Then on weekdays from 6 to 24 October the route through Dewsbury will be closed, with trains to Leeds being diverted via Wakefield with changed and extended journey times.

He quotes or misquotes you approvingly. He badmouths those politicians and journalists who have stood up for the interests of the North. It came across as a long list of Northern folk who he doesn't like.

Whilst TRU is worthwhile & overdue, we still have no commitment that we will get an improved service. Our stations will be made fully accessible, but this is of little use if all it does is to enable residents to access the platforms in order to watch other people’s trains passing through at 85mph.

Most other routes in the Leeds and Manchester city regions see a half hourly stopping service; our communities should have the same.
Providing a bypass (which is what NPR would be), to be used by express services, is a way to achieve this.
It’s communities like ours which continue to lose out.

Fixing Leeds and Manchester city centres is necessary but not sufficient.
Manchester to Huddersfield is one of several congested, two track mixed-traffic routes where additional capacity is needed to separate express traffic from local stopping and freight services.

From the bit in the middle of the Transpennine route, communities which habitually get forgotten in any discussion about east-west rail links & capacity, we note that Mr Gilligan’s report fails to acknowledge, let alone address, that capacity constraints are not confined to Mcr & Lds city centres.

Some of us can remember a public meeting in Marsden about upgrading the main Transpennine railway line. Glossy brochures were handed out. That was in October 1999.

The bit we slightly disagree with is about taking the Treasury on the Elizabeth line. Relocate the Treasury to Crowther's Mill in Marsden and cross-Pennine transport will be fixed quicker than anyone could have imagined.

"the fact commuters can’t rely on trains turning up on time or at all when deciding where to work surely can’t be helping"
We can identify with that.

#ScenicRailView

It might be an effective piece of political lobbying, but we're not seeing anything which addresses the capacity constraints of routes between Leeds/Mcr and Leeds/Sheffield, where there are conflicting aspirations for more expresses & more frequent stopping services for the places in between.

It was Alistair Darling who cancelled the Leeds supertram and several other tram projects. The only tram project he was unable to cancel, because it was a devolved matter, was in his home city of Edinburgh.

Yet those same so-called local, so-called newspapers love slagging off the BBC. That's the same BBC who fund their Local Democracy reporters.

Did you get a chance to have a quiet word with Keir about the need for the Transpennine Route Upgrade to deliver two trains per hour throughout the day for Marsden and Slaithwaite?

Ashton-under-Lyne got its nice new overhead electric wires, along with a halving of the timetabled service, with Northern routinely cancelling another third of the reduced service. That probably doen't feel like an improvement.