Plans for underground system

Plans to tunnel underneath Manchester city centre to run underground trains and trams will be drawn up, Andy Burnham has announced.

The mayor made the announcement at an event to launch the new, 10-year Greater Manchester Strategy, which Mr Burnham said was the policy he was most excited about.

“We are going underground,” the mayor said in his speech. “We are building the Bee Network on the surface. If we achieve our economic ambitions, we will be struggling to manage [with just that].

“I am going to ask TfGM to look at options for underground services. We will work with the government to look at financing it.”

Going underground was first named as a priority by Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) last year, in its draft rapid transit strategy. However, it did not provide details on where tunnels would go, nor a timescale for the project other than the middle of this century.

Speaking after his speech, Andy Burnham told the Local Democracy Reporting Service the underground network would start with a new, underground Piccadilly station, already eyed in plans for a new Liverpool-Manchester railway line.

“We will need infrastructure on a bigger scale to cope,” he said. “It’s not a throwaway line. I am deadly serious.

“I want TfGM to start preparing the original, first concept for what an underground for Manchester might look like. I’m going to open the earliest conversation with the government on what the funding mechanism will look like.”

It’s not the first time Manchester has flirted with an underground network, famously planning a ‘Picc-Vic’ subterranean tunnel in the 1970s, before it was cancelled.

“It’s not a completely new topic,” the mayor added. “With Piccadilly, if it plays the way we hope with the digital campus, Sister, Mayfield, all of it will require a very significant international scale transport system.

“I think from the Piccadilly underground, we build off that a system that goes east-west and north-south.”

No timelines has been given on when material progress will be made on the tunnels, but Mr Burnham said he would like ‘detailed’ plans that are ‘worked out what it will cost’ by 2030.