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Posts tagged Rail transport
High-speed rail: All aboard! | Editorial
Mar 12th
There are two big decisions about high-speed rail. First, is it needed in Britain? And second, if it is, where should it go?
In many regards, yesterday was just another bad day for British transport. Rail maintenance workers decided to strike. Signallers may join them and shut the network over Easter. British Airways remained at loggerheads with its employees. The London tube network was digesting the news that it now has a £460m shortfall in its modernisation programme. Everyone expects cuts in transport spending, if not in the next budget then the one after that.
Faced with all this, only a visionary or a fool would stand up in parliament and announce plans for a £30bn, 330-mile, 225mph rail line, whose construction would not even begin until 2017, and whose completion will take much more than a decade. Yet that is what Andrew Adonis, the transport minister, did yesterday, and he deserves much congratulation for it. The case for high-speed rail is strong, but not so overwhelming that the line will be built without committed people arguing that it should happen, as Lord Adonis has done late in this Labour government and someone else will have to do if there is a Tory one. A thousand small cares could still knock the project off course, as well as one big one – paying for it, which is a subject all parties skirted around yesterday. But the principle of a new line has been established, and the government has set out detailed plans for its construction. This train, as British Rail used to boast, is getting there.
There are two big decisions about high-speed rail. First, is it needed in Britain? And second, if it is, where should it go? The answer to the first question produces remarkable consensus. High-speed rail is not just about travelling faster, and not just about links to London. It will join cities reliably and with much greater capacity than ever before, soaking up growth in transport demand while freeing up space on the existing network for commuters and freight. It is the alternative to more roads and planes, but it will also allow travel on routes badly served by existing transport lines – such as Leeds to Birmingham, or Nottingham to Scotland. That is why cities, political parties, environmental groups, unions and business are all in favour.
The subsequent question, about the route, is less easy to answer. Lord Adonis has been desperate to built a pre-election consensus around his particular plans, and the Conservative party, which backed high-speed rail before Labour, has been just as desperate to avoid joining it. This is a pity, since the detailed route published yesterday by the HS2 company makes sense, if the trains are to head west from London towards Heathrow before turning to the north. They include city centre terminals, proper interchange with the new Crossrail scheme and a reasonable compromise between environmental intrusion in the Chilterns and a direct line to the north. The Conservatives want a route from London that would come nearer Heathrow, which sounds attractive but would also be slower and more expensive to build. Nor – since the trains would run only near the airport, not under it – would it allow seamless travel to the air terminals. Under the HS2 scheme announced yesterday there will be easy connection to a 10-minute Crossrail shuttle to Heathrow; the Tory alternative is worse.
The next step will be to consult on the route, and changes will be made, although they cannot be large without simply directing the consequences of construction into someone else’s backyard. The route cannot be put underground without greatly adding to the cost. It will be narrower, less polluting and less noisy than the M40 and A413 roads which already cut through Buckinghamshire, but to the people most affected by the line that will not be much compensation. Nonetheless, the government must introduce a hybrid parliamentary bill and begin the debate on its financing. This line will make Britain a better place. No one will regret building it when it is open. The hard part will be getting from here to there.
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Guardian Daily podcast: Transport revolution as 250mph trains to run between London and Birmingham
Mar 12th
Transport secretary Lord Adonis has published £30bn plans for a 250mph rail link between London and Birmingham. The proposals, which would revolutionise Britain’s rail network, are subject to parliamentary approval and public consultation. Even after that, work won’t begin on the route until 2017, with the first stage expected to take 10 years to complete. After that, the government intends to extend the high speed rail network to northern England and Scotland.
Peter Walker hears the views of the people of Wendover in the Chilterns, an area of outstanding natural beauty which the new rail route would pass through.
Transport historian Christian Wolmar says the key question is whether the high speed rail plans would increase capacity.
Guardian columnist Julian Glover says the plan will bring economic benefits to the whole country, while Liberal Democrat transport spokesman Norman Baker believes the consultation process will allow members of the public to be heard, and for their views to be given due consideration.
Days of building intercity roads are over, says transport secretary Andrew Adonis, as government announces network of 250mph trains to be completed by 2026
Mar 11th
£30bn high-speed rail plan signals end of the road for motorways
The government signalled the end of intercity motorway building today as it announced plans for a £30bn high-speed rail network, with the first phase between London and Birmingham opening in 2026.
Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, said the motorway network had reached its limit and the burden of ferrying millions more people between cities would instead be taken by fleets of trains travelling at up to 250mph. Work on the first phase linking the capital and England’s second city could begin in 2017 after a formal public consultation, Adonis said.
Having pledged to eliminate demand for domestic air travel with ultra-fast trains, the transport secretary took on motorways in a 152-page “command paper”. He said: “I do not envisage building another generation of intercity motorways.”
The last new motorway, the M40, opened in 1991 and the government’s strategy now is to widen the UK’s major road arteries or to make hard shoulders into new lanes. The news was attacked by a motoring thinktank, which warned the government not to sideline roads when they account for more than nine out of 10 UK passenger journeys, against 7% for rail. “It is not enough to deal with growing demand,” said Professor Stephen Glaister, director of the RAC Foundation. “What is the government going to do instead? If it does nothing, inter-urban congestion will just get worse.”
Under the high-speed rail alternative, London and Birmingham will be linked by a route carrying 18 trains an hour in each direction, with every one carrying up to 1,100 passengers. Journeys will be slashed from 84 minutes to 49 on a line originating at London’s Euston. At Old Oak Common in west London an interchange with the Crossrail service, due to be completed in 2017, will take passengers to Heathrow.
Controversially, the line will then run through the Chiltern hills in Buckinghamshire, past picturesque villages such as Wendover, partly following the A413 road and the Chiltern rail line before joining the track-bed of the former Great Central Railway. Before entering central Birmingham there will be a stop near its airport, which will be 31 minutes from Old Oak Common. There will be a new terminal at Curzon Street in Birmingham centre but the main body of the line will sweep through the Trent valley to join existing tracks north of Lichfield, where journeys will continue to Manchester and Scotland at conventional speeds.
Adonis said it would lead to the demolition of just 440 houses, against 700 for the planned third runway at Heathrow.
The transport secretary also unveiled the blueprint for a wider network, with a Y-shaped route splitting off from Birmingham to go westwards to Manchester and eastwards to Sheffield and Leeds. Journey times between London and Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield would come down from about two hours 10 minutes to 75 minutes. However, the document makes no formal provision for a direct route to Scotland and Newcastle and time savings from London to Scotland’s major cities are less impressive, falling from four-and-a-half hours to three-and-a-half hours.
Acknowledging Tory objections over the Heathrow proposal, Adonis said the case for a station at the airport would be examined by the former Tory transport secretary Lord Mawhinney. The Tories have pledged to build a high-speed network instead of a third runway at Heathrow, and to start construction in 2015.
Theresa Villiers, the shadow transport secretary, said: “In leaving out Heathrow and setting out plans that give no firm guarantees north of the Midlands, Labour’s plans are flawed both by lack of ambition and undermined by their inability to grasp the basic truth that high-speed rail should be an alternative to a third runway, not an addition to it.”
The London-to-Birmingham phase will cost up to £17.4bn, with the full 335-mile network costing £30bn. Adonis said he expected the financing to be “state-led”, costing about £2bn a year. The environmental benefits will be negligible, however, as the Department for Transport admitted that the London-to-Birmingham route will be carbon neutral.
Green groups also warned that the proposals must not squeeze funding from the conventional rail network. Stephen Joseph, executive director of the Campaign for Better Transport, said:”The danger is that a high-speed line will suck money out of the current transport network. The last thing people want is service cuts, higher fares and more potholes, while the executive classes are treated to gleaming new high-speed trains.”
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Beauty of Chilterns may be put at risk by fast rail link, say critics
Mar 11th
Historic town of Wendover in Buckinghamshire in path of London to Birmingham high-speed network
Sitting in a favourite armchair, the family’s elderly collie snuffling about at his feet, Richard Cooper surveys the rolling Chilterns view he and his wife have enjoyed from the rear of their house for half a century.
“It’s hardly changed at all since 1963,” the 84-year-old retired businessman says. “You can just see the pylons, of course, but the trees block out the bypass.” His wife, Patricia, says: “I can’t imagine would it would be like if they build this railway. It could all be different.”
Though 35 miles from central London and a mere dozen from the far north-western reaches of the tube, much of the area around Wendover has barely changed in decades. Set within a fold in the Chiltern hills, in an area of outstanding natural beauty (AONB), strict green belt rules have maintained Wendover as a distinct market town, surrounded by rolling greenery.
But if the high-speed rail plans announced by Lord Adonis come to fruition, at some point within the next 10 years what are now fields to the west of Wendover could be land bisected by the fast track. Trains could be shooting through at 250mph several times an hour at peak times.
“The area is a huge and significant green lung for London. It’s completely the wrong place for this line,” said Colin White, from the Chilterns Conservation Board. “It’s an AONB. This is meant to be significant, not something that can just be put aside because it’s inconvenient.”
White’s organisation visited another AONB through which a high-speed rail line was driven, the Kent Downs, now home to part of the Channel tunnel route. They did not like what they saw. “We certainly wouldn’t want to see the same sort of corporate, concrete, design in the Chilterns. It’s not going to be the same for someone walking on the Chilterns if the dominant thing they see is all this concrete and metal.”
It’s not difficult to find residents in Wendover who share White’s views.
“It would ruin the whole area,” says Jim Fryer, walking his daughter’s poodle-spaniel cross. “My daughter lives very close to where the line would probably run. What would happen to her?”
But two other local views, perhaps more surprising, are equally common. The first is a near complete ignorance, thus far, about the plans. “I have to confess I’ve heard about it, but that’s it,” said one resident, settling off along the Ridgeway trail. In the town centre Ian Toplis, 78, gestures towards the proposed rail line site, adjoining a bypass and commuter rail link to London. “We’ve already got these two intruders, as it were. The bypass is quite noisy though it’s helped the town. I’m not sure how much difference it would make.”
Tony Ecclestone, 62, contrasts transport policy in the UK to that in southern Spain, where he has a home close to part of a high-speed rail network. “It would bring benefits to the country but affect us in Wendover, so you could say I’m split. This country is desperately short of high-speed rail communication. I think there may be an overwhelming case to put in a fast line up the Midlands, even if it goes here.”
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Adonis unveils £30bn high-speed rail plans
Mar 11th
Minister says building work on 250mph route cutting journey times between London and Birmingham could begin in 2017
The government today unveiled plans for a £30bn high-speed rail network, with the first phase between London and Birmingham opening in 2026.
Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, said building work on the 250mph route could begin in 2017 once a formal public consultation has been completed.
The route linking the capital and England’s second city, which will cut journey times from 84 minutes to 49 minutes, will originate at London Euston and pass through Old Oak Common, in west London, where a Crossrail interchange will transport passengers to Heathrow airport.
Controversially, the line will then run through the Chiltern hills in Buckinghamshire, past picturesque villages such as Wendover, before arriving at an intermediate stop near Birmingham airport. There will be a new terminal in Birmingham city centre, and the main body of the line will sweep through the Trent valley to join existing tracks north of Lichfield, where journeys will continue to Manchester and Scotland at conventional speeds.
“The time has come for Britain to plan seriously for high-speed rail between our major cities,” said Adonis. “The high-speed line from London to the Channel Tunnel has been a clear success, and many European and Asian countries now have extensive and successful high-speed networks. I believe high-speed rail has a big part to play in Britain’s future.”
In a nod to Tory objections over the Heathrow proposal, Adonis said the case for a station would be examined by the former Tory transport secretary Lord Mawhinney. “A complex decision of this nature should not be taken in a knee-jerk fashion but after a full analysis of the facts and opinions,” Adonis said.
The first phase will cost up to £17.4bn for 128 miles of track from London to the west Midlands, with the full 330-mile network costing £30bn.
The transport secretary also unveiled the blueprint for a wider network, with a Y-shaped route splitting off from Birmingham to go eastwards to Manchester and westwards to Sheffield and Leeds. Journey times between London and Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield would come down from about two hours 10 minutes to 75 minutes when the new network is in place.
Formal planning for the route from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds will be completed next summer, with a consultation to follow in 2012. The route to Scotland would be completed on existing lines under the current proposal, even when the Manchester and Leeds sections are completed.
Despite the Mawhinney gesure, the Conservatives attacked the detailed proposal. The Tories have pledged to build a high-speed network instead of a third runway at Heathrow, and to start construction in 2015.
Theresa Villiers, the shadow transport secretary, said: “Labour have betrayed the vision we set out three years ago for [high-speed rail]. In leaving out Heathrow and setting out plans that give no firm guarantees north of the Midlands, Labour’s plans are flawed both by lack of ambition and undermined by their inability to grasp the basic truth that high-speed rail should be an alternative to a third runway, not an addition to it.”
The government-backed company that drew up the plans, HS2, believes there is no business case for a direct link to Heathrow airport and some industry experts argue that the Old Oak Common interchange provides an equally good link.
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Rail maintenance workers vote to strike
Mar 11th
• RMT union refuses to rule out Easter national walkout
• Talks continuing over BA cabin crew strike threat
The prospect of a national rail strike over Easter loomed larger this morning after maintenance workers voted in favour of a walkout.
The RMT union refused to rule out a bank holiday strike by thousands of Network Rail staff, and they could be joined by 5,500 signal workers whose ballot result is announced next week.
Meanwhile, a source close to the fraught peace talks between British Airways and the Unite union said informal discussions over averting a cabin crew walkout were continuing, with the possibility that strike dates would not be announced today. A source close to Bassa, Unite’s cabin crew branch, said it had no wish to disrupt BA passengers.
Bob Crow, the RMT general secretary, left open the option of an Easter national rail walkout this morning and called on Network Rail to hold further talks over changes to working practices. “It could well be that both the signal workers and maintenance workers take action together,” he told Sky News.
Network Rail believes it can withstand a maintenance strike for at least a week, with some branch line closures, before services are disrupted by safety measures such as speed restrictions. However, the company admitted this week that a signallers’ strike could bring the busiest sections of the network to a halt because the main signalling centres, which employ around 3,000 people, would be unstaffed.
Crow said the vote, with 77% in favour on a turnout of 65%, reflected concerns over rail safety after Network Rail’s decision to restructure its maintenance division. The Network Rail proposals include 1,500 redundancies, the majority voluntary.
“RMT members were faced with a stark choice in this ballot. They could either sit back and wait for these cash-led maintenance cuts to lead to another major disaster on Britain’s railways or they could vote to take action to stop the attack on rail safety. They have overwhelmingly voted to take action,” said Crow.
Network Rail, which has overseen a significant increase in rail passenger safety since taking over from Railtrack in 2002, has denied vehemently that the new regime could see a return to the dark days of the Hatfield crash in 2000, in which four people died, and the Potters Bar accident in 2002, which claimed the lives of seven people.
A Network Rail spokesperson said: “The way the railway is maintained and operated needs to change. Work practices that date back to the steam age should no longer have a place on a modern railway.
“We cannot allow the unions to hold this country to ransom. Negotiation is the only way this dispute will be settled, and the sooner we get around the table the better for everyone.”
Unite and Bassa officials met to discuss the next steps in the industrial dispute with BA that is close to escalating into a walkout, after a deadline to secure a deal was missed yesterday evening. The general secretary of the TUC, Brendan Barber, is acting as an intermediary in the talks with BA.
The Bassa source said it had “absolutely no wish” to trigger a strike and claimed that the two sides were £10m apart in agreeing on cost-saving proposals. Unite and Bassa have offered a one-off 2.6% pay cut in talks, but BA says the proposals are still “significantly short” of its £60m cost-saving target.
In a direct appeal to Willie Walsh, BA’s chief executive, the source said: “We are taking this opportunity to ask him to reconsider the formal offer of cuts we have made and to accept the sacrifices that we and our members are willing to make in order to help British Airways to protect on board service levels for its customers, and so prevent industrial action.
“What company in their right mind would refuse the offer of a pay cut from its own staff to protect the health, safety and service offered to its customers? Before ordinary peoples travel plans are unnecessarily inconvenienced we hope that common sense will prevail and that our offer is reconsidered. The deadline for calling industrial action is very close. Mr Walsh should not squander that time.”
A BA spokeswoman said the airline remained available for talks. One scenario emerging today could see BA lodge a formal offer to Unite that would allow the union to extend its strike mandate while members consider the proposal. Unite must announce strike dates by Monday under rules set down by the 1992 Trade Union Act.
One key sticking point in the BA proposals is that the airline appears to have accepted the partial repeal of staffing cuts but has not gone far enough to satisfy Unite and Bassa. BA is understood to have offered the return of about 184 cabin crew positions, while Unite is seeking around 700. BA unilaterally cut staffing levels on flights by at least one flight attendant last November, after a voluntary redundancy programme.
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High-speed rail plans unveiled – live
Mar 11th
Follow the train of events as the government’s plans for a high-speed rail network are made public
11.16am:
The Tories would take the high speed link closer to Heathrow (approximately two minutes closer) and take begin construction in 2015 (two years earlier).
They say:
Labour have got high speed rail wrong for the economy and wrong for the environment. Their line to Birmingham leaves the North, Scotland and Wales out of the massive social, economic and regeneration benefits of high speed rail. And failing to take high speed rail through Heathrow, would be a big mistake and a major lost opportunity for the environment. Labour’s deeply misguided support for a third runway has distorted their approach to high speed rail.
11.12am:
It’s rare to have good news stories regarding transport in the UK, but today might fit the bill. As rail workers and BA staff prepare to strike, the transport secretary, Lord Adonis, will stand up in the Commons at 11.30 to announce plans for a high-speed rail network, including a London to Birmingham route.
The announcement has been widely previewed – here is a good ITN curtain-raiser video, and Adonis wrote about his plans in the Times – but there are plenty of details to be confirmed. They include:
• The precise speeds and journey times.
• The cost and how it will be funded.
• When construction will begin (2017 is considered the earliest date).
• The environmental impact; it will go throught the Chiltern hills, an area of outstanding natural beauty in England and Wales.
• The route beyond Birmingham and estimated timescale for the V-shaped network touted to run through Manchester to Glasgow on the west side of the UK, and Leeds and Edinburgh on the east side.
The journey (if you were the train driver) would look something like this, although not quite as fast.
The Tories, incidentally have called the plans a “big mistake”. More on that to follow
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High-speed rail network plans to be unveiled
Mar 10th
Proposed 225mph London-to-Birmingham route through Chilterns would create 10,000 jobs
The government will tomorrow unveil plans for a 225mph British high-speed rail network, including a detailed London-to-Birmingham route that will create more than 10,000 jobs if the multibillion pound project goes ahead.
The transport secretary, Lord Adonis, will announce that building and operating an ultra-fast rail link between the capital and Britain’s second city will boost manufacturing and technology industries in the UK. Construction could begin as soon as 2017 with 2027 a likely completion date for the first phase. The route would have to undergo a public consultation before going through parliament.
Adonis is considering a London-to-Birmingham line that starts at London Euston station and does not go through Heathrow directly, instead connecting with Britain’s largest airport at a site on Old Oak Common in west London that will be called the Crossrail Interchange.
It will connect passengers to the airport via the £16bn Crossrail route, which links Heathrow to Canary Wharf via central London and is due to open in 2017.
The route will then embark on its most controversial phase, through the Chiltern hills in Buckinghamshire, one of 40 areas of outstanding natural beauty in England and Wales.
The Chilterns Conservation Board, the public body responsible for protecting the area, has warned that swaths of the area could be “trashed” by the route.
However, part of the line is expected to run alongside a dual carriageway in the Chilterns as Adonis seeks to build the line alongside existing transport routes. It will then stop near Birmingham airport and the National Exhibition Centre at a parkway station, designed for car drivers and bus users, before continuing to a new terminal in Birmingham city centre. The main route will continue from Birmingham airport through the Trent valley to connect with existing rail lines, where high-speed services will continue to Manchester and Scotland at conventional speeds.
The journey from Old Oak Common to the parkway station will be swift, taking 31 minutes compared with the current 80-minute journey from London Euston to Birmingham New Street.
Although trains are expected to travel at 225mph, the route has been designed to achieve a top speed of 250mph. The London-to-Birmingham route has been drawn up by a government-backed company, High Speed Two, and will be published in detail, within five metres in urban areas and 25 metres in the countryside. The full High Speed Two report will be published alongside the Adonis proposals, which will become a white paper once the public consultation has closed.
However, the national route beyond Birmingham will be outlined in broader terms, with rail industry sources expecting a “V” shaped network running through Manchester to Glasgow on the west side of the UK and to Leeds and Edinburgh on the east side. Adonis ultimately hopes to reduce the journey time from London to Edinburgh from four and a half hours to two hours 40 minutes.
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TfL must make cuts or postpone upgrades to plug £460m funding gap
Mar 10th
Arbiter rules taxpayer must fund Tube Lines’s additional costs for improvements on the London Underground
Boris Johnson must make cuts to London’s public transport network or postpone improvements to one of the capital’s busiest underground lines after he was told to plug a £460m funding gap in a controversial public-private partnership.
The London mayor said taxpayers were being asked to “write a blank cheque” to fund Tube Lines, the last surviving PPP contractor responsible for maintenance and upgrades on three tube routes: the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines.
In a final ruling yesterday, the arbiter of the PPP contracts, Chris Bolt, said Tube Lines’s work programme over the next seven-and-a-half years should cost £4.46bn. The publicly owned London Underground, which still runs the tube network on a day-to-day basis, must fund the work and has budgeted only £4bn for it – leaving a shortfall of £460m on its already stretched balance sheet.
Johnson, who ultimately controls LU and its parent Transport for London, said he would consider taking legal action against Bolt, who rejected demands that Tube Lines fund the difference by raising debt privately. Instead, Bolt said TfL should either cut back on an upgrade to the Piccadilly line – the only tube link to Heathrow airport – or find cost cuts elsewhere in its £9bn annual budget.
“Londoners will also be outraged that the tube upgrades promised to them are now threatened,” said Johnson. The mayor claimed that Tube Lines’s co-owners, Ferrovial, the Spanish owner of Heathrow airport, and Bechtel, the US project management specialist, will be paid £400m in management secondment fees by 2017.
“In other countries this would be called looting, here it is called the PPP,” he said.
But Bolt rejected the management fees argument, saying that Ferrovial and Bechtel managers were helping to keep down overall costs and, without them, the maintenance and upgrade work could cost more than £4.46bn.
Andrew Cleaves, Tube Lines’s acting chief executive, said delaying an upgrade to the Piccadilly line was one option for closing the funding gap. Bolt has already asked the Department for Transport whether funding set aside for purchasing new Piccadilly line trains, believed to be about £500m, could be used to plug the cost gap.
“There are many different variations around timing that we can work through with London Underground, including the timing of the fleet and the upgrade. That’s the sort of thing I want to sit down with London Underground about and discuss,” said Cleaves.
The Piccadilly upgrade is due to deliver faster and more frequent trains on the route by 2014 and failure to deliver it on time raises the threat of overcrowding on an already busy line.
The Tube Lines boss also denied that the ruling would threaten the company’s viability. Tube Lines had originally argued that the work should cost £5.75bn and faced an even greater funding shortfall than LU, which prompted Tube Lines directors to discuss whether the company is a going concern at a recent board meeting.
Johnson’s funding options are becoming increasingly limited after the DfT said it would not reopen a 2007 funding settlement that awarded TfL £40bn until 2017. Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, is adamant that TfL cannot increase its borrowing to fund the £460m gap.
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Level crossing accidents: how we compare in Europe
Mar 10th
What happens when rail meets road? • Get the data
What happens when rail meets road? Apparently some people don’t realise that the combination can be dangerous
Network Rail released it’s annual level crossing safety figures today. They show that 13 people died last year and that 145 motorists – almost three a week – narrowly avoided potentially fatal collisions with a train. There were over 3,200 incidents of misuse at level crossings last year.
That data is here, together with a European comparison and a breakdown of level crossing accidents, deaths and near-misses from the RSSB.
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