The planned HS2 route does not go through St Albans constituency, although two other main line railways do – the West Coast mainline and the Midland mainline. So I am not being nimby in the expressing doubts about the merits of the HS2 proposal.
I don’t think that ultra high speed rail makes much sense in a crowded island. We are not France with its huge empty swathes of agricultural land.
And with increasingly good broadband access on the move, one of the main arguments for HS2 that it helps business people also feels suspect. Many business people appreciate train journey time as a chance to catch up on e-mail and reading, using increasingly sophisticated mobile handheld devices.
This is not to say that we do not need more rail capacity. The Chilterns may not excape unscathed.
But building new parallel conventional railway lines would be cheaper, less brutal to the landscape, and not by-pass intermediate towns with the risk that they are accelerated into relative economic decline.
The money saved on lower construction costs could then be spent on “un-bottlenecking” the existing network, improving loading gauges for high capacity container wagons and even for double-decker commuter trains.
Why do politicians love grands projets so? Look at the obsession with Trident at the expense of providing our armed forces with appropriate conventional kit for the challenges they are facing here and now.
HS2 feels like the domestic equivalent of Trident, a massively expensive white elephant looking for a problem.
The primary benefit of HS2 is not speed but capacity. The West Coast Mainline is full South of Milton Keynes and any ‘unbottlenecking’ of it would involve new tracks being laid alongside it for more than 50 miles in existing built-up areas – including Primrose Hill in St Albans constituency. The last upgrade to the WCML was hugely disruptive for thousands of passengers for many years, cost more than £9 billion, and less than 5 years later it’s overcrowded again. The HS2 route uses a disused rail corridor to exit London, and follows the old Great Central mainline north of Aylesbury, linking these two existing corridors by tunnels through the Chilterns. This is shorter and thus cheaper to construct than parallel tracks on the WCML.
And that’s why I wrote that the Chilterns may not escape unscathed. I fully understand the need for more rail capacity and the proposed corridor may well be best – but make it a conventional rail line which can therefore serve intermediate stops
“I don’t think that ultra high speed rail makes much sense in a crowded island.”
That doesn’t seem to be the case in Japan…
Respected rail commentator Christian Wolmar has now provided a pretty thoroughgoing critique of the business case for HS2 – see http://www.christianwolmar.co.uk/2012/01/hs2-case-rests-on-flimsy-foundations/