Crossrail for the North’s business case after rail snub by London Government – Yorkshire Post Letters

ACCORDING to the latest available data, the 2021 population of Yorkshire is 5.4 million people.

To put that into context, our magnificent county is home to more people than the entire population of many countries – for example, Scotland, Republic of Ireland, Finland, Norway and New Zealand.

Yorkshire is home to three of the 10 largest cities in the UK – Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford.

No Yorkshire city has a Tube system. Leeds Bradford Airport does not even have a simple rail link and yet and the South gets Crossrail, the 73-mile high-speed railway running beneath London connecting Reading and Heathrow to the west of London to Abbey Wood and Shenfield in the east.

Northern Powerhouse Rail has been downgraded, so the through station in Bradford is to be no more. Levelling up? I suggest a subterranean Northern Crossrail linking several Yorkshire cities with each other and Greater Manchester. Fair’s fair.

From: David Reed, Mirfield.

READERS are being short-sighted in welcoming the demise of eastern leg of HS2 to Leeds. By halving journey time from the Midlands and the capital to Leeds, and reducing the time from Heathrow by two hours, Leeds would have enjoyed a massive improvement in connectivity.

This would have stimulated substantial growth from new inward investors. This growth is already occurring in the Midlands on the expectation of HS2. Presumably readers will be happy to see all of this growth now occurring in Manchester and the Midlands, which will still enjoy a much bigger improvement in connectivity compared to Yorkshire.

From: Patrick Chambers MBE, Rosedale Abbey, North Yorkshire.

IT was pleasing to read Geoffrey North’s letter (The Yorkshire Post, November 20) pointing out why hydrogen is much the better option rather than lithium battery electric vehicles (BEVs) to fuel our transportation future.

It’s a point I have been making in these pages for some months as well as to government and other media, so his support is very welcome. The plain facts are that lithium BEVs are an ecological catastrophe now and the situation will get worse as the problems of recycling thousands of tonnes of highly and persistently toxic and explosively flammable lithium battery cells become evident.

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