Andy Burnham right to shine a light on woeful roads between Sheffield and Manchester: Jayne Dowle

Now that Andy Burnham has experienced for himself the perils of the Snake Pass, the major road carrying the A57 between Manchester and Sheffield, he can feel our South Yorkshire pain.

As the new PM himself put it after a devolution event in Sheffield last week: “Manchester and Sheffield have a lot of complementary industry, there’s lots of ties between the two cities and it’s ridiculous actually that we have a couple of winding roads and a creaky rail service. It’s got to be better than that.”

A couple of winding roads a creaky rail service? He might be wrong about releasing killers from prison, but he’s absolutely spot on there. The Snake Pass and the A628 Woodhead Pass are some of the most testing switchback roads in England.

I’m glad he’s experienced it for himself, although presumably he wasn’t driving, but working on his red boxes in the back. Try driving these mountainous passes, keeping abreast of thundering trucks - although HGVs are banned on the Snake Pass - dodging the demented delivery vans and the speeding Ubers late for flights, and worrying about the terrified new drivers wondering if they’ve taken a wrong turn and somehow ended up in Scotland.

From my own home in Barnsley, it’s just over 30 miles by road to Manchester’s Piccadilly station. In the middle of the night, it’s possible to do the journey in an hour, and that’s sticking to all speed limits.

But as I’ve learned to my cost over the last two decades, the usual reality is that it can take twice, even three times that. And in inclement weather - from snow, ice and heavy rain to extreme heat causing wildfires to shut the Woodhead Pass for at least a week recently - you might as well forget it and head up the M1 to the traffic-clogged route across the M62.

It’s no joke living in Barnsley, or any other part of South Yorkshire when it comes to travelling to and from the North West. “Have you come over t’Woodhead?” people will ask with trepidation, relieved to see you’re still alive to tell the tale.

Forgive me if I sound like one of those old blokes you might get stuck with at a wedding who relish recounting every mile of their journey to the venue.

Regularly using the likes of the Woodhead Pass turns anyone into a road nerd. I am indeed a member of the A628 Woodhead Pass Facebook group, and avidly scour it for updates, even when I’m not planning to drive to Manchester city centre, Manchester airport, or across to Liverpool to see my daughter avoiding the congested M62. It’s become something of an obsession; as Burnham would agree, it’s probably rooted in incredulity.

Almost constant roadworks, flooding (when it does rain), worrying reports of the road crumbling into the deep gorges below, it’s not a road for the faint-hearted. There has been talk of digging a huge European-style road tunnel under the rock, but nothing has come of it.

Funding and planning for new infrastructure takes forever. The Mottram Bypass on the Greater Manchester side of the Pass has taken 60 years to be agreed and approved. It was first suggested in 1965 before finally receiving government approval and clearing legal hurdles between 2022 and 2024. The new roads will add less than two miles of carriageway to relieve traffic congestion through Mottram-in-Longendale, Tameside and cost £228 million.

The alternative? By rail, it’s a drive to Barnsley station, park up, take the train to Sheffield, change, and then arrive in Manchester, usually taking around two hours in total. To travel 30-odd miles. Forget going to Manchester airport by train; the service from Sheffield ended in December 2021, when TransPennine Express restructured its timetables and cut the continuous route. Talk of reopening the Victorian Sheffield-Manchester Woodhead railway tunnels similarly fizzles into all that fresh air.

Burnham said the problem “needs to be addressed”, pointing out that “It cannot be right that the Woodhead Pass, the Snake Pass, are managed as just local roads that are crumbling and not available for large parts of the year.”

My fellow road nerds have already pointed out a technicality; the Snake Pass, traversing the Dark Peak, is a ‘local road’, managed by Derbyshire County Council, but the Woodhead Pass is a designated trunk road managed by National Highways.

There are many other vested interests in these borderlands between South Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Greater Manchester, plus challenging topography, protected National Park land and decades of under-investment by successive governments.

For all the ‘professional Northerner’ jibes directed at Burnham, it is good that he has spoken out and is asking the question many of us have pondered for years. Why are these two proud northern cities of Sheffield and Manchester so close together, yet so far apart?

“You don't need to persuade me. We feel it as much as you do on your side,” he told reporters in Sheffield. Burnham’s ‘feelings’ so often derided, are shared by thousands of Northerners. If he really does want to make good his promises to unite the north, he now knows where to start.