Fast trains in a tiny country?

Monday blog

Today I’m going to rewrite a blog I wrote 6 years ago about the utter stupidity of building HS2 in a tiny country like Britain:

Ask the wrong questions – you get the wrong answer

Let me bore you with why I think the idiots in Westminster have blundered into yet another horrifically expensive disaster.

There are two questions our politicians should have asked when considering building the catastrophically expensive and unsuitable HS2:

Question 1: Do we need more rail capacity between the South and North of England?

The answer is probably yes, although new communication options may mean that in the 20 to 30 years it takes to build the HS2 disaster, people will be doing less physical travelling and more on-line communication. But let’s for a moment accept that there is a need for more rail capacity from South to North. Then there’s a second question:

Question 2: Does that train line need to be ‘high speed’?

Now let me explain why it is totally ludicrous to build a high-speed train in a tiny country like England

I’ll make this part of my blog today simple so, were any politicians to be reading it, even they might understand.

France is a big country – about 640,000 km2. The UK is a small country – about 242,000 km2. England is an even smaller country – 130,000 km2. France has an extensive high-speed rail network – the TGV. It makes sense to have high-speed trains in a large country. It doesn’t make sense to have high-speed trains in a small country.

Now let’s go a bit deeper. The French train route from Paris to Lyon to Marseilles can probably be seen as comparable to the UK train route from London to Birmingham to Manchester in terms of how it connects major cities. But the differences in distances are huge. Paris to Lyon is 292 miles, whereas London to Birmingham is only 128 miles. And Lyon to Marseilles is 488 miles, whereas Birmingham to Manchester is just 86 miles. In fact, the distance from Birmingham to Manchester is so short that the train would probably have to slow down as soon as it reached its ‘high speed’:

The much greater distances in France justify a high-speed rail network. But squandering over £100bn on cutting just a few minutes off the train time from London to Birmingham and then even fewer minutes off the train journey from Birmingham to Manchester is utterly ludicrous.

What is the best and most economical way of delivering that extra capacity?

As we had no need for a new ‘high speed’ (199 mph) line, the increase in capacity could have been delivered at much lower cost. For example, modernising signalling on the existing line might allow more trains to run on the existing track. Alternatively, building a traditional line along the same route as the current train line would have been a much cheaper option. HS2 will be much more expensive than a new traditional line because high-speed lines have totally different engineering requirements such as longer straight sections and much higher performance requirements. Moreover, high-speed trains are much more expensive than traditional Intercity 125s.

But our worthless politicians didn’t ask these two simple questions. Our politicians got the two questions mixed up together and so got the wrong answer.

There are many better things the Government could do with £100bn+ than the ridiculously unnecessary HS2 (vanity?) project. They could, for example, have just built another conventional (125 mph) line and maybe saved £40bn or more.

But that would have been sensible and therefore not something our dumb-arse stupid politicians would have considered.