£45m to improve the Midland main line at Market Harborough

The track through Market Harborough is to be straightened and the platforms at its station lengthened, the Leicester Mercury reports today.

The £45m scheme will partly be paid for from £20m recently made available by the government from projects in Leicestershire.

Beyond that, says the Mercury, it :

will be jointly funded by the county council, Network Rail, and also local enterprise partnerships in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire and Sheffield who will benefit from shorter journey times.

The role of local enterprise partnerships in infrastructure spending is a reminder of how long central government has preferred "businessmen" to elected councillors.

Announcing a project, of course, is not the same as starting work on it. Crossrail was announced at every Conservative conference while John Major was leader, but there was no sign of it being built.

So we shall have to see when the work at Harborough starts and also how radical the realignment will be.

There is also the question of the promised access improvements for platform 2. I suspect they will now have to wait for this work to be done.