TYNE & WEAR METRO AT 40 MARKING IT ALL WORK
The Tyne & Wear Metro is so synonymous with the region it serves that, 40 years after public services began (on August 11, 1980), it would be difficult to imagine life without it.
However, it would never have got the go-ahead, let alone expanded into a network comprising 48 route miles and 60 stations, if it hadn't been for strong local determination.
"We are a locally-owned railway. All of the people who work on the Metro are local people and we do it not to generate profits for some remote group of people but to generate societal and economic benefits for our community," explains Tobyn Hughes, the current director general of Nexus (the passenger transport executive for Tyne & Wear), which owns and operates the system.
"We are the people we work for and that is a really important bit because that means we fight for what we believe in."
That strength of feeling has been ever present since the Metro was conceived.
Just four years before opening, the project seemed destined to be cancelled after new works (including the order for the Metrocars that would operate on the system) were put on hold pending the outcome of a Government review amid a deepening national financial crisis. Tyne & Wear County Council leader Michael Campbell made what was described in the newspapers as "an llth-hour plea" to Prime Minister James Callaghan to "save Tyneside's Metro".
Support
Coun Campbell also wrote to 23 MPs across the country who had constituents employed directly on the project or as part of the supply chain, urging them to give their support. He claimed as many as 7,500 jobs depended on the scheme.
On December 21, 1976, Transport Secretary Bill Rodgers announced the Metro would
