Northern Powerhouse Fail

This is a parable, one about what we have been getting wrong with infrastructure in Britain and how this has come to feed political resentment between north and south. It tells of the gap between politicians’ grandiose fantasies and citizens’ grim experience of daily travel. Of how promises hit reality and everything ends up in a heap.

The story starts in a place, the south Pennines, formed of Millstone Grit—the rock, about 300m years old, that creates the range’s character. These are practical, working hills in an intermediate land, pressed between cities on either side. They are only semi-wild, punctuated by towns and isolated settlements. Fractured stone walls and fields of sheep run up to terraces of houses. This is a place divided by accent—Lancashire to the west and Yorkshire to the east—and by climate, too. Settlements on the eastern side of the Pennines, further from the Atlantic, get far less rainfall than those on the western.

Some towns here have grandeur. Halifax’s pillared Piece Hall is one of the most impressive and least-known civic Georgian buildings in Britain; the facade of Huddersfield station outdoes that of most stately homes. Elsewhere, there are small settlements trying to find a future after the collapse of old industries. There is money about—its presence felt in artfully lit organic bakeries and stone cottages with gravel drives and electric gates. There’s poverty, too: discount stores mix with old working men’s clubs.

Better transport might spread wealth from the cities. It would certainly help business within and between them. But, the M62 aside, almost everything people travel on through the Pennines was built in the 19th century. The twisting roads are too narrow for the traffic that races along them. Rail lines snake inefficiently through valleys towards long tunnels under the hilltops.

Compared to the rest of the world, this part of the Pennines should pose no obstacle to easy travel. Belgium boasts higher summits. Yet although Leeds and Manchester are 36 miles apart as the crow flies—less than the length of the London Underground’s Central line—setting off from one city to the other feels like an expedition.

The struggles of the TransPennine Express rail operator have become a byword for misery, with daily lists of services that will not run because of a lack of drivers, investment or willpower. In the first two months of 2023 it cancelled almost one in four of its trains. “Without action people will lose jobs, youngsters will fail exams and the northern economy will go off the rails,” West Yorkshire’s new mayor, Tracy Brabin, has complained.

In May, ministers announced that the operator would be nationalised, but that will do nothing to solve its toxic relationship with train drivers and their union which lies behind the dismal service—let alone build trust in a long-term plan.

The irony is that since this route was equipped with smart new hybrid electric trains the service has only got worse. When trains do run, the twisting and constrained tracks force them to crawl along at a fraction of their potential speed. Services between Leeds and Manchester often average around 30mph, and the fastest only just pass 40mph. Trains from each city to London run at twice the pace.

The trip is no easier by car. The M62 cuts across high moors, sometimes made impassable by snow. The old road from Manchester to Leeds, the A62, climbs up west of Marsden on the route of an 18th-century turnpike, passing places with names that tell of the perils of past travel, such as Thieves Clough and Foul Moss.

Far beneath this spot, four remarkable tunnels cut their way three miles through what geologists call the Hebden Formation—coarse-grained pebbly sandstone interlaced with patches of mudstone, siltstone and shales.

This is the epicentre of the centuries-old challenge of finding a swift and easy way to cross the Pennines. Which is why I decided to go there on a wet day in early spring, with permission to walk into the heart of the Standedge Tunnels. I was escorted by Network Rail engineers, who are trying to work out how to adapt these dripping monuments to the demands of future travel between the cities of the much-hyped “Northern Powerhouse”.

The first of the tunnels carries a canal. It was finished in 1811 by the engineer Thomas Telford—a hero of mine—and is a black, elongated, soaking cavern without a towpath, so that the boats had to be pushed through by men lying on their backs on top of the boat, walking with their feet on its walls.

The other three Standedge tunnels were built for trains. Tracks in two of them were ripped up in the 1960s, when most doubted whether rail had a future. Today, this disused pair serve as rough and narrow roadways for engineering vehicles. Their headlights illuminate ghostly reminders of the past, such as a tiny shelter cut into the rock. Its wooden bench (now rotten) and iron stove must have been small comfort for the men who spent their lives keeping the line open.

Engineers are out on the track in the dark, drilling giant bolts into the soot-covered tunnel walls

The third rail tunnel is the only one still in use, on the main Manchester-to-Leeds line. It is at the limit of its capacity and central to the debate about what should be done to fix travel through the Pennines. While politicians squabble, engineers are out on the track in the dark, drilling giant bolts into the soot-covered tunnel walls to stop the brick lining bulging and cracking.

Halfway through the labyrinth of interconnected passages under Standedge, at a point where you can see pinpricks of daylight a mile and a half away at each end, there’s a spot nicknamed “the cathedral”. It opens upwards with elegant, stepped iron vaulting. To stand here, deep under rock, after splashing through puddles and ducking through low passageways, is to confront the difference between hollow promises to transform travel in the north and the immense amounts of hard work and creativity that go into building something truly useful.