Posted 22nd May 2009 | 5 Comments

High Speed 2 — it’s how and when, not if, says Adonis

Lord Adonis

CONSTRUCTION of a new high-speed line, HS2, from London to the West Midlands and the North is a matter of ‘how?’ and ‘when? — not ‘if?’ — according to Transport Minister Lord Andrew Adonis.
  
And he promised that the HS2 team led by Sir David Rowlands would deliver its proposals to the Government by the end of this year and these would be published ahead of next year’s general election.  “I hope we will be able to respond with a policy statement, too, before the election,” Lord Adonis added.
  
He was speaking to the West Midlands Region of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) in Solihull at the headquarters of Arup, the engineering consultancy that proposed and designed the Channel Tunnel Rail Link—now known as High-speed 1—as well as producing plans last year to extend HS1 to a ‘Heathrow Hub’ and provide the start of a new high-speed line to the north, dubbed HS2.
  
Arup has also suggested a new Grand Central Station in Birmingham, which could include facilities for high-speed trains—although it emerged last week that Birmingham City Council, which never supported the plan for fear it would undermine the case for redevelopment of New Street station, had sold the proposed site at Curzon Street to a property developer for just £11 million.
   
But Lord Adonis has already announced that the possible need for a new station in central Birmingham is being examined by Sir David Rowland’s HS2 team. “Nothing has been ruled in and nothing has been ruled out,” he said.
  
“One of the options would be, for the long term, whether an entirely new Birmingham station would be appropriate, and that is one of the things High-speed Two will look at,” he said during a ceremony at London’s Euston station to mark completion of the £9 billion West Coast Route Modernisation project.
  
When he addressed the ICE in Solihull a few days later, on 21 May, Lord Adonis hinted strongly that the decision to modernise the WCML, rather than build a new high-speed line, had been the wrong one.
   
The case for building the original high-speed lines in Japan, in the 1960s, and in France, in the 1970s, had been justified by the need to relieve congested conventional rail routes, he said. Both the original Japanese and French high-speed lines are now themselves congested—and in both countries there are plans for new lines to relieve the original new lines.
   
The case now for building a new high-speed line in Britain from London to the North—with a first stage to the West Midlands—was the need, said Lord Adonis, to relieve the WCML, “the busiest inter-city line in the country and already near saturation even with the recent £9bn upgrade.”
  
He admitted that Britain’s only high-speed line so far—the 68-mile Channel Tunnel Rail Link—“doesn’t actually connect any of our major cities” and had only been built “because the French shamed us into doing it.”
  
But Lord Adonis said he was convinced now of the need for HS2. “The issue for us in Britain is not whether we follow suit, but when and how,” he declared.
  
He said it would be “a bold economic policy for jobs and growth, a bold industrial policy to drive high-tech engineering and innovation, and a bold nation-building policy to promote national unity and help overcome the north-south divide, one of our most debilitating legacies from the past.”
 
•   Earlier, Lord Adonis told the House of Lords that building new high-speed routes could be cheaper than upgrading existing lines and urged cross-party support for HS2, adding: “Of the £8.8bn spent [so far] on the WCML upgrade, more than £500m has gone in compensation payments to train operating companies for not being able to operate services during the long periods of engineering work.”

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Reader Comments:

Views expressed in submitted comments are that of the author, and not necessarily shared by Railnews.

  • John Bramham, Solihull, England

    It's all very well simply repeating the DoT soundbites that seem to support such a venture, but repetition won't necessarily make them true or even credible.
    The crucial issue is the relatively short distances between stations on the projected route; this effectively shortens the period at which the train will be able to travel at its designated top speed, thus reducing the average speed between stops and therefore of the whole journey. A further drawback of the scheme is that to achieve 250MPH requires four times the amount of power than the current crop of IC 125 units, all of which has to be paid for at some stage in the procedure; it would be interesting to learn just how HS2 limited propose to structure the fares on this "high-speed" line, given that train travel is arguably as dear as flying in many cases.
    I can only assume that pricing will be subject to a hefty subsidy, as most train companies already have in place, otherwise the real cost of using the HS2 link would be considerably in excess of current airline fares - so who would pay more to use a train?
    That brings us nicely to the issue of where the DfT is getting its growth projections from - over 5% P.A. for the next twenty years? Saturation point inside seven years? What planet are these people on?
    From where I'm standing, travellers are staying away from railways in their droves rather than suffer what has become a national joke in terms of joined-up services, reliability and timekeeping, and I can't say that I blame them.
    Who wants to shiver on a windswept, cold, wet platform waiting for a service to access this shiny new service that might be anything up to fifty miles away?
    We need to look at the fundamentals of the matter before spending huge wads of cash (that we don't have) on a flagship route that most people couldn't afford to use in the first place.
    This isn't Luddism, it's pure common sense based on a lifetime of applied logic and the unalterable laws of physics; we all know what happened to the 'predict and provide' regime so beloved of the Prescott era in the case of airports, and this is no different.
    Let us first improve what we already have before embarking on a project that would make the London Dome fiasco look like petty cash!
    JB.

  • H. T. Harvey, Birmingham, UK

    David Oleesy is talking through his hat
    High Speed rail is vital for the future of the railways and by releasing capacity on conventional lines will provifde the best means of meeting future rail demand.

    One of the real 'benefits' of HS2 would be that it would get the movers and shakers using the railways they would then be pressing for rail improvment and not airports and motorways.

  • Alan Marshall, Railnews, kenilworth, England

    David Oleesky is expressing some myths about high-speed.

    Professor Rod Smith, of Imperial College, tried to put the likely cost of a new north-south line in some context at a conference in Birmingham last year. It could be £30 billion over 10 or 15 years — which might seem a hell of a lot but the NHS spends that every three months, he said.

    Nor does high-speed rail require long distances to be successful, as Lord Adonis demonstrated in his lecture in Solihull. He said in Japan “distances between the major cities on the Shinkansen are not greatly different to major inter-conurbation distances in Britain. The view that high-speed rail only succeeds over longer distances is an incorrect generalisation from France. Tokyo to Nagoya is a little further than London to Manchester; Tokyo to Osaka is less than London to Glasgow and Edinburgh.”

    Lord Adonis also pointed out that in Germany “the greatest success has been the 110 mile Frankfurt to Cologne line, with a journey time of just over an hour. This includes the development of Frankfurt airport as a new high-speed hub on the line, which has had the effect of virtually eliminating flights between Frankfurt and Cologne. Some 16% of all Frankfurt airport passengers now come to and from the airport by ICE from destinations across Germany. This experience needs to be studied carefully as High Speed Two assesses options for serving Heathrow.”

    At another presentation I attended recently, Professor Andrew McNaughton, the chief engineer of the High Speed Two company, drew attention to the Paris-Lille-Brussells corridor where introduction of Thalys high-speed trains has resulted in more than a doubling of passenger numbers, complete elimination of competing air services, and a transfer of some road users to rail. He said Paris-Brussells had many similarities to the London-West Midlands-North West corridor.

    Lord Adonis also explained that High Speed Two is concentrating first on the capacity requirements of Britain’s principal inter-urban corridor—London to the West Midlands—“the busiest inter-city line in the country and already near saturation even with the recent £9bn upgrade. It is looking then at options for extending a line beyond to the other major conurbations of the north-west, west Yorkshire, the north-east and central Scotland.”

    Getting the planning right and gauging future demand will be crucial. “Guillaume Pepy, boss of SNCF, when he was standing next to me at a recent rail conference in London,” explained Lord Adonis, “said that one of the biggest mistakes of French high-speed planning was not to build the Paris-Lyon line as a four track railway from the outset because – like Tokyo to Osaka – it is now nearing saturation point and planning is underway for a second line between the two conurbations.”

    Reduced frequencies at Cheshire stations have probably had much to do with the need to share the tracks between fast and stopping trains. Diversion of long-distance services to a new high-speed line will free up capacity for more regional and commuter services — and more stops.

    As for Liverpool-Manchester electrification, I understand the route via Earlstown is high on the list of many in-fill schemes now being examined by the Department for Transport and Network Rail.













  • David Oleesky, Macclesfield

    HS2 is an unaffordable white elephant. High Speed Rail is beneficial in other countries (mainland Europe, Japan) because distances between major cities are much greater and land is more easily available on which to build them. All the major cities of the North of England are already less than 2.5 hours by fast rail service from London (if one can afford the exorbitant fares).

    What limited resources that are available for rail development should be spent on enhancing regional and inter-regional links at a fraction of the cost of HS2. There has been minimal investment in main-line railway infrastructure in North-West England for over 25 years; the last extension of the standard 25kV electrification in this region was to Hazel Grove in 1981 (and is now effectively out of use due to train retimetabling!). The frequency of services calling at many stations in Cheshire (e.g. Macclesfield) has been significantly decreased in the last 5 years. The train service between Manchester and Liverpool is slower and no more frequent than in 1910 - why can't this route be electrified?

  • Paul Davis, Birmingham, england

    Lord Adonis is without a doubt an outstanding Transport Minister. He has begun to articulate a consistent vision for transportation that has been sorely needed, as ecological pressures mount. What interests me in his comments is the recognition that modal choice can no longer be a matter for governmental agnosticism. In that case, Lord Adonis does not prioritise economic development to the degree that other advocates of HSLs have done. This is good: railways will be vital for social (re-)integration purposes; and are the only sure transport option as peak oil production passes into history. It would be folly to base the case for high-speed rail mainly on economic development arguments - a clear hostage to fortune!