Yesterday saw the annual model train show in town, the usual mix of geezers in anoraks and kids with periscopes gawping at layouts in a bewildering variety of scales and gauges. The show is put on by the Chiltern Model Railway Society. By coincidence, the Chilterns are currently the centre of ferocious opposition to the Government's plans to spend £32 billion on "HS2", a high-speed rail line initially linking London and Birmingham, and later pushing north to Manchester and Leeds. You have to wonder if the railways now so lovingly recreated by the modellers would ever have been built if today's NIMBYs had been around in Victorian times. Fears that the HS1 line between London and the Channel Tunnel would blight the whole of Kent (aka the "garden of England") have proved to be greatly overstated, but that's unlikely to mollify the well-heeled denizens of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire (now apparently aka "irreplaceable areas of outstanding natural beauty").
However, you don't have to be a resident of Amersham or Great Missenden to question the wisdom of HS2, at least as currently proposed. Even for a railway buff like your humble blogger, there are some bothersome issues:
* If we're going to spend £32 billion on the railways, does HS2 give the best bang for the megabuck? A lot of the claimed benefits seem very airy-fairy, whereas the costs are only too real, and are certain to go way above budget as the project progresses. Would it not be better to spend money on electrifying more of the network? £32 billion would buy an awful lot of catenaries. There are a couple of electrification schemes on the drawing board -- the Great Western line out of Paddington, Manchester to Leeds -- but the UK will trail well behind the rest of Europe in this regard, even when those schemes are completed.
* If, as HS2 proponents claim, the west coast main line will run out of capacity sometime in the next decade, is this the best way to deal with that? Longer trains are one obvious alternative. There's also plenty of spare capacity on the secondary London-Birmingham line (the Chiltern Line out of Marylebone), which could be electrified at a fraction of the cost of HS2 (NIMBYs permitting, of course).
* How sensible is the planned route? Euston, the proposed London terminus for HS2, is already overcrowded. Renovating it to accommodate the new trains would be massively disruptive. The line will not initially serve Heathrow Airport, even though it will run not far to the north of it. And the terminus in Birmingham will be a new station 15 minutes from the city centre; boasting that the London-Brum journey time will be cut to 49 minutes from the current 80 minutes is meaningless if passengers have to schlep out to the new station at the start or end of their journey.
* What about the trains themselves? The HS2 publicity brags about "luxury dining cars", which seems a bit superfluous for a 49 minute trip. More significantly, the trains may well be double-decker, which would be a huge mistake. UK railways have a much smaller loading gauge than those in the rest of Europe, so the regular network can't accommodate double-decker trains. (Ultra anorak-y loading gauge explanation here). Such trains would only be able to run on specially-designed high speed tracks. This would mean that they could not run on at conventional speeds to cities not directly served by the new lines -- cities such as Liverpool, Newcastle, Edinburgh or Glasgow -- a huge drawback. (Anyone who has travelled extensively on the TGV network in France or the ICE trains in Germany will have noticed that they often use conventional tracks, which is only possible because of the bigger loading gauges there).
There's broad, cross-party support for HS2, but you can't help wondering if the politicians are just slavering over the opportunity to get their names on something REALLY BIG, rather than making an informed, value-for-money decision. The Chiltern NIMBYs are going to come in for a lot of abuse in the coming months, but in this case, they may just have a point.
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