Future
In 2004, the Strategic Rail Authority announced that it intended to close the line. The Runcorn area of the West Coast Main Line was due to be resignalled, and the SRA claimed that incorporating the curve into the scheme added a significant extra cost which could not be justified given the scant service. The closure plans have since been postponed.
Other organisations are working to upgrade the line rather than close it. The North Cheshire Rail Users Group campaign for the reintroduction of regular services.
Merseytravel proposed upgrading the Halton Curve so it can be worked bidirectionally (which would need a new crossover at Halton Junction), providing a second rail route between Liverpool and Chester. Other new services could include direct trains from Liverpool Lime Street to Wrexham or Llandudno via Liverpool South Parkway and Runcorn, which would provide improved access to Liverpool Airport for passengers from Chester, Wrexham and the various towns along the North Wales coast.
In conjunction with the above proposal, Halton Borough Council are investigating the possibility of a new station on the curve, at Beechwood, which would provide convenient interchange with Runcorn's busway network.
On 8 March 2005, the then Transport Minister Tony McNulty announced in Parliament that the resignalling work is currently scheduled for 2010 and the future of the Halton Curve will be "resolved" by then.
In July 2012, it was announced that the government would not include the Halton Curve in a £9.4 billion rail improvement scheme, although Theresa Villiers, rail and aviation minister, said the scheme had ‘recognisable benefits’. The infrastructure has remained relatively unchanged for several years.
Chemical manufacture Ineos ChlorVinyls has also revealed that the company will evaluate the possibility of using the Halton Curve for delivery of refuse-derived fuel to their Runcorn site, as part of a wider assessment being undertaken in support of their new planning application.
Network Rail's draft Route Utilisation Strategy for Wales discusses the future of the line. An hourly service between Liverpool and Chester via Runcorn and Helsby, calling at all stations except Edge Hill could be feasible if the curve was restored to bidirectional operation. The RUS document recommends that further development work take place.
Read more about this topic: Halton Curve
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“One merit in Carlyle, let the subject be what it may, is the freedom of prospect he allows, the entire absence of cant and dogma. He removes many cartloads of rubbish, and leaves open a broad highway. His writings are all unfenced on the side of the future and the possible. Though he does but inadvertently direct our eyes to the open heavens, nevertheless he lets us wander broadly underneath, and shows them to us reflected in innumerable pools and lakes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“I want the necessity of supplying my own wants. All this costly culture of yours is not necessary. Greatness does not need it. Yonder peasant, who sits neglected, carries a whole revolution of man and nature in his head, which shall be a sacred history to some future ages.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)