BRADFORD, England — As Haniyya Ejaz board her crowded morning train in the northern city of Bradford, an automated announcement with a cheerful Yorkshire accent sounds: “Welcome aboard this northbound service to Leeds.”
But the 10-mile commute between the two cities is far from welcome for Ms Ejaz, whose daily train journeys to her classes at a university in Leeds are usually plagued by delays, understaffing, overcrowding and cancellations. Her home, Bradford, was given the dubious honor of being the worst-connected town in Britain in one survey, reflecting a common problem in northern England.
“Usually my train is late or has arrived on time, but I find out it doesn’t have a driver,” said Ms Ejaz, a 19-year-old student at the University of Leeds. “I thought trains would be much more reliable because you don’t have any traffic. But it has been just as bad as buses, if not worse.”
The transport problems facing Bradford are just one symptom of the economic neglect that has long hampered the north of England, where growth, jobs and health care tend to lag far behind the south. Successive governments have pledged to address the problem, most recently Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government, which has pledged to ‘raise’ the north and bring prosperity to the south.
One initiative – a 96 billion pound (about $120 billion) integrated rail plan with a high-speed rail project, HS2 – has been promoted by the government in recent years as a major effort to alleviate transportation problems in the north.
But in November, British Transport Secretary Grant Shapps suggested that a plan for an eastern leg of the line – the branch to Leeds – had been shelved indefinitely.
Adding salt to the wounds of people in the area, a request from Bradford Council and several supporters to include in another line an east-west rail linking major northern cities like Manchester, Leeds and Bradford , Northern Powerhouse Rail, and a newly upgraded station in Bradford were ignored.
“A new line from Manchester to Leeds via a new station in Bradford alone would cost an additional £10 billion,” a Department for Transport spokesman said in a statement.
The evaporating dreams of better railways have infuriated many in the affected areas and led to feelings of betrayal by the government in London, which has the best connections in Britain.
“A lot of things in the north are neglected,” said Mrs. Ejaz. “People have just accepted that this is the standard of train services they have.”
Mandy Ridyard, director of Produmax, an aerospace plant in Bradford that makes parts for Boeing, among others, said one of its employees resigned last year because of terrible traffic on the road from his home in Manchester, about 30 miles away. That road, the M62, is a stretch of motorway that encompasses some of the busiest areas in Britain.
“After three or four years of not being home in time to see his kids go to bed, he just gave up because the traffic just got worse and worse,” Ms Ridyard said. “We’re just asking what other parts of the country have had forever.”
Bradford, a city of over half a million inhabitants, is Britain’s youngest city. More than a quarter of the population is under the age of 18, but nearly 10 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds receive unemployment benefits, a number about double the national average for that age group, according to figures shared with DailyExpertNews by Bradford Council.
At the factory, where a poster of a caped superhero hangs in the warehouse that reads “Build superheroes this way,” about 20 percent of the workforce is made up of teens on an apprenticeship program, according to the company.
Ms Ridyard said she was concerned that failure to improve rail links would harm social mobility in Bradford’s inner-city areas, as well as surrounding commuter towns, and seriously affect young people.
“If you need a car to get anywhere because the train connections don’t work,” she said, “we’re not talking about a level playing field.”
To make up for the scrapping of the high-speed line, the government has offered a number of low-cost upgrades on existing lines. Archaic Victorian-era rail lines would be electrified, cutting journey times on a handful of existing routes (a trip to Bradford from Leeds would be cut by nearly half, under the new plans). And the capacity on the northern train services would be increased. But there are no fixed dates when all this will be completed.
Years of travel chaos on the Northern Railway, with its aging train fleet and staff shortages, saw the franchise, run by Arriva Rail North and owned by Deutsche Bahn in Germany, being taken over by the government in March 2020. lost confidence in the northern rail network,” said Mr Shapps.
Months before the 2019 general election, which saw a landslide victory for the Conservative Party, which managed to win over traditional Labor voters in the north, Mr. Johnson to fund the Northern Powerhouse Rail route between Manchester and Leeds to “stimulate regional growth and prosperity” in the region.
Bradford Council said Northern Powerhouse Rail’s proposals would have boosted Bradford’s economy by around £30bn, creating 27,000 new jobs by 2060.
Now the recent U-turn has left a bitter taste for many.
“They suffer from the classic problem of over-promising and under-delivery, which is a recurring fatal flaw of many governments, but appears to be endemic to this one,” said Jim O’Neill, a key architect of the Northern Powerhouse strategy. , and a former adviser to Prime Minister Theresa May’s government, who preceded Mr Johnson.
“At least two years earlier, it was pretty clear that Bradford wasn’t going to make it,” said Mr. O’Neill, who was a government employee at the time, said the plan to build the new station in Bradford was being considered. too expensive.
A transport ministry spokesman declined to comment on the claims of Mr O’Neill, who is currently vice-chairman of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, a lobby group, but told The Times that the government had not canceled the eastern section of HS2. “The Integrated Rail Plan has set aside £100m to look into the most effective ways to bring HS2 trains to Leeds, and work will continue to assess the best options,” he said.
Not everyone was in favor of the high-speed railway in the north.
Edna Small, 77, a retired teacher, moved in 2007 to Church Fenton, a North Yorkshire village surrounded by lush countryside. According to the proposed plans for HS2 released a few years later, Church Fenton, with an estimated population of approximately 1,500, would have been one of the last stops on the eastern leg.
After news broke that a 15-meter viaduct had allegedly thundered through the quiet suburbs of the village and that her house would be blocked by the viaduct and the local train station on either side, Ms. Small joins a group of anti-HS2 activists.
The abandonment of the eastern branch of HS2 brought a sense of relief, even though Ms. Small, 77, had already sold her home by then, whose market value, she said, had been reduced by rail plans.
“It would devastate the whole area,” she said. “It was a vanity project,” she said.
“But Bradford has been abandoned,” Mrs. Small admitted. “The government makes promises they never keep.”