The big problem with HS2 is that Andrew Adonis and the senior civil servants were technologically illiterate. There is a case for high-speed rail between London, the North of England and Scotland to reduce the need for domestic flights, but that should follow a route like the ECML. The Victorian railway-builders knew what they were doing. The problem with the WCML was a need for more capacity not a need for more speed. The experience of British Rail with the Advanced Passenger Train, the technology from which is used in the Pendolinos, showed that to get the same speed up the WCML as the ECML the train carriages have to tilt.
The Treasury is to blame for this as well; if they had simply accepted the need for increased WCML capacity then the railway could have been built far less expensively. Much of the additional cost has come from building the track bed to make it capable of running 400 kph trains. Meanwhile, a high-speed line to Scotland from Kings Cross/St Pancras would have linked naturally to HS1 and given us the possibility of getting on the train at Edinburgh, Newcastle or York and getting off in Paris or Brussels without having to change trains or go through customs and immigration at St Pancras. That would have been forward-thinking. It is not as if such suggestions were not made at the time, the HSUK web site still shows what could have been.
The big problem with HS2 is that Andrew Adonis and the senior civil servants were technologically illiterate. There is a case for high-speed rail between London, the North of England and Scotland to reduce the need for domestic flights, but that should follow a route like the ECML. The Victorian railway-builders knew what they were doing. The problem with the WCML was a need for more capacity not a need for more speed. The experience of British Rail with the Advanced Passenger Train, the technology from which is used in the Pendolinos, showed that to get the same speed up the WCML as the ECML the train carriages have to tilt.
The Treasury is to blame for this as well; if they had simply accepted the need for increased WCML capacity then the railway could have been built far less expensively. Much of the additional cost has come from building the track bed to make it capable of running 400 kph trains. Meanwhile, a high-speed line to Scotland from Kings Cross/St Pancras would have linked naturally to HS1 and given us the possibility of getting on the train at Edinburgh, Newcastle or York and getting off in Paris or Brussels without having to change trains or go through customs and immigration at St Pancras. That would have been forward-thinking. It is not as if such suggestions were not made at the time, the HSUK web site still shows what could have been.