The TransPennine Express is a microcosm of the British railway industry, at once enjoying unprecedented growth but with old, overcrowded trains that create a bar to economic progress.
It is the railway that lives up to only half its name. Its core route is transporting people across the Pennines between Leeds and Manchester, but it does so at non-express average speeds of 40mph.
If the HS2 line gets people the 200 miles from Manchester to London in about an hour — the same time it takes a TransPennine to do the 40 miles to Leeds — then rather than encouraging east-west cross-northern economic growth, as George Osborne says he wants to engineer, you end up simply funnelling it down the fast line to the capital.