Another trip to London and another smack in the face for a northerner who looks around with unvarnished envy at the transport infrastructure in the capital. Following so soon after a recent blog post by the excellent Tom Forth it really hammered home the gulf that desperately needs closing.
Let’s compare the London experience with some northern realities Tom outlined.
Arriving into Kings Cross (on my non-high speed train from Leeds) with its £500 million modern redevelopment, there is immediate connectivity into the extensive tube network, seamlessly integrated via TFL with with buses, trams, boats, trains, etc. Whereas:
Leeds remains the largest city in Europe and North America with no mass transit system at all.
A 1 min walk across the road and we are into St Pancras, also recently and very beautifully renovated (£800 million). From here I could get an actual high speed Eurostar to various European destinations – Paris, Brussels, etc. – but none to the north of England. In fact the northern services are somewhat second class citizens as Tom describes:
From that station the domestic trains to small towns in the South East are long, modern, reliable, high speed and electric. At the same time the domestic trains to North England from that station — a station built with Northern money to serve Northern destinations — are pushed aside to make way for more important destinations to the South, are short, delayed, and emit diesel fumes that stain the ceiling of the Northern corner of the station.
In fact such is the terrible state of train infrastructure in the north that:
The Northern city of Sheffield which they run to is the largest city in Europe (except Albania) without a single electric train service.
I walked to St Pancras to take the Thameslink, a £5.5 billion pound upgrade in 2018 to improve central London services on the connectivity between places such as Cambridge, Brighton, Luton, Peterborough. These electric services arrive almost one after the other; long, clean, smooth, modern carriages. The frequency is quite amazing. Let’s stick to Sheffield and compare this to its rail services to Manchester:
And its connection to Manchester, the North’s now-undisputed hub city, is unique among such a large pair of cities in the developed world in being a single lane in each direction.
And obviously, when the Thameslink rolling stock was upgraded, some of the old stuff was sent up North; beggars can’t be choosers.
In central London the Thameslink service is underground, because obviously that’s a great place to put mass transit within cities. As they did with the new £19 billion Elizabeth Line. But…
Meanwhile, Manchester and Birmingham remain the two largest cities in Europe without a metro system.
Through the fumes of the diesel trains puffing around Sheffield, do you see a pattern starting to emerge? If this doesn’t make you angry you aren’t paying attention.
Postscript: the final insult… My train from London back to Leeds was delayed so I missed my connection back home.
Post-postscript: it wasn’t the final insult. My next connection home was also late.