Railway to Somewhere Thursday, Feb 14 2013
Is £32bn enough to build a good railway?
We will have to hope so as that is the proposed budget for HS2, a new railway due to open in about 2033. The long-awaited route was announced at the end of January 2013, raising a rather inevitable raft of concerns, including some about historical events and some that are more business-based.
There have been a variety of views expressed – generally either in favour of or against HS2. Those in favour talk about increasing capacity and that trains will be faster, and presumably safer. Opponents say it is not cost effective, that the evidence does not really support the reasoning proposed and that there are bigger priorities elsewhere, particularly regional railways in the north of England. There is little doubt that such regional railways would undoubtedly join up that region better than the current system by increasing capacity and lowering journey times.
Increasing capacity on railways means, of course, improving infrastructure such that more people can travel between stations in a day. I say stations, rather than cities or places, because that is what they seem to be called, inexplicably—either that or “station stops”. It sounds like the rhetoric of an ignoramus or the result of a botched re-branding, but perhaps there is another possibility. Perhaps they are just trying to be honest.
In the 19th century, it was often quite difficult for railway companies to cite stations and lines where they wanted them. Just look at maps of places like Cambridge or Loughborough: the railway stations are barely in the place of the name they bear. This sounds preposterous enough on its own, but the worst thing is that despite the century-and-a-half there has been to improve the situation, the railway station in Cambridge is still not near big roads, the airport, the centre of town or where most people live. The same is true of a relatively new station ambitiously named “East Midlands Airport Parkway”. Easily the nearest thing to that is a power station. The station is five miles from the East Midlands airport. No buses are scheduled to stop at the station, and you have to ring for a cab from the one firm advertised at the station; the hardware of a taxi rank is barely evident. None of this poor planning and execution is helpful for passenger capacity, and thus usefulness of railway infrastructure, on anyone’s terms. The transport minister in the Lords under the last Labour government summed this up from a different perspective when he said about the HS2 public consultation that “everyone wants the stations but nobody wants the line”. We start to see why building new railways is difficult.
These points imply a history of a problem that would surely be put at the top of the list of building new railways: how to avoid compromising on the quality of the railway so the thing is useful once it is finished. Usefulness is clearly the clear over-riding concern: no one embarks on major railway-building projects because they are bored. Further, there is no doubt that a good railway will pay for itself on that basis alone, as Brunel’s railways have done, if the effort can be made in the first place.
It was therefore with bated breath that I awaited the proposed route of HS2. They might finally be about to do something really good with this big project, I supposed that they might be about to join up some big places and allow branch lines and other building projects to develop after that. I wondered if they might avoid the need for the closures of railways in the 1960s and 70s under Beeching, by ensuring that what was being proposed was useful in the long term. The route published for HS2 was therefore rather disappointing. Birmingham, and important hub in the West Midlands, appears to be a spur from the main line, rather than any kind of interchange. It is therefore awkward to connect the northern stations with those in either the East or West Midlands by train. A station is being built at a place called Toton, with the rather weak suggestion that this will serve “Both Nottingham and Derby”. It is a good trick if you can do it, currently 20 minutes is a quick journey time by train between those two cities.
The truth is that this sort of thing represents a nasty compromise. Making transport plans seem big and shiny will only become disappointingly empty if they are not backed up by joining up the planned infrastructure with other transport means and destinations in a coherent manner. Put another way, there is no point in cutting journey times for distances of 150 miles by 45 minutes, if the 10 miles from the station to the final destination is not only required but then takes an hour because that station is in the arse end of nowhere on a line that is in the wrong place.
So, there is at least one thing that is wrong with HS2 (Birmingham spur) and another (Toton interchange) that is, at best, complicated. On this basis, it seems likely that HS2 needs a re-think. Despite these and other prescient concerns, it is quite difficult to be actively against HS2. Are we are in a position to complain about funding of railway projects, especially when we need to invest in hardware to improve the economy? The sad truth is that we will probably never be in a position to complain, even though much of the planning is dubious and does not fit with the priorities of what will be useful or workable. This is why mainline stations get refurbished at a cost of millions, doubtless making their use marginally easier for a tiny number of passengers, but while several other places remain without a station at all. That said, a refurbishment or a line that nearly goes somewhere useful is something, and something is more than nothing.
