High Speed Rail UK

The UK rail industry is facing the fastest growth in passenger numbers since the Second World War. This however, puts our outdated railway infrastructure under very real strain. The West Coast Mainline, recently upgraded at a cost of over £8.8billion and only fully reopened in December 2008, is set to reach capacity once again by 2020. Facing similar constraints are the Great Western Mainline out of Paddington, the Midland Mainline out of St Pancras and most of the East Coast Mainline from King’s Cross to Edinburgh.

Indeed, the West Coast Mainline experience shows how the law of diminishing returns applies to railway upgrade programmes that require train operating companies to be compensated for the disruptions and cancellations that are an inevitable part of the work. In the words of the Secretary of State for Transport, Lord Adonis, in March 2009: “If the cost of disruption is fully taken into account, I suspect it is by no means clear that ostensibly lower priced upgrades are always better value than new lines including new high-speed lines.”

A new high-speed line could accommodate all the passenger traffic travelling on the West Coast, East Coast and Mainland Mainlines twice over – in total, 15,000 people per hour in each direction or almost double this if duplex (double-deck) trains are used.

Our considered argument is that instead of making incremental improvements to our ageing railway infrastructure – improvements that will cost almost as much but deliver increasingly less – it is far better to invest now in a new high-speed line that will deliver a quantum gain in connectivity and capacity, and do so in a way that is environmentally sustainable in the long term.