(07 May 2024, 6:23 pm)markydh wrote It isn’t four track from Chester le Street to Newcastle. It’s double track from Northallerton to Newcastle with a few passing places here and there. If you’re talking about the lines around Tyne Yard, well they aren’t of any use because there’s no direct route from Tyne Yard to Newcastle via the Tyne Valley line, so they’d still have to squeeze into the double track section between Tyne Yard and 
King Edward VII Bridge. The infrastructure just isn’t there. And to be honest even if you reinstate the north east chord to provide a through route from the freight only line passed Royal Mail to the Tyne Valley line, you’d still have the issue of limited capacity at Newcastle Central. You’d need the long talked about and never funded new platform on the south side opposite platform 7.

As for Leamside, the metro line would only extend as far as just west of Penshaw Monument, which is where the line from South Hylton used to connect with the Leamside line. For it to be of any use for freight, the Leamside line would need to continue southwards to where it connected with the ECML at Tursdale. Besides which, funding has not been approved for any metro extensions. Right now the only thing that has received funding is to put together a business case. That alone can take anything up to 2 or 3 years.

Yeah of course, wasn't suggesting it next week. There's plans to reopen the Bensham Curve though which will make it pretty much 3/4 track from Birtley to Newcastle. Of course it all needs funding but arguably if you want to improve public transport and actually get cars off the road, money like this needs to be spent including sorting out Newcastle Central.

Regardless to what anyone thinks, buses isn't the answer as they're too slow, use the same roads as cars and are unpleasant compared to a private car. Even if it was every 5 minutes outside someones front door most people wouldn't touch it with a barge pole and that's before even going into networking, ticketing and everything else wrong with them.

Obviously it's not in governments interests in the UK, so public transport will never improve outside of London. They'll just keep wasting it on pointless sticking plaster schemes and I'll eat a hat if the Metro ever gets beyond Washington, if it even manages to get there.

I know it's in the long term plans to have a CLS -> Birtley -> Teams -> Metro Centre -> Newcastle service, how the last bit works who only knows tbh.