Sub national transport body Midlands Connect has lodged the outline business case for its Birmingham Airport Connectivity rail improvement scheme, which would cost up to £180M and forms part of the £3.5Bn Midlands Engine Rail programme.

The project involves double tracking sections of railway between Leamington, Kenilworth and Coventry – as well as using additional network capacity created by High Speed 2 – to open up new, hourly direct connections to the two stations for people living in and around Derby, Sheffield, Doncaster, York, Darlington, Durham and Newcastle.

It would also double the number of services from Leamington Spa, Banbury, Oxford and Reading from one to two trains per hour, and introduce new direct services between Birmingham Moor Street, Solihull, Warwick Parkway and Oxford.

“As we work to recover from the economic impacts of Covid-19; embarking on an ambitious and successful path post Brexit, our international connections and relationships with other UK regions will become more important than ever,” said Midlands Connect’s chairman Sir John Peace.

Construction of the project could begin as early as 2024, with the benefits also being felt by users of the Coventry to Birmingham rail corridor by reducing overcrowding and congestion.
Recovery from Covid-19 was also discussed this week at a virtual meeting of Transport for the North’s rail north committee, where the challenge of getting people back onto public transport was highlighted.

Judith Blake of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority said that the Government’s lockdown message to not use public transport if it can be avoided “has really stuck and will continue to present us with problems”.

She added that predictions suggest a return to ‘normal’ passenger numbers could take between two and 10 years, but noted: “I think the more that people start to go out for other reasons, then the confidence grows and clearly if more and more people are using the roads they are going to become pretty difficult to navigate, so it will give an incentive to get people back onto public transport again.”

Nick Donovan of Northern Trains told the meeting that – in survey work carried out by the franchise operator – it was found that “the single most important thing to get people back to travelling by public is around confidence”.

“Some of the work even suggests that free public transport would not get people back as quickly as delivering confidence in the safety space,” he added.

(Photograph: Matt Buck and licenced for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence)