Biting the bullet

It’s time to put high-speed trains on the fast track, says UK Transport Minister Lord Andrew Adonis.

“High speed rail is a key driver of modernisation economic, environmental and social”
-Lord Andrew Adonis

Eurostar is a remarkable Anglo-French success story, on a par with Concorde in seizing the public imagination. However, I confidently predict that it will be rather more enduring and transformational in its legacy, and that it will be only the first of many high-speed rail companies to run services in the UK over the years ahead as new services develop on High Speed One and as High Speed Two, and who knows perhaps even High Speed Three and Four, come into operation in the decades ahead.

High Speed Two is only likely to be built at all soon if we forge a strong cross-party consensus behind not only the concept of a north-south high-speed line but also, in due course, behind a definite proposal for the line and its financing. The bane of infrastructure planning in the post war decades was the failure to develop a national consensus behind essential long-term improvements, and I think we all deprecate the consequences.

Obviously there isn’t as yet a definite High Speed Two proposal; the new High Speed Two company has only been in existence for a few months and there will be a lot of devils in a lot of details, not least when it comes to the route and the financing. But once we have a credible and acceptable scheme, I very much hope it will be possible to forge a cross-party consensus behind High Speed Two.

Until recently, most observers in Britain thought that high-speed rail was largely about Japanese bullet trains and French TGVs, and that there were particular reasons to do with the geography, politics and transport planning regime in Japan and France which made them exceptional in respect of their rail technology. Britain’s one engagement so far with high-speed rail – the London to Folkestone line – was conceived as a project largely separate from the existing rail network; hence its very name – the “Channel Tunnel Rail Link” – and the fact that domestic services were only a minor part of the scheme in its original conception.

All that is changing fast. The first backdrop to this is the growing scale and success of high-speed rail not only in France and Japan, but across Europe and Asia. Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, China, Taiwan and Korea have all followed Japan and France in the international high-speed rail revolution. In all, 3600 miles of high-speed line are in operation in Europe, a further 2000 are under construction and 5300 are planned.

As for their impact, high-speed lines have generally led to dramatic increases in rail traffic. As, in Europe, successive lines develop into national and cross-border networks, the network effects become larger still. In all these countries, high-speed rail is not just about faster trains. It is also about much higher capacity rail systems, designed to cope more effectively with the full range of demands on the network – commuter and freight services as well as inter-city services – and to be inter-operable with those of neighbouring countries. It is also about greener transport and carbon reduction, and getting people out of cars and planes. It is also about economic regeneration and better social integration. In Europe, it is also about trans-European networks and the creation of a more integrated and prosperous European market.

In short, country by country, high speed rail is – or is becoming – a key driver of modernisation – economic, environmental and social; it is not simply a better, faster means of transport. The French Prime Minister, Francois Fillon, recently described the French TGV as one of the two infrastructural transformations of modern France; the other being energy independence through the French nuclear programme.

This international experience is having a major impact on my thinking and that of the Government. In my view it is no longer a defensible position to oppose high-speed rail on the grounds of English exceptionalism. I saw somewhere recently the argument that we have less to gain from high-speed rail because our cities our closer together than those in France. This is frankly comical. We need to engage systematically with the experience of countries making a success of high-speed rail and learn from it, which is what we are currently seeking to do.

So too are other non-high speed rail countries, notably Canada and the United States, where the transport debate is shifting high-speed in the same direction. On the day of President Obama’s election last November, Governor Schwarzenegger won a ballot proposition for a bond to pay the first US$10bn needed for a San Francisco to Los Angeles high-speed line. President Obama’s fiscal stimulus package included the first federal funding in the US for high speed rail; when I was in Paris recently I found myself hot on the heels of the mayors of both San Francisco and Montreal who had been receiving similar presentations from SNCF about the French experience. Under the headline “By ignoring rail options, US is on the wrong track”, a commentator in the New York Times recently wrote:

“The truth is that when it comes to rail transport … Americans haven’t made much palpable improvement, at least not compared with our friends and competitors in Europe and Asia. It is as though we got fixed in amber someplace between the 1920s and the 1960s with our big cars, our slow trains and our crowded, legroom-challenged skies. And while the rest of the world forges ahead with new and better ways of moving people from place to place – namely on super-fast trains – we are waiting in the tunnel for the train ahead to cross.”

That is the changing view from Washington. In Britain we are in a better place, both in not getting stuck in tunnels – our longest tunnel, the Channel Tunnel, accounting for nearly a third of our 100 miles of genuinely high-speed line – and also in our upgrading of the railways, which have undergone a renaissance in terms both of usage and investment. This rail renaissance is the second backdrop to this discussion; it is a crucial part of the capacity case for high-speed rail, and it ought to give us confidence that we can progress effectively to the next major phase of railway development.

Rail passenger and freight volumes have grown at a remarkable rate over the past decade. Passenger numbers are more than 50 percent higher. There were 1.2 billion passenger journeys in 2007, higher than at any time since 1946. Freight traffic is up by 40 per cent in the past decade. The number of services, and service quality, have also improved steadily.

Across the network as a whole, the number of train services increased in the December timetable change alone by more than five percent to 104,500 a week – the highest on the network since before Beeching. This includes a 9.8 percent increase in Sunday services, and a 6.5 percent increase on Saturdays, as we seek to offer a reliable seven-day-a-week railway in place of the patchy weekend timetables of the past.

As for network modernisation and new lines, the £16 billion Crossrail project will take 24 trains an hour through central London on a line which connects Heathrow and the west of the capital, through the business and commercial heart of the City, into Docklands and to Essex beyond. Going north-south through London, the Thameslink upgrade will enable up to 24 trains an hour to run from Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and the north of London through central London to Brighton and other destinations in the south. These are both transformational projects which will improve radically the network at its most congested and economically vital heart. We are also pioneering the next generation of inter-city trains on the existing network, which will take over from the ageing diesel inter-city 125 fleet and provide greater express capacity on the electrified network, while at the same time we are analysing plans for further inter-city electrification.

This brings me to the successful completion of High Speed One, as we now call the Channel Tunnel Rail Link in a symbolic change of name. I said earlier that in original conception HS1 was essentially a project – a visionary project – to get from London to Paris in just over two hours. Yet more prosaically, it also became a congestion relief and service upgrading project for trains from East Kent to London, and this aspect loomed steadily larger as the financing of the international services became increasingly problematic. HS1 would offer an opportunity to tackle the acute shortage of capacity on the Kent commuter lines into London, also opening up key network bottlenecks such as London Bridge, and allowing for other commuter service expansion projects such as the north-south Thameslink line through central London.

This domestic capacity enhancement dimension of the HS1 project became particularly attractive because of the very poor rail infrastructure bequeathed by the unproductive cut-throat Victorian competition between the South Eastern and the London, Chatham and Dover railway companies, which left East Kent with one of one of the worst built railway networks in the country.

As it turns out, the second fiddle on HS1 looks set to replace the lead violin. Traffic on the 140 mph Javelin trains from St Pancras, via High Speed One and then onto the Chatham, Ashford, Canterbury and Folkestone lines, will be significantly greater than the international Eurostar business. With the best standard journey times from London to Ashford cut from 60 minutes to 37, to Folkestone from 79 minutes to 63, and to Canterbury from 87 minutes to 62, Southeastern plans from this autumn to run up to eight commuter trains an hour to and from St Pancras in the peak.

This raises two points of considerable significance to the development of High Speed Two. First, similar capacity pressures to East Kent, requiring network solutions, apply – or will apply as traffic increases – in respect of other strategic rail corridors. The government’s High Speed Two document highlights the rail corridor from London to the West Midlands. But I am also struck by the limitations imposed by poor network conditions elsewhere in terms for example of extraordinarily slow journey times between major conurbations. Consider Manchester, Bradford and Leeds, three of the biggest population and business centres in the country. Manchester and Leeds are separated by only 43 Trans-Pennine rail miles, but the rail journey time is 55 minutes – an average speed as slow as London to Canterbury, which is quite an achievement.

My second reflection is that, although there is a high price involved in building high-speed lines, there is also a high price involved in not building them where additional rail capacity is required anyway. This high price is measured not only in lost economic and social benefit but also in the direct cost of upgrading existing congested rail lines, which is very large indeed.

This second lesson is now much more apparent to us than it was before HS1 because we now have the direct experience of the ten year plus project to upgrade the West Coast Main Line (WCML), just painfully completed. This upgrade was essential to achieve many of the objectives sought in the TGV programme: additional rail capacity on a principal inter-city route, enabling more frequent and much faster and more reliable trains. To provide this on the WCML – Britain’s principal inter-city rail artery, which also has heavy commuter and goods traffic – an essentially patch-and-mend approach was adopted, to secure a transformation in capacity and service quality for much less than the cost of building an entirely new line. Many of these benefits have indeed been secured: thrice hourly trains now run from London to Birmingham and Manchester with journey times faster than ever before. Passengers have never had a better service.

However, it has not been an easy journey. The original mid-1990s spec for the WCML project was for a £4bn upgrade to provide not only greater capacity but also 140 mph running and state-of-the-art signalling as on High Speed One. Ten years later? The cost turned out at £8.8bn for what in the jargon is called a “de-scoped” project for 125 mph running not 140 mph, with the new signalling postponed and the capacity enhancement very much less than would have been achieved by a new line. Of the £8.8bn spent 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, and that does begin to price the true cost of the disruption to passengers in services cancelled or diverted year after year.

For the future, we need to assess the relative merits, including disruption saved, of building new lines rather than highly disruptive and expensive major upgrades of existing lines. The government projection is for a doubling of passenger demand by 2030. How far, on congested lines, growth is met by incremental upgrades, and how far by new lines, is a critical issue which will determine the development of new commuter as well as high-speed lines. If the cost of disruption is fully taken into account, I suspect it is by no means clear that ostensibly lower priced upgrades are always better value than new lines including new high-speed lines.

These, then, are the three key backdrops to our conference today – the increasingly positive international experience of high-speed rail, the rail renaissance here in the UK, and the successful completion of HS1 which ought to give us confidence that we can do the same again with HS2.

Let me end by saying how strongly I approve of the editorial in the recent issue of Transport Times which ends with these words: “There will be many siren voices telling us not to bother about planning for the long term when the short term crisis is so grave. They are wrong! Short-termism is the British transport disease.” I agree with every word. Let long-termism be our theme for the future, and High Speed Two its driving force.

This article is based on a speech given at the 2009 Transport Times conference.

The next phase
High Speed One works as well as any other high speed line in the world. Average infrastructure delay is about six seconds per train, which is performance on a par with Japanese bullet trains. It is simply not the case that this country can’t manage world class infrastructure to world class standards. HS1 was also ultimately built to time and within budget, with substantial private funding – although both the time and the budget were adjusted upwards, and the effective share of private finance downwards, several times before the final restructuring of London and Continental Railways in 2002. The line is also one of the – if not the – most expensive high-speed railway built in the world per mile, only partly because of the long tunnel on the approach to London. So, having not built a single major overground railway in the entire 20th century, we have now done it successfully in the 21st century, and we are well placed to do it a second time, but we must demand greater efficiency and cost control as our engineers and project managers master the art.

It is in that spirit that we have asked High Speed Two to propose a high-speed plan to us by the end of the year, starting with a firm route proposition – and associated economic and environmental assessments – for a line from London to the West Midlands, with advice also on the possibilities for extension beyond the West Midlands in terms of services to in particular to the great conurbations of the north-west, West Yorkshire, the north-east and central Scotland. We intend to consider the report intensively immediately after its receipt, and to consult the other political parties upon it, with a view to indicating a definite way forward in the early part of 2010.