The new plan to blaze a tunnel under Manchester - will it ever happen?

This week, Andy Burnham unveiled a vision for Greater Manchester’s transport future.

It included plans to bring in eight commuter railway lines into the Bee Network, the effect of which, the Greater Manchester Mayor says, would be ‘like doubling’ the tram network overnight. It included long-awaited plans to take the tram to Stockport and Middleton. And it also included plans to introduce ‘tram-trains’ to cover much of the city-region.

Most notably, the vision encompasses a plan to tunnel underneath the city centre, as surface-level rail and tram capacity is expected to run out by around 2050. That ambition would cost ‘multi-billion’ pounds, according to Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM).

READ MORE: No trams to run through EIGHT Metrolink stops until further notice after 'serious incident'

However, at this stage the new Rapid Transit Strategy is very much a draft. It ‘is not a costed or funded delivery plan’, according to new documents released by TfGM.

Those documents were released for a meeting of Greater Manchester’s top political leaders on Friday (July 12) in Salford, chaired by the mayor. It took place two days after Mr Burnham released the vision to the public at a press conference.

“There is a risk that the lack of transport connectivity and capacity in the end could become a barrier to growth in our city region,” he explained to reporters on why such lofty ambitions were in the strategy.

"That's why I would point to the need to go underground at some point, not do everything above the surface, and as any second city anywhere else in Europe has done, going underground to support continued economic growth and not put a limit on the economic growth of Greater Manchester."

The two tunnels would run in a