Do we need a high speed railway from London to the North or is it just a vanity project?

​

The short answer is we need it - for capacity - both for passengers who would use it, and to free up capacity on other lines to move freight from road to rail. Why does it need to be a high speed railway?  If we are going to build a railway, we might as well make it high speed - hence the name High Speed 2 (HS2)- our descendants won't thank us for us for another Victorian railway when we can build something better.  High Speed Rail can not only help clear lorries from the the roads, it can take some planes from the sky as well.  Rail is the greenest form of transport (if you don't count walking) so it seems strange that environmentalists are the noisiest people opposing it.

​

Yes, there are other things to spend money on, but even if we go ahead now, it will be seven years before we reach Birmingham, and another seven years to reach Manchester and Leeds.  We are just about managing at the moment with what we've got, but we won't be managing, seven or fourteen years in the future.  We can't keep putting off the start.

​

The Northern cities need this line because they are at a disadvantage without good links to the outside world.  However, if HS2 is really going to be a railway for the North, and not just another commuter line out of London, it needs to do two things better than the current plans allow.  Firstly, it needs to connect the Northern cities to Europe, not just to London.  That means a link between HS2 and HS1.  It is disappointing that this link has been dropped from the first phase of plans - this is short-sighted and narrow-minded.  HS1 makes a tiny operating profit, but it has unused capacity and its full potential is not being achieved because there's nowhere for the trains to go except St. Pancras.  HS1 needs this link to be able to run trains that go further North.  And HS2 needs the link so that cities in the North can be linked to Europe, not just Euston.  The idea that passengers can 'enjoy a pleasant ten-minute walk' between Euston and St Pancras is naive - there's no such thing as a pleasant walk when you're loaded down with luggage or if it's raining.  And what about allowing some freight, or even the occasional ferry shuttle, to travel all the way from the Midlands to the Continent through the Channel Tunnel?

​

(As an aside, but it needs to be mentioned, the planned High Speed 2 will be built to the European loading guage, the same as High Speed 1.  This provides the flexibility of allowing the slightly larger European trains to travel directly from the heart of Europe to the Midlands and the North.)​

​

The other thing that the current plans do not do as well as they should is connect the Northern cities to each other (Birmingham's OK, what about the others?).    HS2 is to be built as 'Y' shape that passes either side of the peak district..  If it were more of a 'T' shape then Manchester would be connected to Leeds across the top of the 'T'.  But is not going to be that way - Manchester to Leeds will have to be a separate line.

 

While we are building the new line to Birmingham and putting the finishing touches to the plans North of Birmingham, we should think about the next stage - North of Leeds.  How about a fast connection between Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle?  Then you have a true 'Northern Powerhouse' with good links between the Northern cities and you could go all the way from London to Newcastle on a high speed train, and from there, of course, you're nearly in Scotland.  It's better to go up the East Coast than the West because that is where the greater population lives.  This plan, incidentally, would include Manchester to Leeds - and this link is all about the need for a fast connection.

​

I rather like the arrangement in Antwerp in Belgium.  There, the old lines go into a terminus station and a new high speed through station has been built underneath it.  So you get good interconnections between the new line and the existing lines without disrupting the existing lines.  Something similar could be done at Leeds.  Initially, the high speed line from London would come in from the South, and go out to connect with the Scotland line in the North.  Later, the high speed line from Manchester would be added from the South, and the Northern line extended as far as Newcastle.

​

In isolation, HS2 would show a modest operating profit - its benefits would be largely invisible, such as improving the lives of people who benefit from faster journeys, or commuters travelling on less-crowded trains, or the fact that there is a little less traffic on the road, or the fact that businesses will be able to have their headquarters in the North rather than be forced to keep an expensive office in London, or the fact that we will have trained up a new generation of engineers to build the line, who will then be able to go on to other things.  What is needed to make it really take off is a set of meaningful connections to other high speed lines, greatly increasing the range of different types of journey that would be possible.  This would maximise the return on what will have already been a huge investment.

​

We must avoid making again the mistake that Britain has made over and over again - take a great idea, implement it in a half-hearted way, and end up with something that is nowhere near as good as it should have been, because we were not prepared to pay the full cost of doing the job properly.  The tilting Advanced Passenger Train and Nuclear power are two examples of this.

​

We need an ambitious long-term plan, otherwise we'll just get a jumble of lines that almost, but don't quite, work as a whole.  A bit like what we've got now.

​

What I want to see is:

2026: London-Birmingham, with a link to HS1
2033: Birmingham-Manchester and Birmingham-Leeds (under the existing station at Leeds)
2036(?): Liverpool-Manchester-Leeds-Newcastle
2039(?): Newcastle-Edinburgh-Glasgow

​

Then we'll have a decent high speed network!

​

What do you think?  Should we go for an ambitious high speed railway plan?  Please comment here.