Leicester’s City Mayor Peter Soulsby, Midlands Connect and business leaders have pledged their support for the proposed rail link between Coventry, Leicester and Nottingham.

At the meeting at Leicester station, they told those in attendance that the link could save passengers up to 13.5 million minutes per year.

Attendees included representatives of the East Midlands Chamber, East Midlands Railway and Cross Country.

Midlands Connect, which is a pan-Midlands body of local transport authorities, enterprise partnerships and business representatives, has submitted a business case for the new link to the Department for Transport.

It has revealed new analysis showing that the link between Coventry, Leicester and Nottingham will deliver an extra 600,000 railway journeys per year.

Midlands Connect last year revealed that the project could create around three thousand jobs, and in January, it set out a potential £400 million in benefits from the link, including boosting local economies in the region.

At present, just three per cent of journeys between Coventry and Leicester are made by rail. The huge majority of the twenty-mile journeys are made by road.

The proposed new link would cut the journey time from Coventry to Nottingham from nearly two hours (117 minutes) to just over one hour (65 minutes).

The journey time from Coventry to Leicester would fall from 56 to 32 minutes. The plan includes running extra services, stopping at Coventry Arena, Bedworth, Bermuda Park, Hinckley and Loughborough.

The scheme will also increase capacity for extra or re-routed freight services between Southampton, the Midlands and Northern England.

It is estimated that this could add a further £280 million of benefits by reducing road haulage.

“‘Coventry and Leicester are the two biggest cities without a direct rail link, with only 3% of journeys between them made by rail. This crucial scheme will reconnect them and directly help travellers and the local economies of Coventry Leicester and Nottingham. The increased rail freight capacity will remove HGVs from the highway network, reducing carbon and improving air quality.”

Peter Soulsby, City Mayor of Leicester