Failed bids to connect Manchester city centre to its airport over the decades have been mapped at The University of Manchester.
‘Tunnels through time’ displays efforts over the last 100 years to ‘solve’ a major transport headache, with new rail plans, including for monorail and tube systems, emerging every ten years or so.

Dr Martin Dodge, senior lecturer in geography at The University, gathered the information and outline maps from old transport reports and newspaper articles. Six of the schemes were plotted onto a single overview map by University of Manchester cartographer Graham Bowden. They sit alongside the current Metrolink expansion to Manchester Airport.

Dr Dodge said: “For me, what is fascinating is the sense of deja-vu as seemingly every decade or so a ‘new’ proposal comes forward to solve the problem by a grand engineering endeavour. This utopian quote from a newspaper correspondent, in 1936, echoes down the years: ‘A judicious policy of suburban railway electrification, coupled with a well-designed tube railway system, would go a long way towards making the population in and around Manchester happier and healthier.’

“And yet all the schemes would have been expensive and crucially uneconomic given the shape of the city, the small size of the central zone and the scale of daily passengers. The desire for tube travel for status of a serious city simply could not be afforded through the 20th Century.”

The most developed proposal was for a Picc-Vic tunnel in the late 1960s, which re-emerged through University research in 2012. The project, which would have delivered an underground railway beneath Manchester Town Hall and station for the Arndale, very nearly got built but was defeated by national economic decline in the early 1970s.

Dr Dodge points to the view of influential city surveyor, Rowland Nicholas, in the 1945 City of Manchester Plan, that building an underground to serve a population of Manchester’s size would be to do so at a financial loss – a conclusion that Dr Dodge says was mirrored against the backdrop of the repeated efforts.

He continued: “In many ways the tram to the airport has little or nothing to do with air travellers. The rail station at the airport which opened in 1993 with a link onto the Styal Line is, in my opinion, much more useful. The tram link is much more about economic regeneration and getting service workers from Wytheshawe to and from the airport in anticipation the big Airport City expansion.

“The dinky tram out to the airport now certainly does not match the ambitious prospect for a monorail investigated in the mid-1960s. Interestingly this scheme would have come along Cambridge Street and provided a station for the University.”

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