Do We Really Need a High Speed Rail Link?

The UK Government announced this week that they intend to proceed with the proposed high speed rail link (HS2) from London to Birmingham.

News of the decision has generated a lot of column inches on both sides of the debate. Business leaders appear to be keen for the scheme to proceed, and it would seem that lots of new jobs will be created. You'd think it'd be universally well received, wouldn't you?

Er, no. Predictably enough, there has been a barrage of criticism of the proposed scheme. If that wasn't surprising, then neither was some of the rhetoric employed by the scheme's proponents against their opponents. If you are not in favour of the proposal, then you can expect to be labelled as one or more of "Luddite", "anti-business" or even "NIMBY" (Not In My Back Yard).

I really enjoy travelling by rail. I drive enough miles in a year that I appreciate it when every now and then, my travelling schedule overlaps the rail network and there's actually a train service to where I need to go. Occasionally, there's even a train going where I need to go, when I need to go, and at a reasonable price. On these rare instances, travelling by train becomes a no-brainer. It is a pleasant change to be able to sleep, read, look out of the window or indeed anything else I want to do. No traffic jams, no worrying about the price of fuel, no navigation. Bliss; or it would be if this wasn't an idealised view of rail travel.

Let's face it, UK rail travel is rarely that romantically perfect. For a start, it's usually prohibitively expensive. A few years ago now, the BBC motoring programme Top Gear demonstrated that it was possible to buy a cheap car, drive from London to Manchester and then scrap the car, all for less than it cost to undertake the same journey by rail. Thousands of people commute to work each day using season tickets that cost £1000s per year, and they seem to increase in cost above inflation every year. 

For my purposes, the problem is that there happens to be not much in the way of train service between where I live, and where I visit. I can get to London from Hull easily enough, and you can reach a lot of destinations via York. However the place I visit most frequently, Bedford, is difficult to get to. The problems are threefold: often there simply is no viable service to and from where I want to go and then come back; the cost is enormous; and by the time I've negotiated the train changes necessary, the whole thing takes a lot longer than it would by car.

If I could find a service for that route which took a similar amount of time as driving (or less), and the cost was similar (or less) than driving it, then I would pick the train any time. However the practicalities for me simply don't stack up and the only reasonable option for me on most of my journeys are to drive. I could perhaps reduce the cost of the journeys by buying season tickets or rail cards, I know. However you can only buy season tickets for an individual train company, not for use anywhere on the network. So if I were to leave, say Hull, on train company A and arrive at Bedford on train company B, then my season ticket is only valid for part of that journey. Bizarrely, I could get a "Friends and Family" railcard, but whilst that can be used anywhere on the network, it's only valid if I've got the kids with me. Further pain is added when we consider the "on-peak", "off peak", and "anytime" tickets.

Train companies further muddy the waters by having a different price for the same ticket depending on how and when you buy it. Buying your ticket online from home, 20 minutes before you leave for the station can be vastly cheaper than buying the same ticket half an hour later at the station. Why?

Yet, the great advantage of my car is that it costs me roughly the same to travel at 8am as it does at 2am. It costs roughly the same to have one person in the car as it does to have four, and that's important if you're travelling with family.

It boils down to this simple equation: it takes too long and it costs to much for me to use the train except, as I said earlier, in those rare cases where there's a reasonably direct service.

And I haven't even mentioned reliability. My car is 8 years old and has now covered over 130 000 miles, yet the only time it's broken down was when my wife put petrol in it instead of diesel, and you can't really blame the car for that. Other than that it has a spotless record of reliability, in all winds and weathers, even deep snow. The same is not true on the trains. At any given time, on any given journey, you are liable to be delayed severely by any or all of the following; signal failure, track maintenance, lack of availability of rolling stock, strikes, staff shortages, "wrong type of snow", leaves on the line, all manner of petty and avoidable issues which are almost impossible to solve because of the structure of the railway system, where one company owns the tracks and several different companies own all the trains. This arrangement ranks as one of the most hare-brained schemes ever thought up. As the railways evolved, there were four different UK rail companies, some even used different gauges of track. Early in the 20th century, these companies were amalgamated into one overall company to manage the lot. It wasn't an overwhelming success, granted, and the cuts recommended by Beeching in the 1960s was an attempt to streamline the "business". This might have been the heart of the problem, seeing it as a business rather than a service.

In the 1990s the then Government decided to break it all up again, and we now have the sorry mess of franchised train companies and RailTrack or NetworkRail or whatever they're called these days. All I know is that we now have a continuous Mexican stand-off, with all the companies pointing the finger at each other for the system's failures.

At one point, the train services were claiming that "over 80%" of services ran on time. Well done, take a bow. 80% is a lot, isn't it, certainly a lot more than half. As Jeremy Clarkson once put it though, that's like saying that you would tolerate a car that refused to start in the morning once every two weeks.

Why should HS2 be immune to any of the existing failings of the current system? It'll be run by the same witless groups of management, track maintained by the same people, and staffed with people from the same prehistoric RMT union. Who's going to use it? I know that sounds obvious, but who? People in Birmingham and people in London. What about those in between? Surely it'll benefit everyone in between? I don't think so. If it's going to be "high speed" then I'm assuming that the service isn't stopping more than, say once, in between London and Birmingham, let's say in or near Oxford. So the actual numbers of people using it will be small, to be generous.

There's the environmental aspect to consider too. This scar on the countryside is going to be over 70 metres wide, that's similar to the width of Wembley Stadium. No problem, say the planners, we'll stick it all in an enormous tunnel. At a cost of £500m. This was additional tunnelling added to the scheme to overcome objections. "The scheme is cheaper with the tunnel" says the DoT (source). OK then, if that's so, why wasn't the tunnel in the plan from Day 1, and why isn't the whole line underground?

Let's put this in perspective. That extra tunnel is costing £190 000 per yard! £5200 per inch! Whichever way you slice it, that's a very expensive tunnel. In addition one would imagine that the preparatory work required to lay track on the floor of a tunnel was similar to laying track on open ground on the surface. If that's true, how exactly is tunnelling cheaper?

I admit I'm getting cynical in my old age, but someone who is willing to throw an additional £500m at a scheme, in order to grease the wheels of the Government approving it, must stand to make a great deal of money from its adoption. More than £500m too.

And all of this to save a handful of people about half an hour on a journey from London to Birmingham? Gimme a break.

Martin