Bill Adams: Our region travels in hope, Mr Grayling

We could start the morning in Barnsley, a typical South Yorkshire town that will miss out on the benefits of having an electrified Midland Mainline nearby. We’ll take a little single carriage pacer train, of the type that plague Yorkshire’s cobweb of overcrowded commuter lines, in the morning rush hour into Leeds.

Being a good host I’ll have taken you out for a pint and a curry the night before. So depending on how you’re feeling, we could take the 07:41 train which takes 52 minutes to get to Leeds, but it does mean we arrive over 40 minutes early for my first meeting of the day at 9am (and if my children were still of school age it would mean dropping them off at school just before 7am).

Or, if your head’s a little tender, we could take the 08:12 – as long as you’re game for an uphill run on the other side to make sure we’re not late. Unfortunately there isn’t a train in between to make the 19-mile journey any easier for everyday commuters.

Of course you mention in your article that employment in Yorkshire is up 9.5 per cent since June 2014, so we’ll be needing the best commuter services around. But I suppose as so much of that employment is zero-hours contracts or gig-economy work, where your shifts get cancelled on the spot, it’s difficult to decide what time train most folk up here should take.

Anyway, if our day out is anything like my normal working week, I’ll probably have an event somewhere like Huddersfield University, or the nearby factory in Slaithwaite, so we’ll have to take a trans-Pennine train and connect at Huddersfield onto a Northern service before we reach our destination.

But as a reward for making it this far, I’ll take you on the bus three miles down the road for a pint and a pie at the Riverhead Tap – you’ll deserve to taste a fine local brew by that point. Just be glad you don’t need to rely on the bus and trains in the Colne Valley all the time like many workers around here.

We’ll have to lug ourselves back to Huddersfield at that point, for a rally on the public-sector pay cap in Halifax. And we better hope we make our train, as there’s only one an hour. Otherwise it’s a 50-minute bus journey for this short seven-mile trip – as we wouldn’t want you to miss hearing from Halifax nurses and teachers what a pay rise would mean to them.

To finish the day we need to head to Wakefield for an exhibition in Unity Works about local mining and trade-union culture. I’d really like you to see how EU money was piled into the centre of Wakefield to save historic industrial-era buildings like Unity. When no one else cared, the EU stopped these beautiful Yorkshire mining towns from becoming derelict.

The only problem is there isn’t a direct train from Halifax to Wakefield. Sure, it’s only a hop across the M1, a mere 16 miles. But when it comes to travelling East to West in the North, you can forget Yorkshire to Liverpool, it’s challenging enough just moving around this small corner of the West Riding. Which is why we can’t wait for HS2, we need to be able to move around Yorkshire now much easier and for less.

So for now we’ll probably have
 to take the 503 bus to Huddersfield and then, if the train to Wakefield isn’t cancelled, we might make it there 
in one and a half hours. Otherwise
we’ll have to go back on ourselves to Sowerby Bridge, or head in and out of Leeds.

After all that you’ll definitely need a pint. It’s been a long day. But you get to go home at the end of it. Unlike the millions of hard-working Yorkshire folk who struggle with this creaking system week after week.

So I hope you mean it when you say that you won’t sign off on Crossrail 2 if there isn’t enough money left for the North. But when I read in the London papers that you’ve promised CR2 come what may, I’m left wondering whether you’re telling Sadiq Khan one thing and The Yorkshire Post another.

Let me know if you want to come up to see why this promise of bi-mode trains is just a slap in the face to Yorkshire. Let me show you why we need real rail investment now.

Bill Adams is Regional Secretary for TUC Yorkshire