Station positioning adds to questions of direction for HS2

I WELCOME news that Leeds is to get a new HS2 rail station south of the river Aire. This site, provisionally called New Lane, already has excellent links for car and bus interchange. However it doesn’t connect so well, really, to the existing station.

In the longer term, the aim should be to place all trains at New Lane which would be reached by east-west and north-south Crossrail tunnels, as I have frequently advocated in your columns. Then the existing Leeds station could be closed and redeveloped. The challenge for local politicians is now to plan for a metro network which would allow rail interchange at New Lane for passengers using the regional rail system.

I ask Metro to develop the idea of cross-city tunnels with a common spine from City Square to New Lane and to allow in the construction of the much-needed new station scope for a large underground station which could be used by future municipal trams and regional trains.

From: TE Marston, Cambridge Street, Otley, Leeds.

I SEE it is time for another instalment of the HS2 story. The latest idea is to build stations on some derelict land on the outskirts of Leeds and Sheffield to serve the local “areas”.

Would it not be better to use the existing main station and access the “areas” by the local services? Leeds would benefit from this as Leeds station is its only station. Sheffield, Birmingham and Manchester all have three.

The reason for this is that 45 years ago a huge investment was made to divert what we now call the Wakefield and Calderdale lines into a modernised Leeds City station, thereby allowing the decrepit Leeds Central to close.

From: Arthur Quarmby, Underhill, Holme.

I FIND it very difficult to get excited by reports that HS2 will “greatly boost regeneration throughout the country” (Yorkshire Post, January 28), or that it will generate a “jobs bonanza for Yorkshire”.

With stages one and two linking first Birmingham and then (in 2033, perhaps?) Manchester and Leeds to London, it seems to me the chief beneficiary of all this will, as with the Olympics, be London.

With HS2, the capital will be able to draw more and more sustenance out of the country and into itself, resulting in a hugely over-centralised economy and consequent impoverishment.

What we in Yorkshire and Lancashire, with our populations far greater than that of London (and greater even than Scotland, Wales and the Irish Republic combined) really need is far better communications generally, and especially from east to west.

From: Peter Hyde, Kendale View, Driffield, East Yorkshire.

I FAIL to see the benefits of HS2. David Cameron has failed to convince me of the good, other than to say that other countries have one so we have to too.

It is like saying my neighbour has a big house and car so, to be as good as he is, I have to have the same. The only people to benefit will be those who work in London, but who choose not to live there.

From: Robert Craig, Priory Road, Weston-super-Mare.

ENGLAND is already overly London-centric and the HS2 rail line will only make matters worse, sucking the lifeblood out of the provinces, and turning the North into an economic desert. Rail links across the North need to be improved between Leeds, Hull, Manchester, and Newcastle.