As I may have mentioned before I enjoy travelling by train and will do so as my preferred choice of getting from A to B if it's a sensible option. I like being able to sit liberated from the necessity of focusing only on tarmac and brake lights for hours at a time. All in all it's much nicer to watch the countryside go by, read a book or magazine, and actually interact with other human beings. It's also nearly always cheaper than driving, unless one is silly enough to believe that petrol is the only per-mile cost of running a car (a surprising number of people, if asked, actually do).
Eurostar's new terminal at St Pancras has been open for over a year now and in that year they have seen an enormous growth in passenger numbers. Part of this is due to better connections with the rest of the UK due to its location, but journey times are also much shorter. Paris is now just 2 hours and 15 minutes from London and this is because St Pancras is connected to High Speed 1 (HS1, formally known as the Channel Tunnel Rail Link). Whilst trains on the most of the UK rail network are limited to 125mph, trains on HS1 operate at up to 186mph. They cover the 67 miles from London to the Channel Tunnel in just 37 minutes!
Given that the UK's existing main rail lines are fast approaching their capacity, and passengers experiencing the current overcrowding on some routes would argue that they're well beyond that already, one could argue that expanding further lines like HS1 across the UK is a bit of a no-brainer. A high speed line has more passenger capacity than a motorway and yet has a fraction of the environmental footprint. It also provides much faster journeys city centre to city centre than cars or short haul flights. Projected benefit-cost ratios for high speed rail projects are high, in the area of 3:1, and these benefits manifest themselves in the economies of the cities they link. Shifting intercity trains onto dedicated track also provides significant increases in capacity for local and freight services on the existing lines.
Unfortunately a couple of years back the government's white paper outlining the future of the railways completely ignored the concept of more high speed rail. As far as I could tell the idea was to double the passenger capacity of the rail network by 2030 without laying a single metre of new track. I'm not sure how that one was supposed to work; perhaps the civil servants at the DfT think the way to work out the capacity of a train is to divide the internal volume of the carriages by the average volume of a person and then implement a 1.1x compression ratio for when the doors are closed.
Thankfully newer policies seems to be closer to the point of sanity. Andrew Adonis, the new transport minister, seems to have taken the task of rolling out high speed rail across the UK to be his personal mission. A company, called High Speed 2, has been created to examine where the next high speed line in the UK should be built; London to Birmingham and Manchester appears to be the most likely choice.
It will be interesting to see how this story develops.
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