That is something of an understatement. Since George Osborne first mooted a high-speed rail connection across the Pennines in 2014, the NPR train has barely left the station. HS2 ignominiously ground to a halt at Birmingham instead of continuing to Manchester and Leeds. HS3, conceived as a means of unlocking economic potential in the north by bringing cities and towns closer together, proved to be an unfunded pipe dream. As politicians have repeatedly talked of creating a brave new world, outdated and unreliable rolling stock has continued to take its time traversing crumbling Victorian infrastructure.