Mandelson is wrong on High Speed 2 – the ‘railway deserts’ are already here

This article appeared on politics.co.uk on July 5.

Maglev: dismissed by Sir Rod Eddington in favour of steel-wheel options.

A week or so before Lord Mandelson supposedly shattered the consensus on political backing for High Speed 2 on July 3, the planned inter-city railway between London, Birmingham and the North, some 1,200 business and community leaders in Blackpool signed a petition to demand reinstatement of rail services lost around a decade ago. At the same time, the Shropshire Star newspaper launched a similar campaign for Shrewsbury.

Why? Because Network Rail, which manages our existing railway infrastructure, had refused a request from train operator Virgin Rail Group to introduce direct services to both towns from London Euston, declaring that capacity for such services was unavailable. In any case, NR said, more trains on the trunk West Coast Main Line (the spine which connects London to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow) would lead to unacceptable unreliability.

The cases of Blackpool and Shrewsbury are not isolated examples of the capacity crunch our railway network faces. But they do graphically illustrate the limitations of the ‘patch and mend’ approach advocated by so many commentators as supposedly ‘better value’ than the HS2 proposals. The West Coast line was upgraded at enormous cost (officially £9bn) under a project lasting 11 years, most of them during the Blair administration. But despite the cost to taxpayers being twice that of the entire construction of the High Speed 1 link to the Channel Tunnel, the West Coast line is currently Britain’s least reliable. Worse still, upgrading work continues to complete investment deferred from the initial programme on cost grounds, meaning more disruption looms for the 40 million-plus passengers who use the route each year.

In contrast, HS2 injects capacity and reliability into rail services by serving up to 18 cities under current plans – it is not, and has never been, about getting from London to Birmingham a few minutes faster. Lord Mandelson appears to believe that Labour approved the HS2 concept on a whim, and that it may cause significant harm to local rail services in the regions; these would become ‘railway deserts’, he fears.

But recent history supports neither point. Contrary to widespread perception, Sir Rod Eddington in 2006 told the Transport Select Committee that his study of national transport strategy supported the case for a high speed railway ‘in the busiest corridors’, which he suggested to be London to Birmingham and Manchester, although he dismissed commercially-unproven options like ‘maglev’ technology.

Labour’s Transport Secretary Lord Adonis then started a meticulous planning process, including convening a global summit in London in 2009 to garner international expertise, which I attended. The coalition, meanwhile, has issued a number of strategic alternative analyses, which have assessed HS2 against various road and conventional rail investment options.

One of HS2’s greatest selling points is that gives us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to liberate our ageing railway network by using its capacity most effectively. It cannot be right, for example, that a £9bn ‘enhancement’ of the main line from London can result in the Cheshire town of Northwich losing two-thirds of its morning commuter trains to Manchester. Transport authorities across the Midlands and the North are itching for more capacity for local trains, and that is why they continue to give strong backing to HS2. Nowhere are cuts on the agenda – although if HS2 allows us more time to look after our ageing legacy railway, much of which is reliant of 19th century structures and alignments, then efficiency savings could follow. But railway deserts? Emphatically not.

The blunt truth is that there is no option which would allow us to spend the HS2 cash on ‘other stuff’. Upgrading our existing transport networks is unlikely to be any cheaper than building new, but it is unlikely to deliver even a fraction of the benefits. No crystal ball is required; the proof is there already.

Capacity arguments in favour of High Speed 2 still stand

This letter appeared in the Financial Times on July 4, in response to comments about the proposed High Speed 2 project in the newspaper the previous day.

The Mid-Cheshire Line has seen a reduction in direct commuter trains to Manchester since completion of the West Coast Route Modernisation in 2009.

Sir,

It is telling that your high-profile editorial package highlighting supposedly mounting opposition to High Speed 2 (July 3), led by comments from Lord Mandelson, makes little or no attempt to rebut the capacity arguments underpinning the project. Indeed, as your article makes clear, HS2 retains strong support in regional centres precisely because there is a recognition that the capacity issues we face on the rail network are intractable, and any infrastructure intervention intended to deliver long-term benefits is going to prove very expensive.

Lord Mandelson’s comments about the risk of creating ‘railway deserts’ are especially surprising, since analysis of recent history suggests that it is the policy of upgrading existing corridors which poses the more obvious threat to local services. It was his Labour government which oversaw the ill-starred upgrading of the West Coast Main Line from 1998 to 2009 at a cost of more than £9bn, the speed and capacity objectives of which have never been met, despite running approximately six times over budget. More troubling have been the subsequent effects, including significant cuts to local rail services around Manchester to squeeze in more fast trains to London, and the closure on capacity grounds of several local stations in Staffordshire. Similar results have been noted around Leeds, where the main station was rebuilt a decade or so ago, but the resulting gains in capacity were largely swallowed up by the introduction of more trains to London over existing tracks.

Equally puzzling is Lord Mandelson’s failure to note the example offered in his own former constituency of Hartlepool, where a rail service to London has been successfully reintroduced by Grand Central at no cost to the taxpayer under so-called ‘open access’ provisions. Plans for similar services running from other regional centres, including Huddersfield, Barrow-in-Furness and Stalybridge, have been on the drawing board for many years, but never introduced. Capacity released by HS2 would permit such an operation, but as there would be no public subsidy or DfT control; these savings can thus hardly be described as ‘cuts’.

Close inspection of the capacity challenge facing our rail network shows that there is almost certainly no option that allows circa £40bn to be spent on ‘other stuff’. It is rather a choice between repeating hugely expensive upgrading of ageing legacy assets (on several axes, not solely the West Coast Main Line described above) which may, experience shows, result in cuts to local provision and chronic unreliability on the trunk route, or investing in internationally-proven technology, expensive though that undoubtedly would prove.

Yours etc,

Nick

HS2: fog over Hampstead, Shrewsbury cut off

Several inter-city services to destinations off the core north-south main lines have been introduced since rail privatisation, including this London – Sunderland service operated by Grand Central, a subsidiary of German national operator Deutsche Bahn. Photo: DB

This blog is hesitant to say ‘I told you so’. But the news this week that Virgin Rail Group’s proposals to operate more inter-city services to and from London Euston have been rebuffed by Network Rail highlights yet again the infrastructure crisis which so blights the long-term outlook for our principal rail axes.

NR’s decision to reject, for now at least, Virgin’s request to operate direct trains between Blackpool, Shrewsbury and London is in part seen as a response to the operator’s recent decision to take enforcement action against the infrastructure manager for what it perceives as NR’s failure to deliver a reliable, robust main line railway. But to characterise this dispute as merely ‘tit for tat’ is to grossly underplay its significance. For years now, we have been told that the West Coast Main Line would be ‘full by the mid-2020s’, as evidenced by NR’s long-term planning processes. But it now seems NR was far too cautious, and this blog’s view that the WCML is already on the point of overuse is being borne out by events in unprecedented fashion.

Taking a longer term view, the cause for concern grows even more: ‘Shrewsbury-gate’ is the latest episode in a sorry soap opera which includes such misadventures as the permanent cessation of passenger services at several stations in Staffordshire in 2003, and the ongoing failure to facilitate long-planned inter-city services from Huddersfield, Barrow and Rochdale. This saga has utterly undermined the supposed benefits of the £9bn+ West Coast Route Modernisation, and indeed the whole ‘incremental upgrading’ concept – industry-leading reliability and capacity for reasonable service expansion should surely be the minimum we expect from the refurbishment of one railway at that price.

These arguments have always been the most compelling in the case for High Speed 2, not least because the capacity and reliability crises which are most high profile on the WCML nevertheless manifest themselves time and time again on main line and suburban routes across the corridors served by the HS2 ‘Y route’. In its recent examination of the Department for Transport’s early preparatory works on HS2, the National Audit Office expressed reservations about the ‘articulation of the strategic case’ for the new line. But with events on the ground moving so fast, that already seems like an academic discussion: if we value our entire rail network as a strategic asset to the country and its economy, then surely we cannot endure the sort of capacity and reliability threats that we are battling on the WCML and elsewhere.

Add in the undisputed reality that incremental upgrading of essentially 19th Century assets is often as difficult and as costly as new build, yet it delivers demonstrably fewer benefits, then a compelling strategic narrative begins to emerge. A raft of environmental and wider economic benefits can then follow, but of course the extent to which these are maximised is dependent on wider government policy which is beyond the remit of transport planners.

In any case, it is most encouraging that those making the strategic case for HS2 are communities themselves, like Shrewsbury and Blackpool. They’ve seen the opportunities offered to other regional centres like Halifax, Hull or Hartlepool (and other places, not beginning with ‘H’ too) by inter-city rail services in recent years, and rightly want to see the links they enjoyed in British Rail days restored, in keeping with the resurgence in long-distance passenger rail growth seen consistently since privatisation.

UK main line rail passenger-journeys have grown substantially in recent years. Source: Brown Review into Rail Franchising

This ‘bottom up’ trend for better connectivity is, like HS2 itself, anything but London-centric however. Coventry, for example, luxuriates in a train every 10 min to London six days per week, which puts in context the absurd suggestion that it might be ‘sidelined’ by HS2. But with the Department for Transport recently pledging a funding contribution towards a new station at Kenilworth as part of a package of enhancements to the cross-country routes passing through the city, it is perhaps understandable that the city council has ditched its dogmatic opposition to HS2 in favour of a more pragmatic approach to connectivity which looks at its rail links in all directions, not just to London. As we have seen time and time again, enhancements made to fast services on existing lines to London almost always require a diminution in the quality of regional services, and Coventry has set a welcome example in recognising this.

All of which is lost on the London commentariat of course; witness arch-panjandrum Andrew Gilligan’s concern about a phantom threat to the (excellent) London Overground service which passes through Camden en route from leafy Richmond to even-leafier Hampstead. Who gives a toss about Shrewsbury, or 30-odd million WCML passengers, when that’s your definition of a nationally-important railway? And to think, there are those in Manchester and Leeds who would see Gilligan as an ally. Frightening.

HS2 must be built.

HS2: less spin, more substance

Destination Milton Keynes: direct services from Aylesbury are expected to begin by 2019. Credit: P Harrop

The headline is probably a touch naïve, as public relations and lobbying are an integral aspect of modern political life, for good or ill. But the recent spat over comments attributed to public relations firm Westbourne Communications and its Campaign for High Speed Rail have shone a light onto the shadowy world of lobbyists and ‘spin doctoring’ which inevitably swirls around government and major government-led projects.

According to Anna Minton’s report for Spinwatch, the primary source of the controversy is ‘an interview with [an unnamed] academic present at the March 2012 Penn Studio London workshop’ -- a somewhat flimsy basis for an apparently serious critique. Minton’s report goes on to list examples of what it calls ‘astroturfing’, before clarifying that:

‘Most of the activities of councils, developers and lobbyists are not actually illegal, although instances of planning meetings packed with actors and fake letter writing campaigns from non-existent supporters of controversial schemes are undoubtedly unethical.’

The clear inference to the reader is that such ‘fake’ tactics have been used by supporters of High Speed 2, yet there is no reference offered to substantiate this and no suggestion that the businesses and institutions cited as supports of CHSR were concocted.

I have attended a number of Westbourne’s events over the past couple of years, and I can state categorically that I personally never heard any language that could be described as remotely ‘militaristic’. Indeed, those looking for ‘militaristic’ connotations might do well to consider the ‘Downfall’ parody -- a tired cliché pedalled across YouTube, often by fans of rival football clubs. Sadly attempts by one HS2 opponent in Staffordshire to portray Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin as Hitler appear to have caused genuine offence. I’ll let readers assess whether such pranks are more or less ‘ethical’ than Westbourne’s alleged conduct.

However, my main reservation about these phoney wars is the reluctance to address many of the fundamentals of the debate. Westbourne’s James Bethell once acknowledged to me that discussing the rail capacity benefits of HS2 ‘does not have cut-through with commentariat’. The result is that the most compelling arguments for the project have too often been overlooked, perhaps because they do not sell papers. But that does not mean that the dire reliability of the West Coast Main Line outlined in the Gibb Report, the live threat to local stations from the incremental route upgrading approach, or the doubts about the capacity benefits of novel train control systems on ageing mixed-traffic railways aren’t each a matter of record. All these topics have been subject to analysis on this blog, as regular readers will be aware.

Surprisingly, when I suggested on social media that a less emotive dialogue that focussed on rail issues might benefit the HS2 debate, the High Speed Action Alliance didn’t seem too keen to join in. 'How annoying for you when the lies and deceits of pro lobby are publicised’, HSAA tweeted pettily in reply, before retweeting the supporting opinion of an anonymous blogger – so much for transparent campaigning then.

Indeed if HSAA are looking for ‘deceits’, they could start by looking closer to home. On March 29, HSAA’s colleagues at Stop HS2 produced a blogpost attempting, in tortuous fashion, to compare HS2 to the local rail cuts of the 1960s. Brazenly ignoring the glaring hypocrisy of raising the spectre of Beeching when alternatives to HS2 so clearly emperil thriving local rail stations such as Stone and Atherstone, Stop HS2’s author ‘Joe’ (presumably this is ubiquitous rent-a-quote Joe Rukin, though no surname is given – again, transparency) writes:

‘The worst part of this disjointed thinking is that without HS2 taking it over, Great Central could have a great future, providing an alternative route from Milton Keynes to London. With plans to reopen the East-West line, it would be simple to run trains along that line from Milton Keynes, which would then connect with Great Central and run into Marylebone via Aylesbury. Such a project would cheaply deliver the thing which HS2 does not, interconnectivity and local benefits.’

But like so much rail investment that that HSAA, Stop HS2 and their associates insist is precluded by HS2, a Milton Keynes – Aylesbury rail service is firmly on the agenda, and indeed is likely to come to fruition before HS2 thanks to the efforts of the East-West Rail consortium and Chiltern Railways. Indeed, a greater threat to ‘local connectivity’ would come from trying to path more London-centric inter-city services through Milton Keynes on an already saturated railway as an alternative to HS2, with a very real risk of capacity for local trains being squeezed out, even if an initial dedicated platform for EWR has been provided under recent remodelling of the station.

But ‘Joe’ isn’t done. He adds:

‘The current plan is not for HS2 to use the Grand Central trackbed, but to skirt around it, constantly crossing the line, as HS2 is being engineered for a track speed on 250 mile/h, meaning it has to be much straighter and wider than previous lines.’

The term ‘track speed’ is meaningless, and historians of Brunel would surely quibble with the inference that his (initially broad-gauge, ergo ‘wider’) Great Western Railway wasn’t, for substantial distances, pretty straight. But if Stop HS2’s real problem is with railways growing, then they could again accuse East-West Rail, where much of the Oxford – Bletchley formation is to be redoubled and electrified for 100 mile/h running, resulting inevitably in a more substantial physical footprint. Perhaps the group could just rebrand as Stop EWR?

Deceit? Maybe, maybe not. Scaremongering? Yes. Hypocrisy? Without doubt.

I suspect, like so much material put out by the multi-faceted PR machine that HS2 opponents would like us to believe does not exist, they hope the general public in the well-heeled shires where such material is (mostly) disseminated will not bother to check primary sources. Indeed, this is precisely the sort of sleight of hand that Stop HS2 and its acolytes routinely accuse HS2 Ltd and government of committing.

In any undertaking on the size and scale of HS2, controversy is sure to ensue; spin, scaremongering and sanctimony follow not far behind. Substance should shape the debate going forward.

HS2: looking into the Great Beyond

HS2 services are envisaged to use an expanded Manchester Piccadilly station.

Mansfield, Hucknall, Bristol, Barnsley and Leicester: high speed rail is coming your way. All are among the locations cited by name in the government’s Command Paper and related documentation covering Phase II of High Speed 2, issued on January 28. Indeed, the time-consuming task of poring over the reams of paperwork released last month is rewarding, if only for the light it sheds on the thinking behind HS2, as well the many anomalies that the Preferred Route Option has generated.

Whether Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin has been stung by repeated assertions that HS2 was designed to get ‘every fool in London’ to Birmingham 15 min faster (as shamefully claimed by Sir Simon Jenkins last December whilst drawing a painful analogy with the 150th anniversary of the Metropolitan Railway) is debatable. But there is no doubt that, in tone at least, HS2 is now looking to much broader horizons. The Command Paper raises the real prospect of a Leicester – Edinburgh service running via HS2 and the East Coast Main Line, and, by tapping into the rolling programme of electrification of the conventional network, a Bristol – northeast England service which would join HS2 at Birmingham.

These aspirations for a substantial non-London market for high speed services have predictably been widely ignored by most reaction to the Phase II announcement, just as the potential to restore lost inter-regional passenger services along our existing main lines has been. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that much of the supposedly informed comment around HS2 in reality responds to a perception of the project, rather than the detailed plans themselves.

The fuss over Parkway stations is a case in point. Just two genuine ‘out-of-town’ stations are proposed under the second stage, joining the Birmingham Airport facility outlined in Phase I (few would claim that the Crossrail interchange at Old Oak Common falls into this category). I concur with those who point to some of France’s out-of-town stations, where trains are few and footfall modest, but to compare these directly to, say, Meadowhall is surely fatuous. The latter is already a busy multimodal hub serving Rotherham, Barnsley and Doncaster as well as Sheffield, while Toton has been explicitly chosen to serve both Derby and Nottingham. Neither bears much resemblance to, say, the spartan and windswept TGV Haute-Picardie.

But far more important is the ineluctable truth that many -- perhaps a substantial majority -- of HS2 passengers will board their trains at exactly the same locations they use today, thanks to the extensive provision of so-called ‘classic compatible’ services. As an example, it is ironic indeed that whilst the planned HS2 terminus at Manchester Piccadilly would form an annexe to the existing trainshed, extra platforms to be built to support the Northern Hub programme will be many minutes’ walk from the concourse and linked by travelator. That isn’t a problem per se, but it highlights how when conventional rail investment includes inevitable design compromises, it does so largely without accompanying howls of invective. Needless to say, the ‘anything but HS2’ brigade revels in such obvious double standards.

That said, HS2 Ltd’s modelling has its own perception issues too. A macro-level service pattern has been drafted to support the revised economic case for the project, which is essential to evidence-based planning, but it does leave the project promoter open to the suggestion that it is defining timetables for 20 years hence. And it is fair to say that the service modelled is, in places, quixotic. A muted reaction to the Phase II plan in Liverpool is understandable; the model gives the city a vastly better service than it could hope to receive under any further ill-starred upgrading of the West Coast Main Line, but the plans still envisage only two trains an hour from London via HS2, one of which makes no use of the Phase II alignment at all. This Liverpool service does however serve Stafford, which no doubt will be welcomed in Stafford. But this in turn raises the huge anomaly of Stoke-on-Trent, which appears to gain an HS2 service under Phase I in 2026 and lose it again a few years later under Phase II. Curious.

HS2 Ltd should state far more robustly in my view that any service pattern offered today is nothing more than the most cursory amuse bouche for a decade of wrangling about who gets what. I am increasingly of the view that the deferral of the Heathrow Airport spur should be made permanent; the Bow Group and others make play of the ‘success’ in Europe of high speed rail interchanges at hub airports, but I suspect the traffic volumes are meagre. To emphasise the point, Scheherazade Zekri-Chevallet, Chief Commercial & Marketing Officer at four-nation TGV operator Thalys International, remarked at a conference late last year that of its near 7 million annual ridership, just 55 000 were using its dedicated interlining tickets via airports in Paris and Brussels.

But while I think the Heathrow paths would be far better utilised for more fast trains to Liverpool and/or a London – Blackpool/Chester/North Wales service running via the Phase I junction at Lichfield, thence Colwich, Stoke and Crewe, my opinion counts for little. HS2 Ltd should consider even at this early stage appointing a Director of Passenger Services in the mould of former Virgin Trains and BR InterCity MD Chris Green to consider these issues in more depth. Currently, the passenger-facing role of developing post-HS2 rail services is being undertaken (if that’s the right word) by Passenger Focus and Network Rail, whereas in (say) France or Germany, this would be the domain of a major operator like DB or SNCF.

It would surely be beneficial to test alternative service options against a set of commercial parameters in a broadly independent fashion, in consultation with business groups in the towns and cities in question, safe in the knowledge that nothing is set in stone. Open-access use of the infrastructure by a new entrant in the style of Italy’s NTV could be considered much closer to opening.

The growth forecasts made by HS2 Ltd are exceptionally cautious; it says that volumes predicted at the outset for 2021 have already been exceeded. Within the envelope of these assumptions, there is substantial room for manoeuvre: a sensible service pattern in 2013 is almost certainly not going to apply so smoothly to 2033. Investment in the conventional network (especially electrification), pressure on pathing at key nodes and broad demographic change could all influence the plan. HS2 should be flexible enough to adapt as the project moves into the implementation phase.

The real West Coast scandal

The West Coast Main Line: it seems disruption is for life, not just for Christmas. Photo: Network Rail

It wasn’t quite a Mayan prophecy, but no doubt a few pundits were left somewhat disappointed when the rail franchising Armageddon of December 9 failed to materialise. Despite the many column inches devoted to the undoubtedly serious flaws in the Inter-City West Coast refranchising process, there was never any genuine risk that services on a network carrying 30 million passengers per annum would simply cease because of a foul-up of the functionaries.

And so it proved. The trains are still running, and Virgin Rail Group has a short-term deal to continue to operate ICWC services for a further 23 months. Passengers could be forgiven for breathing a sigh of relief as they prepare for the big Christmas getaway...

Or not. Because (and do please forgive the London broadsheet hacks for failing to notice this), ICWC trains do (effectively) stop running on December 23 for five days over the Festive period. Sure, there will be a limited rail service linking London with Nuneaton via a circuitous route along the Chiltern main line, but no direct services will run between Euston, Manchester, Liverpool and stations to Glasgow; ironically Chiltern Railways services between London Marylebone and Birmingham Moor Street may also be affected by the need to share tracks with Virgin.

The reason for the hiatus is, of course, engineering works – all four West Coast Main Line tracks through Bletchley will be closed for resignalling. Infrastructure manager Network Rail’s desire to perform work at Christmas is perhaps understandable, as there is less commuter traffic generally and no trains at all on December 25-26. But the Bletchley blockade lasts much longer, seriously hindering leisure travel at one of the busiest times of year, and it isn’t a ‘bog standard’ track possession, it is one of a panoply of work packages deferred from the infamous West Coast Route Modernisation Programme undertaken between 1998 and 2009.

As regular readers of this blog will already be well aware, the project was effectively halted prematurely to ensure the outturn cost was kept below the symbolic £10bn mark. Nobody now disputes contractor Bechtel’s assessment that the true capital cost of WCRM was in the region of £13bn. Note that this does not include the wider economic disbenefits caused by a decade of disruption; this sum has never been meaningfully assessed. My own view is that the value of leisure travel in a service-dominated economy is seriously underestimated by transport economists.

But on the West Coast Main Line, it seems disruption is for life, not just for Christmas. This blog has remarked many times that the institutional unreliability of Europe’s busiest mixed-use railway utterly undermines the claims by opponents of High Speed 2 that more services could be accommodated on it. Now these concerns have been confirmed in a landmark report authored by Virgin Rail Group COO Chris Gibb and issued on behalf of the operator and Network Rail.

Mr Gibb outlines a series of interrelated challenges which impact on Network Rail’s ability to achieve an acceptable level of reliability on the busiest London – Rugby core. Among the specifics highlighted are the growing incidence of trespass and suicide, where the report points to Réseau Ferré de France data showing that fewer than 3% of suicides on the French network occur on Lignes à Grande Vitesse, where trespass risk can be modelled at the design stage; an unintended benefit of having fewer platform faces of course.

The difficulty in gaining access to the WCML for maintenance is also addressed:

'The section between Watford and Euston is some of the most difficult to maintain and ageing infrastructure, passing through an urban area which limits access to and alongside the railway whilst influencing the railway with earthworks issues, trespass and other ‘neighbour’ issues. The current possession arrangements are barely enough to hold the infrastructure in its current condition, which in turn is not good enough to sustain good performance.'

An examination of overhead power supply equipment revealed a yet more damning indictment of the ‘incremental upgrading’ approach:

'It appears that the West Coast Route Modernisation project team were more focussed on within budget/on time delivery of the project, than the medium/long term component performance, and this approach has clearly cost NR and the industry dearly in terms of poor performance.'

You get the idea.

It is abundantly clear that many millions of pounds will be needed just to keep the southern WCML in a fit state to handle its current workload, let alone the several extra 125 mile/h services per hour envisaged by the 51m Group under its alternative to HS2.

There will inevitably be those who, come what may, will insist that interminable spending on route upgrading is always the right policy. But global best practice suggests otherwise: it is generally under-appreciated that two of the world’s most commercially-successful high speed rail projects, Japan’s pioneering Tokaido Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka, and the Paris – Lyon line in France, were both authorised after the respective governments concluded that upgrading the conventional routes in each case would be too costly for the accrued benefits[1].

Closer to home, we can hardly dismiss the south end of the WCML as an obstreperous one-off. As this week’s multiple overhead power failures at Hitchin illustrated, the East Coast Main Line from London King’s Cross is similarly fragile despite a series of infrastructure upgrades over the past three decades, whilst readers of industry newsletter Rail Business Intelligence will already be aware of insiders’ mounting concerns about the costs and benefits of the London – Cardiff route modernisation, now priced at around £7bn.

The interrelated concerns about capacity, reliability and service patterns on the UK’s principal rail axes will not go away, even as memories of ‘Franchisegate’ fade. Over more than four decades, the alternatives to a new line to link the capital with our most important provincial centres — 14 of which would be served by trains using HS2 under current plans — have been tried repeatedly. Thanks to the Gibb report, we now have empirical proof of the limitations of ‘patch and mend’.

The real West Coast scandal is about infrastructure, not franchising.
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1. For more details on the early years of high speed rail development, see Hughes M., Rail 300: The World High Speed Train Race, David & Charles, Newton Abbot 1988

OK, Computer? Infrastructure, technology and clairvoyance

Unsurprisingly, the notion that some extraneous technological development will dramatically reduce the need for travel in years to come has barely featured in the debate over UK aviation strategy. Credit: Heathrow Airports Ltd.

Why didn’t the Romans invent the wheelbarrow? Central heating, aqueducts and racing chariots…but not wheelbarrows. They could have, in theory, but they didn’t. Strange.

And so begins an important lesson in what historians term technological determinism. In short, it’s the idea that just because a particular technology has the potential to fulfil a certain role in society, there is no guarantee that it actually will. The unexpected explosion in SMS text messaging offers an example in the counter sense: a technology largely written off by its developers has achieved mass uptake on a global scale.

How does this affect railway investment? The railway itself is a unusual case: without doubt, the industry has shown remarkable staying power – or even ‘bouncebackability’, to use football manager Iain Dowie’s memorable turn of phrase. By rights, the railway should have been killed off by a multitude of subsequent innovations from the telegraph to the jet aircraft to the internet.

It has not been. Which means it is surprising that, in the UK at least, there is a vocal minority of clairvoyants who liken the modern railway network to the canal system, and insist that a further technological Deus ex-Machina will obviate the need for travel at all. Or at least flatten demand to such an extent that people will stop trying to build railways past the end of their garden....

Because the creed espoused by these techno-zealots requires a very selective interpretation of the notion of ‘travel’. If, for example, you live in a bucolic idyll served by a meandering branch line dating back to Victorian times, your desire to use it will apparently remain undiminished amid the rise of the machines. No, the real targets are the fat cats: the preening executive seeking to shuttle from urban centre to urban centre in pampered luxury. Yes, all 31 million of them (!) who did just that between London, Birmingham and northwest England last year: they must be stopped!

And they shall be: apparently by Skype, with extra 3D twiddly bits. Or, er, something.

Convinced? Me neither. Indeed, I am not sure which aspect of some high speed rail opponents’ cultish devotion to technology I find most disturbing: the blind, unwavering faith that point-to-point travel will diminish in the next 30 years (not ‘could’ or ‘might’), or their unstinting, almost mystical, commitment to the idea even as the burden of evidence to the contrary utterly overwhelms it. Not only has the mass uptake of high-bandwidth internet services coincided with a surge in UK passenger rail ridership, but the adoption of web-enabled devices has democratised access to rail travel. Who now would detour to a station booking office to instruct a clerk to find the cheapest ticket? Fewer and fewer of us of course.

Technology is however changing working habits, and nobody would deny the increased incidence of passengers working onboard inter-city trains. With time, today’s patchy wi-fi functionality should be substantially enhanced, but then capturing the economic benefits of such activity remains exceptionally difficult. Certainly the assumptions about onboard productivity contained in the economic model for High Speed 2 have been widely questioned, but it is telling that HS2 Ltd ascribes no economic benefit to productivity gained by passengers transferring from air or road; this mitigation becomes all the more relevant as HS2 evolves slowly into an Anglo-Scottish rail spine.

But the ‘technology versus travel’ debate has far wider implications than one bog-standard rail project. Indeed, logic dictates that international journeys would be disproportionately affected. How to explain, then, the complete absence of the topic from the terms of reference of the Davies review into UK aviation strategy, the consequences of which are likely to reverberate for many decades to come? The explanation is surely that it’s a weak, weak argument.

Every bit as likely is a partial backlash against our screen-dependent culture, as concern grows about the health and societal impact of too much time spent hiding behind LCDs. Growth in business and leisure travel could plausibly be sustained by a premium attached to ‘real-time’ interaction. Last December I boarded a Deutsche Bahn high speed service from Cologne to Brussels, my €33 fare having afforded me a seat in a first class compartment. I was joined by a German diplomat also heading for Brussels; having reached for my smart phone, I asked in faltering German if she knew whether there was a wi-fi network onboard.

‘No’, she replied, ‘and thank God for that. I am chained to my phone all day, this is the only time I get to gaze out of the window.’

Surely she is not alone in rejecting the tyranny of technology. Time for the web-wonks to ditch the dogma – we’ll need our railways for many a year yet.