looks at HS2 government wanting the line into Piccadilly running along a viaduct as opposed to the tunnel idea. Of course nothing is getting cheapened or cut back on city of London side of the line.
@@nigelhorsley7395 they are also scaling back the London terminal from 11 platforms to 10 which will inevitably screw up the timings as it restricts dwell time and removed any spare capacity to absorb delays.
The PEP units seem to have been designed for underground metro lines as all except the 315s ran into underground tunnels. The original PEP units had 3 doors on each side rather than the 2 on the production units so would have suited London Underground for sub surface lines...
I wonder why the best example of non-London Rapid Transit system which used not one but two new tunnels under a city centre - that of Liverpool City regions Merseyrail!
this was a very fun episode to watch and i really didn't know a lot about the pic-vic project.... leading onto the metrolink we have today. speaking of which will there be a video on the metrolink sometime in the future?
Yay! It’s a Class 120 DMU at Stroud. Greater Manchester’s tentacles spread far and wide!
Amazingly narrow minded people not seeing the bigger picture. This is so much of the way that cities are hamstrung and lives made complicated. I’m glad we have a premier in Victoria who is up to adding to the road and underground rail in Melbourne in 2022. His third term of office shows that the population mostly agrees with these large plans, inconvenient they have been for the few years it is taking to build. But yes, more can be done and should be done as Melbourne heads towards Mega-city size and numbers.
Then out came the Manchester Metrolink tram that now dominates much of Greater Manchester including Central Manchester, Altrincham, Oldham, Sale, Rochdale, Bury, Wythenshaw, Manchester Airport and Salford.
And with plans to extend the Manchester Metrolink to Stockport and Salford Docks. And future extensions to Wigan and Bolton as they too are in Greater Manchester.
PEPs were also tried out on Fenchurch Street to Southend Central via Upminster . Failure
I hate the term "Terminal station" it sounds either as if it is going to die or is something to connect an electrical wire to, the correct Railway term is Terminus/Termini.
Also the class 508s were built for the Southern region as 4 car units (costing £600,000 each) before being reduced to 3 car and transferred to Merseyside, the fourth cars being used as trailers in class 455/7 units and are still in service today, until the much delayed class 701 replacements are finally certified for use.
...And now at the prestigious 2022 UA-cam Content Creator Awards, the award for the longest average sentence across all content goes to.... ... Ruairidh MacVeigh!
Pity it didn't get a slice of the £60 billion spent in london on the crossrail project. But then Manchester is not london.
The Odsall chord solved nothing. The Castlefield corridor is still the main problem with the rail system of Manchester. There is no way they can expand it to 4 tracks so eventually heavy rail is going to need the Picc Vic tunnel. I am somewhat sceptical that HS2 will ever get to Manchester in its present form.
Tony Wilson said: "This is Manchester, we do things differently here." And he's right. The cost would have spiralled exponentially. We ended up with a tram system which, apart from the Bury to Altrincham routes just duplicates the existing bus routes at many times the cost. The next proposed extension is from Manchester to Hazel Grove which already has a train every 15 - 20 minutes and a bus every 10. For the cost of the tram they could run high density trolley buses and resurface every road they run on. If they are the hybrid type seen in Rome they'd be more flexible and avoid the situation, as seen today, where a derailed tram shut down the whole of the city centre for the Metrolink.
Boston's like this too.
(Po' little beantown.) 🤠
Interesting history, echoing today. London first, the rest maybe.
The political background of this video shows that things never change. The Tories are hopeless at managing the economy and always have been. They've never in living memory justified their reputation as being fiscally competent.
Confused how the Ship Canal objectedto a railway scheme of 60 years before it existed.
Not bad mate
It was too expensive and there were cheaper options like light rail and the Ordsall concord. (Light rail wasn’t really a thing in the 70s but they could and should have built the Ordsall concord back then. It did eventually get done in 2017. I still wonder though that when the Picc-VIC got shelved in the 70s, they didn’t just build the Ordsall chord then. It solves the connection between Victoria and Piccadilly. Metrolink also connects the two now and considering how much cheaper it was/is to implement Metrolink light rail and expand it, I think what eventually happened is far better value for money.
Could you do a video about the South East railway mainly from London Victoria to Dover via the chatham line
Who thought it was a good idea to put an enormous telephone exchange and nuclear bunker right in the path of the most direct route between the two stations?
It's possibly because Manchester is under resourced with open squares and parks within its boundaries. Piccadilly gardens, being the only large open space in the centre, would make it suitable to build under, rather than under existing buildings.
Missed the 304s when they finished in 1996. None survived into preservation.
I wonder if the timing was different whether it could have obtained funding from the EU for this project.
Ah, the same old story; profit kills all things.
This could've been the first crossrail
The Newcastle Metro was built because the council decided to give it funding rather than a second central motorway. I wonder if this would've been built if Manchester transport planners had made similar decisions. Funny that Greater Manchester has the highest number of miles of motorway of any county, while Tyne and Wear has one of the lowest.
As Britain was not capable to work within the EC, I see the big problem that Britain can not even pull on the same rope in one single urban area. Most countries in the world, of the 196 that there are, have many many decades ago completely synchronized all train operations as far and wide as is physically possible. England can't do that. Every single little shitty sideline needs to be it's own company. Your route is going directly to nowhere. Rethink, and rethink totally.
Just out of interest, where did you find the British transport films footage of Merseyrail? And is it available? If so could you provide a link? Cheers
Also, is there any chance of a future Merseyrail video?
Could you do a video on Crossrail someday?
Great video....where did you get the map....at 7.55?
It's not London, so Jago's a no go.
Bury is pronounced "berry". It's grating because Your videos are so good.... just for future reference
Cheadle Hyooom. Otherwise excellently informative.
Ha ha I know in the UK "scheme" just means "plan" but in the US it means "evil plan by Bond supervillain "
Burrie? Bury is pronounced "Berry" and Hoom? Hulme is pronounced "Hewm"
We now know that 'the economic situation in Britain' really was a long term plan by what we know as 'neoliberals' -- economic free thinkers that wanted to unwind the mixed economies developed during the 20th century for a more laissez faire approach reminiscent of the late 19th century. The process was started with the early 1970s Heath government which not only introduced systematic deficit spending but also the goal of joining the EC. This latter move caused a jump in the cost of living which is what triggered the demands for more pay. Attempts to try to mitigate this with a 'wages and prices freeze' didn't work -- wages got frozen but prices did not. All this set the stage for the main event that kicked off with the Thatcher government ("and the rest was history"). Just a FYI, though, the impact of the miners' strike, the three day week and so on was actually minimal, especially in places like Manchester. Certainly nothing like today where power cuts are more 'voluntary' -- you turn the power off because you can't afford it!
Anyway, it all worked out for the best. The Castlefield curve is simple and obvious and I have no idea why it took so long to get around to putting in a rail spur to the airport. The trams -- another obvious choice.
Even in the 1960s Birmingham was the second largest city by population, not Manchester.
Yet the Cross City line didn't get its new trains for at least 20 years...
🚂👍
It's pronounced *Cheadle hyoom"
well, the new tram in Manchester bridges that gap...but a 10 min walk up the road? c'mon Mancunians get with it