A new fleet of light trains to connect Rossendale travellers with tram and train networks in Manchester could use some old parts from ‘recently retired’ London Underground trains.

Last week, Rossendale Council was given the go-ahead to create a strategic outline business case for a new rail link, with £150,000 funding from the Department for Transport and Lancashire County Council.

The borough council will put £16,000 towards the business case project which will aim show the benefits of the proposed links against its costs. 

Rossendale’s cabinet will this week be asked to authorise the funding agreement and note a refreshed update on the rail links plans for the potential City-Valley link shuttle service.

The blueprint proposes a small fleet of battery-powered Vivarail class 230 trains using ‘upcycled’ body shells and bogey sets taken from old London Underground District Line trains.  A bogey is the chassis or framework underneath a railway carriage which carries the wheel sets and suspension.

The Isle of Wight uses retired London Underground trains and recently reopened after a £26million upgrade. It previously operated Tube trains from the 1930s. Now it has revamped Tube trains from the 1980s with refitted parts.

In Rossendale, passenger experience on the new electric trains would be equivalent to brand new trains because the carriages would be refitted and redesigned, say the plans to be discussed by the cabinet on Wednesday.

The electric trains would run along the existing Rawtenstall, Ramsbottom and Bury line but with three new stations at Ewood Bridge, Stubbins and Buckley Wells, which would also be a Metrolink tram interchange.

The overall aim is to offer regular commuter services from Rossendale into Bury, enabling forward travel into Manchester while also allowing the East Lancs Railway to run its heritage train services.

Statistics say over 50 per cent of Rossendale residents work outside the borough. Nine thousand travel into Manchester daily. New light rail and Metrolink tram connections could remove between one and three million car journeys annually, studies suggest.

Battery-powered light trains are seen as a ‘high quality solution’ because they offer good acceleration and would minimise the need for railway infrastructure upgrades on the existing East Lancs rail line which has a number of limitations.

Rossendale Council leader Coun Alyson Barnes has welcomed the funding for the business case and said new train-tram links would boost the area’s economy. But she also emphasised much work was still to be done.

Train and rail line investment in the north have been controversial political issues for years. Projects such as new High Speed Rail links to Manchester and Leeds or enhancements to the TransPennine network across the north have been much-debated but remain uncertain.

Critics say Westminster governments’ costing processes have favoured London and the South-East for decades, with examples including the Crossrail links across London, London Underground extensions and EuroTunnel schemes.

Rossendale lost its mainstream railway services after the Beeching cuts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today,  the East Lancs Railway runs a limited number of heritage trains  between Bury, Rawtenstall and Heywood. Weekends and holidays are the peak times for it, and it also has aspirations to extend towards Manchester’s Castlefield area.

The City-Valley Link plan for Rossendale’s cabinet states:  “Infrastructure and signalling are expensive to upgrade and changes are difficult to reverse. Where new trains are being procured, capacity improvement can be achieved through inherent speed and acceleration improvements. ‘Agile’ trains are a preferable means of increasing capacity over complex infrastructure upgrades, where possible.

“Infrastructure maintenance costs will increase with a more intense service and the time available for repairs will decrease. Design, installation and maintenance of complex infrastructure or signalling must be considered in context of staff and skills available.”

The line sections between Bury, Ramsbottom and Rawtenstall are around four miles long and take 10-18 minutes to traverse. Only a single train is permitted in each section at a time. Rawtenstall station can only handle a single train with the current signalling arrangement, the plan explains.

Limited crossing loop capacity is a key constraint. For example, two of three platform faces at Bury’s Bolton Street station are regularly occupied by ELR services. Platform faces at Ramsbottom are occupied with some service pattern and Rawtenstall cannot be used to cross trains in the absence of new signalling.