Woodhead's Tunnels Trilogy

In last weeks post from 4rth November entitled 'Has future maintainance of Woodhead Tunnels ceased?' we promised to bring you the Department for Transport reply to Angela Smith MP, who asked for a statement on the current position.

We are pleased to announce that we can now bring you the said letter which is reproduced above. This was the first of a trilogy of letters circulated between Angela Smith MP, the Department for Transport and Friends of the Peak District which have all now been published in recent posts.

Apologies for not reproducing them in sequential order but we have simply passed on to our readers the letters available to us, as and when we had sight of them. We'll tidy it all up by publishing the trilogy in some sort of chronological order in a subsequent post.

Department for Transport reply to Woodhead Tunnels future maintainance question

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Yesterday we posted a letter from Friends of the Peak District to the Rt Hon Theresa Villiers MP. This followed revelations in a letter from the Department for Transport to Angela Smith MP that the government were preparing to "put consultation on the future care and maintainance of the Victorian Woodhead tunnels into abeyance".

Today we publish the response from the Department for Transport, which comes not from Theresa Villiers herself but from the Cities and Regions Policy Manager, Brian Welch.

Your thoughts are of course always welcome and can be submitted using the comments box at the foot of the post.

DEPARTMENT for TRANSPORT Replies To the Chair of Re-open the Woodhead Line

Readers of this blog may recall that back in July, having given the new government some time to settle in, our Chairman sent an open letter to the Rt. Hon Philip Hammond, the Secretary of State for Transport, asking that his government "show some foresight and safeguard this route and commit it for future reopening & development".

I am pleased to say that we received a reply to the letter a few weeks ago (from Brian Welch, the Cities and Regions Policy Manager) and having discussed it in the branch meeting, now feel ready for it to appear to a wider audience for general consumption and comment.

For some it is just the usual standard letter that might have been received in the 1980's, for others despite its apparent negativity on initial reading, it still leaves open some prospect for future re-opening. Over to you. Please feel free to comment using the comment box at the foot of the post.

Please note that after viewing the letter you will need to hit the back button to get back to the site as I haven't found a way to open up this particular document in a new window yet.

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