West Midlands Rail Investment Strategy

The rail industry needs to recover from the major shock it has suffered during the pandemic. We need to encourage passengers to return and match our services to what passengers need. Key to this will be to:

• demonstrate we have a clean and safe network.
• develop robust timetables that serve passengers' needs.
• ensure the railway is efficient and value for money.
• introduce new train fleets for local services.
• delivering already agreed and funded new stations.

Rail can be the backbone of a cleaner and greener transport system through:

• encouraging modal shift from forms of transport that damage the environment more.
• efforts to reduce the environmental impact of rail transport itself.

Midlands Rail Hub is a circa £1.3bn project which will unlock much needed capacity into central Birmingham, improve access to HS2 and deliver faster and more frequent connections across the region and beyond.

We strongly support the delivery of HS2 in full to both the North West and to Yorkshire via the East Midlands.

In our view, HS2 is an essential intervention and it is imperative to ensure that its benefits are secured and maximised at the earliest opportunity.

Central to our vision for rail services is that they should provide the capacity needed for the region's growth in the future, connecting communities, businesses and people to jobs.

It is our aim to make the railway as easy to use as possible for everybody. This includes:

• putting stations at the heart of the community.
• integrating different transport modes
• making the railway inclusive for all
• making ticket fares simple to understand and easy to pay.

Both economically and spatially, the West Midlands is of vital importance to the freight sector in the UK. 

It was vitally important that our strategy took into full account the needs of freight and its future growth.

We need to investigate challenging but innovative options for the region's rail network, which could include:

• more major infrastructure schemes providing new capacity
• new tunnel options under central Birmingham
• development of new rail corridors for freight and passenger lines