This morning government finally announced its plans for high speed rail to and within the North of England, after fevered speculation that it would deliver a cut price version of original plans.
The plan announced by Grant Shapps does deliver part of what Northern leaders had asked for - but far from all, cutting their requested investment roughly in half and replacing much of the new track originally requested with upgrades to existing routes.
Instead of a 40-mile new high speed line all the way from Manchester to Leeds, a new line is proposed from Warrington to Marsden in Yorkshire, where it will be tacked onto an upgraded Transpennine route.
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It is understood the move shaves around £18bn from the favoured £36bn plan put forward by Northern leaders, which would have seen a brand new line run all the way through to Leeds via a new central underground station in Bradford.
Government has rejected that full proposal, arguing it was ‘low to poor’ value for money.
Instead it proposes a mixture of both: some new high-speed track, with existing lines either side then upgraded. The long-overdue upgrade of the existing Transpennine line - including electrification and changes to allow more freight - will therefore constitute ‘the first phase’ of Northern Powerhouse Rail, it claims, a statement that is likely to be met with fury by Northern leaders.
Overall, government says the proposed route will cut journey times between Manchester and Leeds to 33 minutes, four minutes slower than the original plan.
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It also says the move will, overall, double capacity between the two cities - and claims it will be delivered faster than the plan preferred by Northern leaders.
Nevertheless mayors and leaders are likely to view the move as a betrayal, having argued - as have Northern news titles this week - that anything less than the full plan would constitute a broken promise that will not unlock the economic benefits a full network would provide.
There are specific requests sought by Greater Manchester missing from the plan.
There will be no underground high speed station at Piccadilly. It is understood government believes that would cost £4bn more than a surface station and feels that would provide little economic benefit in return - a claim leaders here are again likely to fiercely contest.
Without an underground station, they have argued, a new station would take up a vast swathe of land in central Manchester that could be used for economic development, effectively tearing up regeneration plans for the area around Piccadilly.
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Transport sources also say that without that underground option, the new high speed line would have to be carried out of Manchester on huge viaducts.
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The plan also gives no verdict on the long-awaited upgrades to rail capacity within central Manchester, first promised by George Osborne in 2014. Those would have seen two platforms added at Piccadilly and an expansion at Oxford Road to ease a bottleneck that helped drive the Northern rail network meltdown in May 2018.
“Work is ongoing to develop options to improve capacity and reliability of trains in the centre of Manchester,” says the plan.
It is understood that those capacity issues - which create a logjam for the whole of Northern England - will be addressed in a future government rail plan, along with other smaller localised projects, such as the reopening of lines closed under the Beeching cuts in the 1960s.
There is also no decision on the proposed Golborne spur of HS2, which it says will be considered as part of a separate review of connections with Scotland.
Relatively speaking, Manchester is still one of the winners from the plan, which sees significant cuts to high speed connections originally mooted for Yorkshire.
While the Western leg of HS2 is set to be delivered from Birmingham to Manchester as planned, the Eastern leg will no longer run all the way from Birmingham to Leeds, instead stopping at East Midlands Parkway, with upgrades to existing lines onwards from there.
Meanwhile Bradford, the North’s second largest city and one of the most poorly connected, will not get a new central station leaders had requested.
Listen to the Northern Agenda podcast featuring analysis of the government's rail plans with Manchester Evening News political editor Jen Williams:
Ministers may suggest that Bradford could benefit from proposed new public transport links in next-door Leeds, although details for that have not been worked up. Local rail upgrades will see journey times between Bradford and Leeds cut to 12 minutes.
Presenting the plan to the House of Commons, transport secretary Grant said that overall the move would deliver £96bn in new rail investment in an ‘unparalleled’ act of levelling up - but Labour called the proposals the ‘Great Train Robbery’ and a ‘betrayal’ of the North.