Victory for campaign to get Liverpool-London high speed rail link

A CAMPAIGN to link Liverpool to the high speed rail network to London, boosting the local economy by £15bn and bringing 2,000 jobs looks to have been successful.

Reports today suggest Transport for North – the organisation planning the HS3 high-speed service – is now in favour of improved connections to Liverpool.

Until now, it was understood HS2 would connect Manchester and Leeds directly to London on dedicated high-speed tracks but trains to Liverpool would have to run on existing lines past Crewe, cutting the journey to 1 hour 32 minutes.

But chairman of HS2 Sir David Higgins said in the Liverpool Echo that the HS2 London to Manchester line was being planned with high-speed east-to-west rail as part of the plan.

A new high-speed line between a new Liverpool city centre station and Manchester could cut journey times between the two cities to 21 minutes.

If that line is built to connect with the HS2 line between London and Wigan, overall journey times from Liverpool to London could be cut from the current two hours plus to just an hour and a quarter.

Such a scheme has long been the ambition of city region leaders, as promoted through the Linking Liverpool campaign.

If the behind-the-scenes negotiations  come to fruition it is a major victory for the group, with many city leaders having been resigned to not getting a direct link to the city.

Transport planners are at the advanced stage of considering options for the route, the local newspaper said, while Merseytravel is talking to Liverpool council and other local government bodies about where any new Liverpool city centre station could go.

Linking Liverpool says the scheme would create 20,000 new jobs support the building of 10,000 new homes and bring in 2.9m visitors a year as well as adding £15bn to the local economy.

It could make space on existing lines for more freight traffic, meaning 150 million fewer HGV freight miles a year on the roads.

Higgins said: “We’ve certainly looked at all the options of how we connect HS2 into the east-west connectivity in the country.”

The current plans for HS2 would see a dedicated high-speed line from London go via Manchester Airport to Golborne, just south of Wigan, from where services will travel on regular lines towards Scotland.

Sir David said those lines could also be used by trains going from Liverpool to Manchester.