We love a timelapse video round these parts, so why not spend 70 seconds or so watching some Mancunians re-building something very, very fast?
This is the Metrolink stop at Manchester’s Victoria, the city’s second station, which mostly provides services to the north. The stop closed in February 2014, so that Transport for Greater Manchester could rebuild it with extra platforms, so that it can accommodate all the extra trams it’ll get once the Second City Crossing opens.
Since then, trams have been passing through Victoria on a single track; anyone wanting to take a train out to Wigan or Bolton or other points north has had to get off a stop early at Shudehill and then walk the last third of a mile. The shiny replacement stop was meant to reopen in October but, as is the way of these things, didn’t. Anyway, it’s open now.
The Second City Crossing, since you were wondering, will be a new bit of track which will bypass the existing route to the west. Only about 300M to the west, admittedly, but it’s not really intended to open up new bits of the city centre.
Instead it’s intended to provide more capacity by removing a major bottleneck. The outer arms of the network keep expanding, forcing more and more trams through the single route across Manchester. You can only get so many trams through one route, however, so they’re building another one.
Here’s what the network will look like once it opens. Victoria is to the right of the central zone.
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Fancy.
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