A river runs through it

Yesterday's announcement that the South Manchester line of the Metrolink tram system is to be extended from East Didsbury to Stockport was hardly unexpected, but welcome news nonetheless. There will also be new stops on existing sections of track, including one on the Bury line at the southern end of Rochdale Road in Collyhurst, part of a housing regeneration project already being built which will eventually extend north from Victoria station along the Irk Valley.

Like the rest of the South Manchester line, the extension to Stockport is essentially rebuilding something that existed from the late nineteenth century until the Beeching cuts to railway services in the sixties, although unlike the former Manchester South District Railway which ran along the north bank of the Mersey into the town the new track will now cross the river at some point, most likely from Heaton Mersey to Edgeley, passing close to the planned station at the eastern end of Cheadle village which should also be running passenger services by then.

That bridge will no doubt be the trickiest part of the project, work on which is due to start in 2027 and be completed by 2032. Will Stockport still be the new Berlin by then? Who knows, but hopefully I'll be around to see it and finally get to board a Stockport bound tram one day in the next decade or so.

Agatha at Abney

I had a stroll around Abney Hall Country Park in Cheadle the other day after seeing a BBC documentary about Agatha Christie in which Lucy Worsley also visited it.

Abney Hall was built in the mid nineteenth century by businessman James Watts, who owned a large warehouse on Portland Street in Manchester, around the time he became mayor of the city (a Hydes pub a few hundred yards south of it in Cheadle village is now named after him). Agatha Christie's older sister married his grandson, also called James Watts, and as a child in the early twentieth century she spent a lot of time there, eventually writing one of her first books while stopping for Christmas at the hall, which became a model for country houses in her subsequent detective novels. It was also where she retreated in the mid twenties after the episode in which she went missing as her first marriage broke down and was found at a Harrogate hotel having suffered some kind of memory loss, and from where she set out with her sister in law to a furniture sale in Marple, inspiring the name of her elderly female detective.

One thing I hadn't thought about before seeing the documentary was how close the railway line runs to the grounds of the hall, something which features in her novel 4.50 from Paddington. Cheadle station, where Agatha's family would have alighted on trips north from their home in Torquay, shut towards the end of World War I, although the junction where it stood in the early twentieth century still looks very similar and there are now plans to build a new station at the same location. 

RIP HS2

In a widely trailed announcement, the Prime Minister yesterday confirmed in his speech at the Conservative conference in Manchester (in a former railway station no less) the scrapping of the Northern leg of the HS2 high speed rail line between Birmingham and Manchester.

I wrote here about the pros and cons, and likely future, of HS2, but still feel a sense of embarrassment, both at Britain lagging behind Western Europe on high speed rail and what the project will now end up as, an expensive, relatively short, and no doubt underused, section of track between Birmingham and London. So why are the Tories ripping up the scheme now?

Sunak clearly wasn't a fan of the Johnsonite rhetoric about levelling up the North when he was Chancellor, and probably doesn't see any need to develop the economy outside the South East, especially if it means increasing public spending. He may even think that he can get away with it politically amongst Northern "red wall" Tory voters (the eastern arm of the initially planned "Y" to Leeds had already been abandoned), or maybe he's just written them, and his hopes of winning next year's election, off and is now spending what time he has left in office killing off things he doesn't like, and which Labour seems ambiguous about reversing (as on so much else).

HS2 to-do (or not to do?)

The future of HS2, the proposed new hundred and forty mile long high speed rail line between the North of England and London, seems to be in the balance as the initial costings threaten to overrun massively (HS1, Britain's only existing high speed rail line, runs for just over sixty miles between London and the Channel Tunnel).

I admit to being attracted by the idea of travelling between Manchester and London in just over an hour, rather than in about two and a half now, which would also reduce the appeal of shuttle flights between the two cities and make rail travel to the continent from the North much easier, especially if there are cheap standby tickets on offer, as some have suggested there should be to stop it becoming an expensive white elephant with half empty carriages.

Beyond that, I'm not convinced about HS2 bringing economic benefits to the North, partly because the supposed flow of people and investment outwards from the South East might well operate in reverse, drawing more commuters into the capital as the hour to work travel area to London expands hugely to include pretty much the whole of the Midlands.

The section of the Y-shaped line that appears most vulnerable to being cancelled is the right hand arm to Leeds, with the potential savings being diverted into HS3, another proposed high speed line linking Liverpool and Hull, but again, apart from pleasing commuters, and helping to prop up support for the Government in the Tories' newly won Northern constituencies, the economic benefits of making travel between cities which are relatively close to one another quicker are hard to see, especially as technology increasingly makes such travel unnecessary.

There is also of course the environmental impact of building a high speed rail line through the English countryside. Tunnels like the one planned under Manchester's southern suburbs between the airport and city centre, emerging after seven miles at Ardwick before arriving at Piccadilly, would mitigate much of this, but would also push up the price of an already over budget scheme.

The first HS2 train is due to pull into Manchester in 2033, but somehow I can't see myself waiting on the platform with my newly issued senior citizens railcard for it.