Woodhead Tunnels Trilogy - The Chronological Chronicles

As promised, the letters are published again today, this time in sequence, just to tidy up the Tunnels Trilogy of correspondence between the DfT, Angela Smith MP and Friends of the Peak District. You dear reader are now as up to date with the current position on the state of play, viz a viz the tunnels, as we are.

You will need to
CLICK ON THE LETTER TO ENLARGE
then CLICK THE BACK BUTTON to RETURN
else you will lose us.

Thanks for taking the time to visit our site today.

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

CLICK TO ENLARGE - USE BACK BUTTON TO RETURN

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.

HAS FUTURE MAINTAINANCE of WOODHEAD TUNNELS CEASED?

News has reached Re-open the Woodhead Line of triangular correspondence between the Secretary of State for Transport, Angela Smith MP and the Friends of the Peak District indicating that talks on future maintenance of the tunnels has ceased.

The correspondence has been prompted by a letter from the Secretary of State for Transport to Angela Smith MP which 'puts consultation on the future care and maintainance of the Victorian Woodhead tunnels into abeyance'. Whilst we do not have a copy of this letter at present, we do hope to be able to acquire such and publish it in due course.

What we do have however is evidence that Friends of the Peak District have seen the letter and have made a representation to the Secretary of State arguing quite rightly that the "Woodhead tunnels represent a massive investment of human and built capital that should not be condemned to decay because there is no immediate use for them".

The full text of their response to the Secretary of State for Transport is reproduced below. We also have a copy the DfT response to it, which makes interesting reading but rather than give readers an information overload I shall make that the subject of tomorrows blog:-

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

AND USE BACK BUTTON TO RETURN