Uh-huh - Whitehaven and Barrow are both cut off from the M6 and the route of HS2 by the Lake District National Park, so no motorways or new railway lines could get to them without tunnelling under the park.
Apologies to everyone for going off on tangents, but I do wonder if this is as an impossible hurdle, as there's been a campaign to rebuild the Penrith-Keswick railway almost since it was ripped up in the mid 1970s.
That said, it would have to be a tunnel as on land there's simply too much difficult geography to negotiate if you were going to build a motorway/high speed railway. The stretch of the A66 alongside Lake Bassenthwaite, for instance, is already build on old railway trackbed and there's no space for owt else.
With thought, you couldn't end the bridge at Whitehaven anyways: the town is cramped into a valley between cliffs to the North and South. I suppose somewhere around the Siddick area of Workington would be better - you could run a railway line onto the coast track up to Carlisle, which then avoids the hilariously slow/single line section between Whitehaven and Harrington.
Growing up in Whitehaven, I'm painfully aware of the problems being so distant/unconnected to the rest of the world brings. Same reason they dumped Calder Hall/Sellafield there: if it all went tits up, no fucker would notice or care.
