New 'battle for north' would be on right track

Published on Sunday 7 June 2009 21:41

ON 2 June, 1888, a train thundered out of Euston station at 10am and arrived in Edinburgh just under nine hours later. The following month, rival east coast railway companies fought back, dispatching a train from King's Cross which reached Edinburgh 23 minutes faster. The legendary "battle for the north" had begun.

A joint railway conference two months later finally halted hostilities. Journey times from London to Edinburgh were set at seven and three-quarters hours on the east coast, and eight on the west. By 1979, British Rail had set a new record of 3 hours 52 minutes between Euston and Glasgow with its revolutionary Advanced Passenger Train, a record which still stands.

Today, passengers can reach Edinburgh from King's Cross in 3 hours 59 minutes. Normal journey times, however, average 4 hours 30 minutes. That's still not bad; I regularly do the journey and it often beats flight times if you factor in inevitable delays and transit to and from airports. Yet it could be even quicker: high-speed trains would cut journey times to around 2 hours and 15 minutes.

Why then have neither the UK nor Scottish governments, despite lots of positive noises, bitten the bullet by authorising high-speed lines from London to Glasgow and Edinburgh? The answers are depressingly predictable: negotiating the British countryside poses challenges, while the cost of building additional lines and supplying new rolling stock would be prohibitively expensive.

Add to that the inability of the public sector to cope with major infrastructure projects and the crippling short-term mindset of politicians, whether in government or opposition, and it adds up to infuriating inactivity. In countries like Spain, meanwhile, passengers can travel from Madrid to Barcelona – a journey roughly equivalent to London-Edinburgh – in just two hours.

While the Spanish government got on and built it, a UK Treasury-commissioned study chaired by Rod Eddington, ex-head of British Airways, poured cold water on the idea when it reported in December 2006. To be fair, the prevailing Department for Transport stance does appear to be making progress, albeit at slow speed; as if the wrong kind of leaves were on the track.

Its new Secretary of State, the rail enthusiast Lord Adonis, recently set up High Speed 2 (HS2) to examine the case for high-speed services to Scotland, while, as minister of state he travelled the UK rail network (alone, to the chagrin of civil servants) spreading goodwill and oozing good intentions. The government's focus, however, remains on routes where existing capacity is under the greatest pressure: i.e. not the east or west coast main lines.

This is almost unforgivably short-sighted, particularly during an economic recession. An independent study commissioned by Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT) found that high-speed lines could bring an additional 1 billion to the Scottish economy. In fact, so compelling is the case for high-speed rail that the report urges Scotland to press on with an Edinburgh-Glasgow high-speed link regardless of what happens in London.

Another rail enthusiast, the Scottish transport minister Stewart Stevenson, has tried to match Lord Adonis's railway vision, and is the keynote speaker at "High Speed Rail – the Scottish opportunity", a conference taking place in Edinburgh today. But with the estimated cost at least 4bn, he could be forgiven for being reticent.

The dilemma is obvious: railway lines cost lots of money without any obvious electoral payback. Yet they also bring immeasurable benefits in terms of the environment and economic regeneration. In London, High Speed 1 (HS1, better known as the Eurostar line) has generated 10bn worth of investment at King's Cross, Stratford and Ebbsfleet, significantly more than anticipated.

HS1 has also cut air travel between London and the Continent. With total journey times spent on internal air travel between London and southern Scotland often slow and uncomfortable, surely the same would become true north of the Border? There's also an opportunity to forge a valuable legacy – Stewart Stevenson could long be remembered as the man who brought high-speed rail to Scotland.

SPT propose that construction of any London-Scotland link should begin simultaneously in both and meet in the middle, a bit like the Channel Tunnel. This option is hopefully being chewed over by the Scottish Parliament's transport, infrastructure and climate change committee, which began an inquiry into the benefits of high-speed rail services earlier last year.

But it's important for those in control, much like the proposed trains, to move quickly. Although HS2 is due to report back to the UK government by the end of this year, the Conservatives – increasingly likely to be in government by this time next year – don't envisage high-speed lines, if they're built at all, extending beyond Birmingham.

"It would be hard to design a nation better suited to modern rail travel than Britain," writes Matthew Engel in his new lament for the railways, Eleven Minutes Late, yet there is "no prospect of it happening in anything other than an unimaginably distant future". It is up to the Scottish and UK governments to ensure that Engel is proved wrong; pursuing a renewed "battle for the north" would be a good start.