A disaster for the city

The line to Leeds will terminate at a dead end station on New Lane, south of the River Aire. There will be no link to the existing lines to either Bradford Interchange or Forster Square stations. Leeds already has infinitely better links to the capital than Bradford and these plans will cement that advantage.

New businesses are not going to want to invest in Bradford if they have to walk across the river and change on to crowded second-class-only local trains to reach the city. And Bradfordians travelling to London will face the same problem if they want to avoid fighting through heavy Leeds traffic and paying exorbitant parking fees.

A link should be built west of Leeds so that sizeable numbers of HS2 trains can extend to Bradford in the same was as today’s Birmingham trains extend to Wolverhamp-ton and Cardiff trains extend to Swansea.

I urge all Bradfordians to make their feelings know by sending their comments to http://hs2.org.uk/route-consultation before the consultation period closes on January 31, 2014.

Peter Zemroch, Starbeck Drive, Little Sutton, Ellesmere Port