Why is the railway network in the North so abysmal? Well, a lot of it comes down to a rather dismal series of bad policy decisions made through the 1990s and 2000s inflicted by - you guessed it - the over-centralised UK government. Constant cancellations of previous projects has led us to the point where the current "TRU" is only going to finish delivering its outputs in the 2030s, over 50 years after the project was originally mooted.

This week, we'll look at that history and working out where things could have been done differently...

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