Increasing capacity on the railways: my verdict on High Speed Rail

Today Lord Adonis, the Secretary of State for Transport, announced a £30bn plan to build a high-speed railway line between London and Birmingham from 2017, eventually extending to Manchester and Leeds. Here I'm going to try and examine the plans and give my verdict.

The basic idea of high-speed rail in the UK is that we should build new tracks to take the strain off the existing mainlines, and make the new lines capable of trains travelling at more than 200mph. This would give a much-needed injection of capacity into our struggling mainlines. It's analogous to the situation of the road network in the 1950s: the A-roads were clogged and there wasn't any capacity to do anything. So we built the motorways. High-speed rail is to the railway network what motorways are to the road network.

The point of high-speed rail is not speed, it's capacity. Again, it's like the motorways: we didn't build the motorways so we could all whizz up and down the country at 100mph, we built them so the A-roads didn't collapse under the strain. That's not to say that we can't get fantastic speeds out of new high-speed lines. Herein lies another similarity to motorways: both need to be built wide and straight, to maximise the speed. The world speed record for traditional steel-wheel-on-steel-rail trains is held by the French, with one of their TGVs attaining an astonishing 574.8 km/h (357.2 mph).

The idea of high-speed rail has been around for a long time: the Japanese started in 1964, as a showcase for the Tokyo Olympics. The Shinkansen (or Bullet Train) has become synonymous with high-speed rail, with a network covering the whole of Japan.

The French were the pioneers in Europe, starting with Paris to Lyon in 1981, a line not dissimilar to our West Coast Main Line (WCML). But instead of upgrading the existing line, as we did between 1999 and 2008, they chose to build a completely new line. The result? Journey times on Paris-Lyon were cut from 5 hours to 2 hours overnight. Since then, the French have built a vast network extending from Lille to Marseilles, from Le Mans to Strasbourg.

The rest of Europe has got in on the act too, with Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium all building their own high-speed lines. The first high-speed line in the UK was opened in 2007 to connect London to the Channel Tunnel.

The second line, whose plans were announced today, would run from London to Birmingham and Rugeley, with a connection to the WCML to permit onwards services to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. This would take all the fast trains off the WCML and leave lots of capacity south of Rugby for growth and for new services.

The capacity increase comes from the act of building new tracks: in that respect, building a new ordinary-speed line would have just the same (if not more) effect on capacity. Once you've decided to build new tracks, however, it makes more economic sense to build them to be capable of very fast speeds, because more people will be attracted to a faster train service, so you get more money out of them and the investment is thus justified.

Let's not kid ourselves: the investment required for building high-speed lines in Britain would be huge. And we, as taxpayers, would foot almost all of the bill. The first line to the Channel Tunnel cost £5 billion. According to today's report, the second line from London to Birmingham announced today might cost £17 billion, and a Y-shaped network to take the pressure off the West Coast and East Coast Main Lines and get all the way from London to Manchester and Leeds could cost £30 billion.

Put another way, a line from London to Birmingham would cost cost every British man, woman and child £280 each. The full network reaching from London to Manchester and Leeds would cost £500 each. Some would say that's quite a lot of money; it is, but in some ways it's actually very good value for money. Because the benefits would be, quite simply, enormous.

Primarily, it would give the network the injection of capacity it sorely needs. As I said before, the West Coast Main Line will be out of capacity in about a decade. Building a second high-speed line from London to the West Midlands would effectively double the capacity for long-distance trains to the North West and Scotland.

The East Coast Main Line suffers from a massive bottleneck at Welwyn, where four tracks merge into two to squeeze through a long viaduct and two long tunnels. Even the cheapest plan to fix this bottleneck would probably cost at least £3 billion, and the capacity increase would be nothing compared to that provided by a high-speed line between London and Yorkshire - given the limited capacity of the ECML it's not hard to imagine that such a high-speed line could triple capacity between London and Yorkshire.

As a secondary effect, journey times would be significantly reduced. Even with just a simple London-West Midlands high-speed line, journey times on London-Birmingham would be cut from 1 hour 20 minutes to just 49 minutes; London-Manchester, currently standing at about 2 hours 5 minutes, could take just 1 hour 40 minutes; and London-Glasgow could be reduced from 4 hours 30 minutes to under 4 hours.

With a network that extends to Manchester and Leeds, London to Glasgow or Edinburgh could be as fast as just 3 hours 30 minutes. That would put a serious dent in British Airways and BMI, who have a lucrative eight flights a day -- each! -- between London and Glasgow and London and Edinburgh.

The space capacity on the West Coast Main Line would permit a whole range of services which have been sidelined to come back to life. It would permit a huge increase in commuter services to the likes of Watford Junction, Milton Keynes and Northampton. It would also permit services to smaller cities such as Blackpool to return; London-Blackpool services last ran in 2003, withdrawn to make room for more services to Glasgow and Liverpool.

It also gives room for increased freight traffic: a single train composed of deep-sea containers can do the work of thirty or more HGVs. With more capacity for freight on our railways, we can start to remove freight from the roads, and so even the road network ends up with more capacity as a result.

All this begs the question that, if high-speed rail is so good, why hasn't it been built already? In part that's down to the decisions in the 1960s and 1970s to upgrade the existing network instead of building new lines, and this attitude has prevailed ever since. But there's only so much upgrading that can be done, and the last big upgrade on the West Coast Main Line resulted in a sub-standard weekend service for most of the last decade.

By contrast, building high-speed lines causes much less disruption to the existing railway network, but instead causes years of planning enquiries and NIMBYism. Today's report is the result of a year-long study by HS2 Ltd to find the best route between London and Birmingham; this route will cut through the Chilterns, and already the opposition from the Campaign to Protect Rural England has been vociferous.

Nevertheless, all three main political parties have agreed over the last few years to the necessity of high-speed rail in principle, which means that today's report stands a good chance of being implemented eventually, if not perhaps quite as soon as the timescale envisaged by Lord Adonis today which would involve construction starting in 2017 and opening in 2026.

However, the Conservative shadow transport secretary, Theresa Villiers, said that Labour had "betrayed" the vision of high-speed rail set out by the Conservatives a few years ago; in particular she lamented the fact that today's plans only got as far as Birmingham, not Manchester and Leeds, and that Heathrow was not to be served directly.

While today's plans don't set out detailed plans for lines to Manchester and Leeds, they do endorse them as the vital next step after building the line from London to Birmingham. Pretty much everyone agrees that you've got to go via Birmingham to get to the north, so today's announcement is a reasonable first step, and planning on lines to Manchester and Leeds can follow later once we've cut our teeth on the line to Birmingham.

How to serve Heathrow, however, has been a subject of contentious debate in the railway press for many years now. Heathrow is not well-served by trains, with only the Heathrow Express service into Paddington as a link to the wider railway network; a long wished-for connection from Heathrow to Reading has been suggested for many years but has not materialised. This is in contrast to Gatwick, which has had direct train connections to London, Brighton, Southampton, Portsmouth, Bedford, Luton, Reading and many other places in the south of England for decades.

Today's proposals see Heathrow being served by a station in the Acton area of west London to allow interchange between High Speed Two (the new line to Birmingham) and Crossrail, the new east-west suburban line across London which will serve Heathrow from 2017. This would permit passengers to make one train change to get between Heathrow and the north of England, as well as making access to the west end and the Docklands much easier.

The Tories would prefer this station to be much nearer Heathrow, or perhaps even underneath the airport (though this would require much more expensive tunnelling). This is because the Tories see the primary purpose of high-speed rail as an alternative to domestic air travel, so much so that they've proposed building high-speed rail instead of a third runway at Heathrow.

In my view that simply isn't a feasible goal, since for it to make any kind of a dent in usage at Heathrow you'd need a line all the way to Scotland, which would probably cost in excess of £50 billion and take 30 years to build. What's more, the fraction of flights out of Heathrow which are domestic is so small that removing them would still leave the airport close to capacity. No, as evidenced by every other country which has built high-speed rail the fundamental purpose of high-speed rail is capacity of the railway network itself; any effects it might have on air travel are secondary.

One key feature of today's report has been detailed proposals on exactly how the high-speed line will serve London and Birmingham. It's no use buildling a high-speed line from the edge of London to the edge of Birmingham if it can't get into the city centres. Today it has been proposed to expand and rebuild London Euston to take high-speed trains, and to run the tracks out along a lightly-used line through West Ruislip.

They also plan to build a new station on derelict land just east of Birmingham New Street, on the site of the old Curzon Street station. The latter is something I've been advocating for several years, and I'm very pleased that the report has not tried to shoehorn the high-speed services into an existing station at Moor Street or New Street, since neither would be able to cope. (I intend to examine Birmingham in more detail in a future blog post.)

There will undoubtedly be opponents to the route chosen between London and Birmingham, which cuts through swathes of countryside in Buckinghamshire and Warwickshire. There will be questions from many along the lines of "why should we put up with a line through our back yard from which we can't get any benefit unless we drive to Birmingham or London?" The answer, of course, is that they will benefit from improved services on existing railway lines and less traffic on the roads. I know that won't silence them, but I can live in hope, right?

Today's report spells out the detail of how High Speed Two should be constructed. What it doesn't spell out, however, is how it's going to be paid for. At a cost of £17 billion, no government would be eager to part with that much cash; in this economic climate it would be a miracle.

However, there is much detailed design work and consultation to be done before we can actually start building; it is most likely that construction will begin no earlier than 2017, once Crossrail has been completed. So hopefully the economy will have recovered significantly by then, and the funding for a high-speed line would be forthcoming. Make no mistake, however; the bulk of the funding must come from the government, and thus, ultimately, from taxpayers.

In conclusion, then, today's report is a huge milestone on the road to high-speed rail in England, and I commend the work of both HS2 Ltd and Lord Adonis in getting us this far. I think today is perhaps the day that the question turned from if we see high-speed rail to when. However, to see exactly what happens next, and when, we must wait until after the general election.