Why I'm not keen on HS2 - Medium Speed is Better

I ought to be in favour of HS2, the new high-speed railway line planned to run between London and Birmingham. But I am not. This is not because I am much moved by the various protests against the line running through unspoiled’ countryside. New roads are ceaselessly driven through unspoiled countryside, doing it far more damage than a railway line could possibly do, and there are, oddly enough, hardly any protests. Where there are, they rarely if ever succeed. The Newbury bypass was driven through as planned. The M40 was allowed to gouge a great chasm out of the Chiltern escarpment. And all these roads then condemn the area for miles around to the perpetual metallic sigh of motor traffic, far more damaging than the periodic concentrated roar of a train. If I ride my bicycle through the countryside I am often aware of the presence of a Motorway or bypass many miles before I reach it, because of the incessant background noise of traffic, which blankets and damages all the proper sounds of the countryside from birdsong to wind in the trees, and which has banished silence from much of the English countryside, for ever. And that is not to mention the weary, cheerless glare of the lights which are now frequently installed along such roads, even in deep country.

 

No, my problem with HS 2 is that it is the wrong kind of train. I am told (though I need more details) that the real force behind it is a European transport directive . Is this true? What is the chapter and verse? This would not itself be an argument against it, but it is also not necessarily an argument for it. If we are at last to spend a significant sums on building railways, what we need are not 150mph corridors. Even where they exist, stupid, vain people, who still think flying is somehow advanced and glamorous,  will still insist on flying the same routes, and millions of others will drive them because fares will be so high.

 

The London-Paris/ Brussels rail route has never really been the success it ought to have been because its amazingly high fares can’t compete with highly-subsidised cheap flights and also, in my view, because of the undue, airline-style fuss needed to use it.  If one could just get on the train and go, showing one’s passport at either end or even aboard, then it would be far more attractive. As it is, it is made to seem as much like air travel as possible, with check-ins and luggage scans and lots of sitting around before being allowed to board (often to find that – though the train is half-empty, all the passengers have been crammed up together) followed by long periods of more sitting around, waiting for the train to leave. I’m sure there are perfectly good arguments for all this messing around. I just don’t think they’re good enough. A couple of plainclothes police officers quietly patrolling each train would be just as good. But I digress.

 

 

Trains in Britain, especially since the introduction of the HST back in the late 1970s, are quite fast enough for the distances they travel. They have actually got slower since that era, thanks to the ‘Passengers’ Charter’, which penalties companies for failing to keep to their timetables. The obvious unintended consequence of this is that they have padded their timetables with lots of spare minutes. Short of a breakdown, or a nuclear war, or some other major incident, the trains will always be on time. They will just be slower. This is why politicians are able to claim ( as they often do) that ‘trains have become more punctual since privatisation’.

 

Like the crime figures, this is both true and wholly misleading. But people who don’t travel regularly by train are fooled by it, and even some of those who do don’t realise how it works. On my own route to and from work, I have found that when I change trains at an intermediate station, waiting for some minutes on the platform there, my journey of about an hour can be as much as five minutes shorter than if I take a direct train and do not change. Sometimes, if I am really lucky with connections, I can save as much as ten minutes. This is obviously absurd, and is another of the many consequence sof living in a mad country with a mad government.

 

During this journey I also pass another huge piece of evidence for the ‘mad government’ theory – the tomb that was until a  few weeks ago Didcot ‘A’ Power Station. This perfectly serviceable station was shut to fulfil an EU Carbon quota, despite the fact that its closure will make it even more likely that this country will cease to be self-sufficient in electricity generation in the next ten years, and subject to power cuts like a Third World nation. Meanwhile huge subsidies are being spent to carpet the country with wind turbines and solar panels, which cannot begin to produce the power once turned out by Didcot ‘A’. Perhaps our old friend ‘Bert’ who pretentiously posts here under the name of a great historian, can come up with an alternative explanation, apart from the fact that the British government is mad. After all, he knows (though he can’t explain how, or offer an alternative explanation ) that the slow disappearance of weekly rubbish collections is not caused by the EU’s Landfill Directive, and the huge penalties imposed on landfill disposal as a result, despite the existence, indeed growing quantities,  of enormous landfill facilities in this country.   

 

No, what we need are more medium-speed (and slow) trains. We need 80 or 90-mile-an hour passenger express services between medium-sized cities, including cross country lines which avoid London, and a loop around London which allows trains to avoid the centre of the capital while continuing to use main lines.

We need full electrification of all but the most remote lines. We need the reconnection to the railway system of dozens of market towns (in my own part of the country I would name Abingdon, Thame, Witney, Wantage, Faringdon, and Cirencester and Winslow – others no doubt have their own examples) which were absurdly cut off from the rail network, the reopening of the Oxford to Cambridge line, of the old LSWR line from Exeter to Plymouth round the north of Dartmoor, of the Great Central trunk line which was built to continental loading gauge (this is not the gauge between the rails, but the width to which tunnels, bridges, signals and platforms are built, significantly wider on the Continent than here) and intended to connect with the Channel Tunnel, of the line from Didcot to Winchester which used to run parallel with the now swollen and overloaded A34 trunk road .

 

We also need a great deal more sidings and unloading points for goods trains. If there is any change left over after this, then a relief line to Birmingham and the north might be worth considering.  But only if.

 

What is much more likely is that in 40 years we shall have a skeleton of high-speed lines (running well below the intended maximum speeds because they have been neglected) and the rest of the passenger and freight network will have been neglected almost to death, apart from a decrepit network of unsafe and decrepit commuter lines around London, which will by then be a dank, grey version of Mexico City or Istanbul. Modern economic liberalism ,for some reason, hates railways.