£45bn for Northern Powerhouse Rail? There are better routes to spend our money on

So good news at least for commuters of the future, those would-be office drones who are currently busy deciding which GCSEs to take.

The government has announced that, over the coming two decades, it will spend £45bn on Northern Powerhouse Rail, a long-promised but much-delayed project to boost train links across England’s north. Because, as transport secretary Heidi Alexander says, the region has “put up with second-rate rail for too long”. A bit longer surely won’t hurt, will it?

The landmark high-speed upgrade, which will be delivered in phases, will start with improving existing Trans-Pennine routes between Leeds, York, Bradford and Sheffield. A second phase will link Liverpool and Manchester with a brand new line.

However, construction is not expected to start until 2030 at the earlier, and will have no official, single "completion date" – such is the scale of the ambition, but also of the missed deadlines that have bedevilled another rail project, HS2, whose northernmost extension was scrapped two years ago.

That said, NPR, as we must learn to call it, will not be completed until the 2040s at the earliest. No need to attempt booking an elusive advance supersaver for at least a decade, then.

If this all seems such a long way off, it isn’t helped by the fact that there are many other rail upgrade projects that could be completed much sooner, and that would possibly benefit more people.

So imagine you were Fat Controller for the day – or Sir Topham Hat, as he is now called in the Thomas the Tank Engine world, because, sigh, political correctness… What would you do to modernise Great British Railways?

Me first. If I were the railway generalissimo – and this won’t be a popular view – I’ll build a high-speed link between London and Sheffield, offering a first-class return for a fiver on Saturdays, simply so I could go watch Sheffield United whenever I want.

Then I’d force Transport for London to pull its finger out and improve the accessibility of existing public transport across London, focussing on Elizabeth line trains via Stratford, where disabled passengers like me still have to plead with sometimes unfriendly staff to let them use one of those horrid yellow ramps to get on and off, in spite of the initial fleet of trains costing the public purse some £370 million.

But that’s just me. What should be done for the good of the entire country?

The most obvious project would be to recommit to a full HS2, namely those routes cancelled by the previous government when the costs boarded the Starship Enterprise and took off at warp factor 9. HS2 heading north of Birmingham was supposed to branch out into a Y-shape, linking with Manchester and Leeds and beyond.

For now, when HS2 is fully opened, passengers should be able to shuttle between Euston to Birmingham Curzon Street in 49 minutes, as “soon” as 2033, possibly. But surely we can do even better than that?

Because if the government is now set to improve connections between Yorkshire and Lancashire and Manchester and Merseyside, you’re not going to get the full economic benefit unless you also address connectivity to the Midlands and the South. It’s time to realise HS2’s original ambitions and push onwards and upwards from Birmingham.

Another national rail priority should be Crossrail 2, the long-proposed pan-London link to link Surrey and south-west London with north-east London and Hertfordshire.

Unpalatable as that will be to people shivering on windy platforms waiting for their delayed once-an-hour Trans-Pennine “express”, London and the south east happens to be the UK’s main economic engine. A companion route for the Elizabeth Line – which instantly became Britain’s busiest railway, and has clocked up 600 million journeys since opening in 2022 – could be equally transformational. And yet planning permission has been delayed, and it remains stuck in parliamentary sidings. Choo-choo, Sadiq Khan…

And what of the Midlands Rail Hub, a £1.75bn upgrade project that will add 300 extra trains a day and speed up commutes across England’s central belt by improving connections at 50 different stations, notably Moor Street, Curzon Street and stops in central Birmingham? The work on this, though extensive, is still expected to be done within a decade – and before the Northern Powerhouse Rail puts trains on its new tracks.

The Campaign for Better Transport has singled out four worthy, “easier win” projects. They are: to bring the disused Leamside Line, which runs from Gateshead to County Durham and connects with the East Coast Main Line, back into service; reopen Yorkshire’s 12-mile "missing link" between Skipton and Colne; build a couple of new stations and reconnect Bristol Temple Meads to North Somerset; and reintroduce the rail link between two significant Fenland market towns, March and Wisbech.

Expanding the rail network, or making trains run better, is a fine idea. It all boosts an economy that needs all the help it can get, and helps to ease the pressure on a congestion-throttled road network. Yes, this country badly needs to learn how to cut costs. But, when it comes to new rail links, can we afford to be kicking things down the tracks?