The Guardian is being misleading, as usual. A feasibility study was conducted, but it would not be accurate to say it was 'scrapped' as there were never at any point plans to fund it.
This is the full study:
http://assets.dft.gov.uk.s3-eu-west-1.a ... -study.pdfThe study was London - Aylesbury - Banbury - Birmingham Intl, with a spur to Birmingham, then Birmingham Intl- Nottingham - Sheffield - Wakefield, then Wakefield - Leeds and Wakefield York. The other branch being Birmingham Intl -Crewe and then branches to Manchester, Crewe & Wigan
Essentially it would involve adding in various bits of infrastructure to complete a (largely off-road) route each section, linked with access through pedestrianised urban areas.
One thing it is NOT is a parallel cycle HS2 greenway, some sort of utopian pothole-free hundreds-of-miles-long path where you could zip along at 25mph, but rather trying to make existing patches of off-road infrastructure into more of a continuous journey via access improvements. The 'greenway' term refers simply to an off-road path such as a towpath or path through a park.
The reasoning for the network is to relieve blight caused by HS2; however it is not clear that HS2 is going to cause blight, but rather might enrich certain areas. There isn't really an obvious reason why a long distance rail path should be accompanied with similar path, because they aren't really correlated at all. HS2 goes non-stop from London to Birmingham, so a cyclepath in say Aylesbury has literally no relevance to it. Working out how to get cyclists on and off the trains and to and from the stations would be more useful, but otherwise they might as well build a cycleway following any existing rail line such as the East Coast Mainline, or in areas where the rail service is slow and poorly used.