Stop HS2 and share the billions across the rail network instead

Reopening Northampton to Bedford would permit through trains from Birmingham to Brighton and connect the central Midlands to three airports – Birmingham, Luton, and Gatwick.


Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Stop HS2 and share the billions across the rail network instead” was written by Letters, for The Guardian on Tuesday 7th June 2016 18.01 UTC

The week before the bill for HS2 was given its successful second reading in the House of Commons in March 2014, I travelled from Euston station to Carlisle at 5.30pm on a Virgin Trains Pendolino. I had an open return and no reserved seat. Half of this publicly subsidised train was given over to first class, which was only 10% full. But even second class had plenty of room, and I had a table to myself to work on.

On another journey out of London 18 months later I travelled on the opening morning of the first new line linking London and a major city since the Victorian era, between Marylebone and Oxford Parkway. The line involved only a few miles of linking track between existing lines, some new bridges, a new greenfield station, and the relocation of 4,000 crested newts. It cost £320m, and shows what urgently needed smaller sums of money up and down the rail network can and should do to reduce congestion, improve connectivity and the passenger experience, and reduce car use and road congestion.

HS2 is not just a huge white elephant as Simon Jenkins argues in the long read (The wrong track, 7 June). It is the biggest threat to the public and private investment upgrades the rail network urgently needs to increase capacity and reduce overcrowding, and so bring it into the 21st century. Unlike more intelligent but less gargantuan rail improvement projects, HS2 will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions, since it merely competes with an existing underused service. The cheapest and simplest way to increase capacity in future on the northward and westward inter-city routes from London is to get rid of first class, while increasing space and seat size for all customers in new one-class trains, which is one of the most laudable features of HS1.
Professor Michael Northcott
University of Edinburgh

• When, some 18 months ago, a statement was made in the Lords about HS2, I declared an interest in accordance with the customary procedure. I made clear it was a posthumous interest, because by the time it reaches Newcastle, if it ever does, I will long since have been dead and buried. I share Simon Jenkins’ profound scepticism about the project’s cost and viability.
Jeremy Beecham
Labour, House of Lords

• Simon Jenkins is right in every respect. HS2 is a vanity project that needs to be stopped now. The only thing he left out is that if the government sticks to the current proposal to bring HS2 into Euston, quite apart from Euston’s poor connectivity to HS1 and many London destinations, this will involve huge damage – traffic chaos, noise and air pollution, loss of housing and public spaces – that densely populated Camden and Euston will have to endure during the 17 years of planned construction. And the cost of bringing the line into Euston from Old Oak Common, after compensation payments are taken into account, is likely to be well over half of the cost of the rest of the line up to Birmingham.
Tim Lankester
London

• Simon Jenkins passes over perhaps the most curious aspect of the HS2 saga. I read his piece while travelling north from King’s Cross to York. Flat and rural, this is the most obvious place to put a high-speed link to the north – including Scotland. Somehow, the metropolitan elites thought of Birmingham as being in the north, with an extension to Manchester/Leeds added as an afterthought.
Dr Henry Thompson
Harrogate

• Let’s hope politicians thinking of giving the green light to HS2 read Christian Wolmar’s article (In the age of grand rail projects, the past tells us to think small, 6 June) and think again. He is right: the money to be spent on HS2 could be far more effectively spread over numerous small projects, each a fraction of the cost, but collectively delivering far greater overall benefit.

There are two other points he might have made. Firstly, the rail network was slashed by Beeching on the premise that there would always be adequate bus services to compensate. These have been widely axed or drastically reduced, with the result that huge areas of the country now have no practicable public transport at all. Secondly, many towns that were deprived of rail services are now seeing large amounts of new housing unaccompanied by any public transport improvements, and desperately need to be reconnected.

Yes, let’s spend £55bn on the rail network, but look seriously at where it will do the most good.
Christopher Benson
Epsom, Surrey

• It’s not just the branch lines that need reopening. Even more valuable are cross-country lines. Other countries have rail networks; we have a kind of octopus, with its head wedged uncomfortably into the bottom right corner, and tentacles radiating from there. It’s London to here, London to there, London to everywhere – but never here to there. Someone once complained that he wished to go from Norwich to Peterborough, a distance of 65 miles, but could only do it by way of London, making a journey of 180 miles.

Such few cross-country lines as we have are slow and inconvenient. The trans-Pennine has effectively been kicked into the long grass – not even allowed basic electrification. The line from Cambridge to Harwich is single track for part of the way. And the former line from Cambridge to Oxford has been allowed to be built over, and there is much head-scratching over how to replace it. If we must have HS2 (must we?), then how about some complementary fast lines from, say, Birmingham to Bristol and the West Country, to Southampton and to Felixstowe? These would do more to revive midland, and thus northern, economies than a businessman’s luxury special from London to Manchester.
Tim Gossling
Cambridge

• The objective of increasing rail capacity could be solved by two modest reinstatements of lines closed in the 1960s and later. Reopening Northampton to Bedford would permit through trains from Birmingham to Brighton and connect the central Midlands to three airports – Birmingham, Luton, and Gatwick – rather than just the first, and of course connect southern England to Birmingham airport.

And reopening the line from Spalding to March would provide a through route from Liverpool and Manchester via Sheffield, Lincoln and Cambridge to a connection with HS1 at Stratford International. It could also have connections from Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Durham, Darlington and York. The Lincolnshire line is a much underused one and could be upgraded; however, when one reaches Cambridge, doubling to the track south would be required. The project would open up northern England, especially if work began in the north and was not worked out from London as is happening with the Great Western line to Bristol and south Wales.
David Kennett
Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire

• The fundamental problem with HS2, apart from the fact that it fails to deliver on most of its promises, is that the long-term view of this project is one for a high-speed rail line and absolutely nothing else. HS2 Ltd seems more than happy to spend a record-breaking amount of public money to build a high-speed line that currently no one seems to want or believe in, and which will bring chaos and destruction to key parts of London and the Chilterns.

HS2 Ltd has shown no consideration as to how HS2 could actually contribute towards making London, Birmingham or Manchester better cities beyond the railway. In fact it has shown a short-term and reckless disregard for urban planning at every juncture. HS2 Ltd is failing miserably to take a long-term view of London and the other cities it will serve. Euston is desperately in need of redevelopment and should be approached in the same way as King’s Cross, but HS2 Ltd refuses to consider it.

Old Oak Common has to be an urban planner’s dream just waiting to happen. The opportunity to terminate HS2 there and totally change that part of west London could be a massive bonus brought to us by HS2 in the way that HS1 was for Stratford or the extension of the Jubilee line and Docklands Light Railway was for Canary Wharf and the East End. What happened to blue-sky thinking? HS2 has refused to engage with the local communities along the line, and we will all be worse off for having been ignored by them.
William Miller
London

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