The Financial Times spoke of it as ‘the missing piece in Burnley’s jigsaw’; forthright Lancastrians speak of it as ‘the no brainer’; the facts simply speak for themselves: nowhere else in the country is there a town of 90 000 people 23 miles from an urban centre of 2.5 million people without a direct rail link between the two.

It is Reading without a direct train line in to London, Warrington to Manchester, Skipton to Leeds: unimaginable for some yet a reality for train travel between Burnley and Manchester.

The ‘No Brainer’

The solution is the reinstatement of just 500 metres of track – the Todmorden Curve. 500 metres to halve train travel time from Burnley to Manchester to a commutable 48 minutes; 500 metres to create and safeguard 816 private sector jobs; 500 metres to lever in £30+ million GVA to the Lancashire economy each year.

Every step walked of the Todmorden Curve is the equivalent of a private sector job created, is a step towards balancing an economy with a dependency on the public sector (21.8%) above the national average (19.2%), a step towards increasing access to higher paid employment to an area where currently only 2.6% of the population commute.

Just as Bradford industrialists sought to connect to growth, so must Burnley through Manchester. Just as a responsive government enabled industrialists to access canal water, so this government must allow access to high paid employment. Just as industrialists developed a corridor of mills, so this bid would bring them back to life and initiate the 3.9 hectare Weavers’ Triangle development by Barnfield Investment Properties.