TRACKS TO THE FUTURE

Secret talks on London bullet train

Rail ministers from Edinburgh and London met last week for preliminary discussions on laying down the spine of Britain an entirely new line, which could cut journey times from north to south to just three hours.  The talks have been kept private in a bid to dampen public expectation, with ministers on both sides of the border balking at the vast cost of the scheme.

Consultants estimate that it could cost up to £ 30 billion to build a line capable of handling the Eurostar trains, which could travel at speeds of up to 220 mph.  However, rail industry bosses and pressure groups are now increasing the pressure on ministers to act, claiming the economic and environmental benefits of the line would outweigh the initial costs.

The meeting last Wednesday between UK rail minister Tom Harris and Scottish National Party Transport Minister Stewart Stevenson marks the first time that the UK Government and the SNP administration have met to discuss the rail project.  The meeting was called by SNP ministers who want to maintain strong transport links with England.  The new momentum behind the project follows the successful bedding in of the new high speed Eurostar link between London and Paris and Brussels, which opened in November 2007.

Journey times between London and Paris have been cut to two hours and 15 minutes, half the time it takes to get from London to Glasgow.  Engineers believe it would take a decade of planning and building before the trains could be used, by which time the current network is likely to be overwhelmed by demand.

Pressure groups say the high environmental cost of short haul air travel, plus the need to link up Scotland and the north of England with the new London Eurostar service requires a "High Speed Two" link down the country.

A feasibility study into a new high speed line by the consultants Atkins in March concluded that either a west coast or an east coast line - which would cost between £ 9 billion and £ 12 billion - would produce huge economic benefits to the country.  A third option - building a £ 30 billion network down both east and west Britain - would bring economic benefits of more than £ 60 billion, it added.  The report concluded " High speed operation is required to attract sufficient passengers to switch from road and air."

Only this, it added, would  "make construction of a new line economically or financially viable."

Despite the anticipated boost to the economy of the line, both Holyrood and Westminster administrations are facing major financial problems.  There is also a potential problem in the discussions because industry sources suggest Scottish ministers would not only have to pay for the line in Scotland, but would also have to meet a substantial part of the costs in the north of England, as there is little incentive for UK ministers to build a line north of the heavily populated Manchester - Leeds corridor.

On the positive side, Gordon Brown is under pressure from MPs and MSPs who say that a north-south high speed line could become a "grand project" demonstrating the Prime Minister's support of the Union.

Under the Office of Rail Regulation's (ORR) draft determination of the Network Rail business plan up to 2014, a planned investment of £ 30 million to improve track, signalling and platform capacity at Gatwick Airport rail station would be scaled back to just £ 9 million.  The South East England Regional Assembly (SEERA ) has written to the ORR chairman Chris Bolt, transport secretary Ruth Kelly and chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games Lord Coe of Ranmore warning them such a cutback could have disastrous consequences when thousands of visitors spill out of the airport and try to get to the Olympic Park in Stratford, East London.

"The improvement set out by Network Rail for Gatwick Airport station ...  is the minimum level of standard of improvement required" said chair of SEERA's Regional Transport Board Nick Skellet. "The Board therefore considers it essential that Network Rail is resourced adequately to enable the work to be completed in advance of the Games."

An ORR spokesman told New Civil Engineer "We looked at its business plan and we think we can deliver what the government wants for £ 9 million which would be a £ 21 million saving for the tax payer."

But he stressed that ORR's decision was only provisional and that ORR would consider SEERA's claims before making its final decision on 30 October.

Meanwhile SEERA's letter to ORR has raised concerns about proposed cutbacks to Network Rail spending to upgrade Reading and Redhill rail stations.

Paris by rail in two hours

"UK to have world's fastest train in 12 years "

Sir David Rowlands, the chairman of High Speed Two, which is preparing detailed plans for a new North-South line, said that the preferred option was for four tracks to double the capacity of the route.

No high-speed line anywhere in the world has more than two tracks, but Sir David said that Britain needed to plan ahead for continuing rail growth over several decades.  In his first interview since being appointed in January, Sir David said "We are looking at four tracks because two tracks could quickly be filled.  It is much cheaper to safeguard the land at the start rather than having to go back in another 20 years and build another two tracks.  He said that the initial high-speed trunk line from London to the West Midlands would open soon after 2020 and later be extended with branches to the North East and North West, eventually running to Glasgow and Edinburgh.  Britain would copy the French strategy of building a high speed network gradually.

A site near Wormwood scrubs in West London is being considered as a giant rail hub where passengers would switch from the high speed line to Crossrail, the mainline railway being built under Central London to link tracks to the East and West.  The hub, at Old Oak Common rail depot, would also connect with with the Heathrow Express and the Great Western Main Line.

Sir David, a former Permanent Secretary at the Department for Transport, said that the line would allow tens of thousands of homes for long distance commuters to be built between London and Birmingham.  Commuters would travel to work on the existing West Coast Main Line.  Most of the 225 mph trains would run non-stop to Birmingham, Manchester or Leeds but some could stop at a new parkway station 50 miles north of London.

Sir David admitted that there would be opposition to cutting through the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.  he said that a new line would not remove the need for more airport capacity because most switching from other transport would come from cars.  Asked whether he believed that a future government would finance the line he said, "It's a huge challenge but I believe it will eventually happen because the railway is full."

High-speed rail must go into London

While this site has considerable merit and is convenient for Heathrow, access would be difficult from many key points in the capital.  A second deck at Euston station combined with direct links to Euston Square and to King's Cross  / St Pancras, is an opinion that merits serious consideration. 

According to your map, the Newcastle - Edinburgh section of the line would follow the existing route via the coast.  The distance between these two cities is 20 miles shorter via a direct inland route; a station between Coldstream and Kelso would serve ( and regenerate ) the whole of the Tweed Valley border country.

Network Rail said passengers could look forward to the biggest expansion of the rail system in a generation.  Work is due to begin today on a five year plan, in which nearly £12 billion will be invested in projects to relieve congestion.  Another £ 11.5 billion will be invested in replacing older parts of the network, including track, signalling and bridges while £ 11.4 billion will be spent on maintenance and the costs of operating and running the network safely.

Among the schemes are the cross London project Crossrail, on which £ 2 million will be spent; the Thameslink project linking Brighton to Bedford ( £ 5.5 billion ); transforming Birmingham New Street station ( £ 5.5 billion ); an improvement scheme at Reading ( £ 425 million ); redeveloping King's Cross ( £ 450 million ); improving the East Coast main line between London and Scotland ( £ 250 million ); and a link from Cambridge to the East Coast line ( £ 50 million )

Network Rail chief executive Iain Coucher said: "We will see a transformed railway through ambitious plans that will deliver more trains, more seats, longer trains and faster trains.  Stations will be transformed and new ones built.  Speeds will be increased.  Bottlenecks will be unblocked.  Services will run more frequently at weekends and over bank holidays.  And all this while time keeping is ramped up, costs driven down and safety boosted."

Anthony Smith, chief executive of rail customer watchdog Passenger Focus said: "Dealing with passenger's main concerns about punctuality and crowding are at the heart of this plan.  However, it is also important that Network Rail reduces its costs and keeps the pressure off further fare rises.

Light at the end of the tunnel

This, however, is no Thomas the Tank Engine story but a triumph by the Swanage Railway Society, which has rebuilt the 11 miles and 70 chains of track wickedly uprooted by British Railways in 1972.  The first through service from London on the restored main line chugged into Swanage on Wednesday afternoon, and aboard were Frederick Sills and his son Peter, who was 15 when they travelled on the last Swanage train.

"It's absolutely amazing that the clock has been turned back and history reversed by the Swanage Railway volunteers," the older Mr Sills said, "They have performed miracles."

By contrast, grand public rail projects are sinking into a slough as  as the economic tsunami washes away their ballast.  This is despite an optimistic announcement by Network Rail, the day before the Swanage triumph, of the "biggest expansion of Britain's railways since the age of Brunel" at a cost of £ 35 billion.  Of this, £ 2 billion will go towards the £ 16 billion needed for London's Crossrail project to link the Great Western at Paddington Station to the Great Eastern at Stratford via a 13 mile tunnel.

Crossrail is a touchstone.  Only now has the project even reached the planning -blight stage, 19 years after it was first announced. It has missed the psychologically useful deadline of the London Olympics.

"The tragedy is that 10 years of dithering means that Crossrail will be nowhere near ready in time," Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, laments. 

Completion will now be 2017 - if ever.  More than one transport anorak likens it to the aircraft carriers promised to the Royal Navy - always being given the go-ahead but never being built.

Funding is the problem, since Crossrail depends on private finance to top up public commitments.  Funds are expected from BAA and Canary Wharf, or at least they were.  Now everyone has stopped flying and the bankers have deserted Canary Wharf, and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance.

"If we cannot deliver Crossrail," says Lord Adonis, the transport minister," how will we be credible in delivering any other major scheme through joint financing?" Quite.

It's such a shame.  Britain is good at big engineering projects like this.  The tunnels that now link St pancras to the fadt line under the Channel mean that it is quicker to get to Paris than it is to Liverpool - and considerably more pleasant to most people when they arrive.

Railways have been a roaring, groaning, crowded success for the past two decades.  There were 12.5 billion passenger journeys last year, more than in any year since the big spike just after the Second World War.  Like cinemas, predicted in the 1950s to become empty dinosaurs, railways have won a new following.  Because of the peculiar way they are run, though, we have become accustomed to seeing prices rise and trains getting more packed simultaneously.  Yet this week there was talk of two train operators possibly being forced to relinquish their franchises by the numbing economic wind.

it does not help that the  lovely summery English myth is of a railway so deserted that it could never possibly make money.  The ideal is the Gloucestershire station of Adlestrop where, in Edward Thomas's poem, "No one left and no one came/ On the bare platform."  Adlestrop closed in 1966 but tourists still take photographs of the station name plate in a bus shelter on the edge of the village.

How strange it is that the metal monster of the industrial age, the searing power of steam, should now be seen as part of a rural pattern of English and Welsh life ( Tourists photograph the  station sign at Llanfair PG on Anglesay too, and, as a bonus, trains still call there )

In Scotland, things are a little different: the railways are a skeleton, even if one of the world's great train journeys is to Mallaig, where ferries leave for the Hebridean isles.

In England the iron road's trespass is forgiven, enfolded as it is in groves of the wrong kind of leaves.  Even railway viaducts, which one might expect to be reckoned as ugly as gasworks or wind farms, are ornaments of the landscape.  On the line that cheers every railway tourist - the 72 miles from Settle to Carlisle - a celebrated view is of the Ribblehead Viaduct.  its 24 arches carry the line 104 feet above the moors of North Yorkshire.  it is designated a Scheduled Ancient Monument although its last stone was laid only in 1874.  The traveller cannot see it so well from the train, although the line does curve, but there's a station half a mile away to get out for a walk closer.  The pattern of the sun and hurrying clouds in the drizzly atmosphere equals anything by the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.

That is one reason why railways are to the English a moral issue.  It would have been wrong to close the Settle to Carlisle line, just as it was wrong to close the Swanage line.  The satanic figure of railway damnation was Dr Beeching, Richard to his wife, but cloven hoofed and more redolent of sulphur than the smokiest furnace coal.  His report in 1963 (published after the end of the Lady Chatterley ban, but five days later than the first Beatles LP ) proposed the closure of a third of the railway system. The Beeching Axe fell.

In 1950 there were 21 000 miles of railway.  Three thousand closed before Beeching.  Now there are 12 000.  Worse was proposed, such as the ending of the East Coast line at Newcastle; today the easiest way to Edinburgh ( quicker than air ) is by that line.

In response to Beeching, Flanders and Swann's song Slow Train  is firmly in the tradition of Adlestrop. "No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat," they sang, mourning th coming loss of Mow Cop and Scholar Green  ( closed 1964 ) Tumby Woodside ( closed 1970 ) Midsomer Norton ( closed 1966 ) Cockermouth for Buttermere ( closed 1966 ) Long Stanton ( closed 1970 ) and Kirby Muxloe ( closed 1964 )

They manage these things better -and worse - in France, or Spain.  Both had their Beeching Years, and both networks receive huge public subsidies.  Over the past two decades they have laid hundreds of miles of high speed lines, newly surveyed routes across virgin territory.  their advantages are open country and fierce planning laws.  They cleverly used EU funding.  So now the two hour journey from Madrid to Segovia, across the |Guadarrama mountains, takes half an hour, through a tunnel.  That I regret.  Travelling by train is a pleasure, and pleasures should last. 

The ideal train journey is in a corner seat in an empty compartment with well-upholstered seats.  A corridor provides access to an efficient bar and a place for the children to play.  There is a loo and no traffic jams.  it is the best way to see the country ( at a steady pace ); the easiest place in the world to doze or to read.  You reach your destination rested and lively, whether it's Cordoba or Corfe Castle.

High speed rail won't fly unless it goes through Heathrow

Some trains are now carrying 40% more passengers than they should, and year after year commuters are subject to soaring fares.  Network Rail's own forecasts predict passenger numbers rising nearly 45% by 2030 on the West Coast main line alone.  Yet only last month the government reneged on promises to ease rail overcrowding - the 13 000  extra carriages promised in July 2007 have been reduced by a quarter. 

How long can this continue?  If we persist in failing to invest in public transport, how can we ever get people out of their cars and into greener forms of transport?

There are some signs of hope.  Despite the gloomy economic outlook, a debate about the creation of a UK-wide high-speed rail network is emerging.  With cross-party political support, it seems that for the first time in years we may finally be embarking on what the French have termed un grand projet and have the opportunity to think long term about transport in Britain.

We already have one high-speed rail line.  It runs from the Channel Tunnel to St Pancras in London.  The big question is where it should go next.  There are many options, but broad agreement that the new network should be linked to Heathrow - precisely how, though, is causing controversy.

Having spent more than three years with my colleagues looking at this very question, in my mind the answer is simple: we must extend high speed rail direct to a new station located by the airport on the Great Western Main Line railway.  This would create a four way connection between Heathrow, the new Crossrail, and our existing rail and motorway networks.  Such an interchange would revolutionise the way people travel to and from the airport, which is Britain's largest generator of road traffic, and significantly reduce the 65% of Heathrow passengers who choose to arrive at the airport by car.  Our research shows that, with the right domestic rail links to Heathrow, the equivalent of 65 000 cars could be taken off the road each year.

  Even greater "green" transport benefits could be achieved if high speed international rail links were extended to Heathrow, which would encourage more passengers to switch from air to rail for short haul journeys.  A direct link between the airport and the Continent would enable high speed trains to travel between Heathrow and central Paris in two and a half hours.  As Britain's high speed network developed, a number of domestic flights could be reduced - especially if a high speed rail journey from Heathrow to Birmingham took just 37 minutes.

Effective high speed rail planning must focus on the goals of capacity, speed and, most importantly, delivering the journeys that passengers actually want.  from countless European examples we have seen that passengers prefer city-centre to city-centre connections, providing them with a fast and convenient service.

Those planning new high-speed lines, therefore, face one particular challenge -  how to get the trains into city centres.

To deliver passengers to the heart of London, rather than Stratford in East London, the High Speed 1 rail link required a 23 km tunnel through east London to St Pancras.  Though a significant part of the £ 6.2 billion cost, this city centre connection was central to the success of the project - and in securing the ultimate benefits, now estimated at £17.6 billion.

Clearly there are some challenges ahead and some tough choices to be made.

If we create a high speed rail network with an "out-of-town" London terminus, we risk losing the time savings for passengers that prompted the development of high speed railways in the first place. 

Equally, if we don't put Heathrow on the high speed network and choose instead to put it on a branch line, we lose the opportunity to radically improve the airport's rail connectivity.

For me the opportunities are too good to be missed.  An estimated 60 trains an hour could stop on a direct link to Heathrow, but less than a third of that number would stop on a spur line, and the opportunity to shift passengers from road to rail - and from air to rail - would be lost.  The question remains, therefore, will Britain's high speed rail extension serve only a rail network, or will it, in the true sense of un grand projet, do much more?