Charlotte Cane, the Liberal Democrat MP for Ely and East Cambridgeshire, is right:
"Every new government or [rail] minster wants to look at everything again.
"You do a business case under one set of criteria and then, five years later, you're asked to do a business case under another set of criteria.
"Governments need to be less fixated on making new announcements which are their announcements, and more willing to continue things that have already been started."
She was talking to BBC News about the often promised but never delivered improvements to Ely North Junction, a bottleneck on the main railway route from the port at Felixstowe to the Midlands.
As the BBC report says, it's where lines from Norwich, Cambridge, King's Lynn, Peterborough and Ipswich all meet.
I once complained after a journey from Market Harborough to Cambridge, the railways want you to travel to London and nowhere else. Things will be better, at least for me, if the Oxford to Cambridge line is reopened, but I'm beginning to doubt if the final stretch, from Bedford to Cambridge, will ever materialise.g
The state of play with Ely North Junction, says BBC News, is that Network Rail was given £13m by the government in 2020 to develop options for the junction and prepare an outline business case. The report was submitted to the Department for Transport in 2022 and is still awaiting a decision.
Ely North Junction is close to a village called Queen Adelaide, which lends its name to the remarkable Queen Adelaide's Curve. This is a loop of line that allows trains to travel through the area from east to west (or west to east) without going through Ely station.
When I was a lad, every train from Leicester to Norwich (and from Norwich to Leicester) went round it, but almost all the workings that use it now are goods trains. The video above shows a rare exception and also gives you a good view of the area around Ely North Junction.
