The proposal
The Weaver Metro is a phased rapid transit network for Leeds and West Yorkshire. It uses existing railway infrastructure where it already exists, builds new tram infrastructure only where it does not, and is delivered within the £2.1bn Transport for City Regions funding envelope available for 2027 to 2032.
Executive summary
The proposal is delivered in phases. Each raises what already exists before building what does not, so that benefits accrue while the longer-lead elements mature through design and consent.
Phase 1 raises seven existing rail corridors serving Bradford, Horsforth, Wakefield, Dewsbury and Garforth to metro standard, through continuous electrification, station upgrades, leased conventional electric multiple units and unified branding and ticketing. It requires no new track. Electrification is costed at the RIA Electrification Cost Challenge complex-project ceiling, normalised to 2025/26 prices. Total capital cost is £231.2m, with rolling stock met through leasing and charged to operating expenditure. Phase 1 is deliverable within the current mayoral term.
Phase 2 builds the city centre spine the Phase 1 corridors feed, adopting the L1 alignment endorsed through public consultation, and extends the network into communities no rail corridor currently serves. It adds new stations at Laisterdyke, Armley and Elland Road, tram extensions to Seacroft and Belle Isle, and a dedicated airport express running direct from Leeds station to the Leeds Bradford Airport terminal. Total Phase 2 cost is £1,633m to £1,703m net.
£2.1bn
Transport for City Regions funding envelope, 2027–2032
£231.2m
Phase 1 total, no new track
£1,633m to £1,703m
Phase 2 total, net
£166m to £236m
Headroom against the envelope
The combined programme totals £1.86bn to £1.93bn, inside the £2.1bn envelope across the whole of its cost range, with headroom of between £166m and £236m. Tram-train vehicles are used at one point only, the airport express, where the gradient to the terminal exceeds what conventional heavy rail can climb. Elsewhere the network runs conventional electric units on continuously wired heavy rail, or street-running trams.
Design principles
Four principles govern every element of the proposal.
1. Use what exists
Rail corridors already connect Bradford, Horsforth, Wakefield, Dewsbury and Garforth to Leeds city centre. The first task is to operate them to metro standard.
2. Build only where nothing exists
New track is proposed for the city centre spine, for Seacroft, for Belle Isle and for the airport spur, all corridors with no rail alternative.
3. Sequence for early delivery
Elements requiring no new track and no Transport and Works Act Order are delivered first, so benefits accrue while longer-lead elements mature through design and consent.
4. Present the network as one system
Unified branding, mapping, frequency and ticketing are treated as scheme infrastructure rather than marketing, on the evidence below.
The approach has direct precedent. The Docklands Light Railway opened in 1987 for £77m, with roughly two thirds of its initial route running on disused or underused railway infrastructure and new stations built from a standardised kit of parts to reduce cost and shorten delivery. The original Manchester Metrolink, opened in 1992, was built almost entirely on two existing heavy rail lines connected by a short section of new street-level track through the city centre.
Network identity
The network is branded and presented to the public as the Weaver Metro, with unified mapping, frequency standards and ticketing across its heavy rail and tram elements. Branding is treated as a delivery requirement rather than a presentational choice, because the available evidence indicates that it materially affects ridership on otherwise unchanged infrastructure.
One identity for West Yorkshire
The network carries a single identity across the whole of West Yorkshire rather than being split by city or by mode. This aligns with the Combined Authority's own consolidation of local transport under the Weaver Network brand: bringing the heavy-rail corridors into that same identity, mapping and ticketing extends a consolidation already under way rather than setting up a competing one. The Weaver Metro is the rapid-transit tier of that single regional network.
There is strong local precedent both for an integrated identity and for what is lost without one. From 1978 the West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive operated under the Metro brand across buses and trains throughout the region, with colour-coded network maps for twelve lines, integrated MetroCards and unified fares across bus and rail. That integration was lost with the privatisation of the railways: the Railways Act 1993 broke passenger services into national franchises, and West Yorkshire's local rail services were folded into the operators that became today's Northern franchise, a brand spanning Liverpool to Newcastle and neutral across the north by design. The Weaver Metro restores a single, legible West Yorkshire identity to those corridors.
Evidence on branding and ridership
Research published in the Journal of Public Transportation measured a rail factor, a preference for rail over bus under identical service conditions, of 63% for regional train and 75% for trams. Emotional and social attributions account for between 20 and 50 percent of the difference in perception between modes, indicating that presentation is not separable from measured demand.
Two British cases quantify the effect on existing infrastructure, where the tracks, trains and stations were unchanged and only the identity and integration changed.
London Overground, when Transport for London took control of the former Silverlink Metro routes in 2007, rebranding them and integrating them into TfL ticketing and mapping, ridership rose:
32%
in the first year, 51% within two years, and doubled within four.
Manchester Metrolink Phase 1, unifying two existing heavy rail lines under a single brand and connecting them through the city centre. The previous heavy rail services carried:
7.5 million → 18 million
passengers per year, before and by 2004, on Phase 1 alone, and operating beyond capacity at peak.
Brand was not the sole cause in either case, but it was the organising principle that made frequency, through-running and integration legible to passengers, evidence that unified identity belongs among the scheme's delivery requirements.
Read the proposal in full
The rest of the proposal sets out the cost basis, each phase, the combined programme cost and the delivery sequence.