Q. What evidence is there that high-speed rail is the right option for investment?

Again, the reference is the Atkins High Speed Line study for the SRA, which examined the business case for:

• High-speed rail
• New rail routes operated at conventional speeds (no more than 200km/h)
• Motorway/trunk road investment (additional lanes etc)
• Upgrading existing north-south railway lines.

Its thorough cost benefit appraisal established a clearly better outcome from high-speed rail than any of these alternatives.

In addition, we know that the national transport networks are running out of capacity. This applies just as much to the principal rail routes as to our motorways and airports. Indeed, rail is growing faster than the other surface transport modes, faster than car use, for example.

As the November 2006 National Audit Office report into the West Coast Main Line pointed out, even with substantial expenditure on the route and lengthening of trains — worthwhile investments in themselves — available capacity will be fully used up within 10 years. High-speed rail is the best way to address this capacity crunch.

Q. Why not build a new freight-only line, instead?

The DfT, in the July 2007 Rail White Paper, explicitly ruled out building a separate route for rail freight in order to solve the railway’s capacity problem. This is because little freight travels on the network during peak periods when capacity relief is needed, so diverting freight to other routes would not help.

Unlike passenger travel which can be (and already is) concentrated (on city centres), freight movements by rail are, and will continue to be, dispersed. It is not easy to configure a freight route that would serve the channel tunnel, the major ports and the various rail freight terminals of the Midlands and the north.

If a spine freight route were to be created, then there will have to be new mega-terminals and each of these will attract large scale lorry movements. That is partly why there was so much opposition to the Great Central proposals. It makes more sense to free up capacity on the existing main lines for rail freight to expand, which is what a high-speed line would achieve.

It is also difficult to see how a new freight line would generate anything like the same revenues as a new high-speed passenger line. Freight operating companies pay access charges on a marginal basis, and would be unable to compete effectively against other modes without substantial operating grant assistance if they also had to pay for using a new freight line.

But there may be situations in which high-speed rail can address the freight market directly. So-called airfreight (which in practice is often road-hauled on a groupage basis in Britain) could be accommodated, provided suitable terminal provision and handling facilities are provided, including at Heathrow. In France, plans are now well-advanced for a high speed premium freight service. And some sections of high-speed line, for instance across the Pennines, might be suitably designed for a mix of passenger and freight services.

Q. If existing routes were upgraded, they could offer faster speeds and extra freight capacity at lower cost than a new line, couldn’t they?

The Rail White Paper ruled out building new tracks immediately alongside existing lines, based on advice from Network Rail and London & Continental Railways, who pointed out the adverse impact of disruption to existing services.

When the East Coast Main Line upgrade was put on hold in 2002/3, its costs were estimated at about £4bn. Given what we now know of the real costs of line-of-route upgrades and the scale of works planned, this cost estimate has to be regarded as being on the low side. Implementation of line-of-route upgrades, except where it is a relatively simple matter of adding additional tracks (as in the Trent Valley of the West Coast project), is not only expensive, but highly disruptive. The West Coast will have spent seven years without a proper weekend passenger service, for example. Our busiest routes have many junctions, very few of which are grade-separated and they need to be replaced in route upgrades and this is unavoidably expensive and disruptive.

Higher speeds, for instance 135 mile/h on the West Coast, may well prove feasible with the Pendolino fleet, but the faster speeds increase journey time differentials with stopping passenger and freight services and therefore always come at a cost in terms of route capacity, unless a four-track railway is available or created. Capacity will be reached on the West Coast route quite quickly at current rates of growth, especially on the southern portion of the route (from Rugby/Nuneaton — London).

So, overall, no, it looks most unlikely (as Atkins found) that upgrading existing lines would be better value for money.

Q. ERTMS will reduce headways so there’s no need to build new lines to create more capacity, is there?

On plain line, the specification for ERTMS would reduce headways, perhaps from 3 minutes to 2.5 minutes. But it is not clear at all that any meaningful improvement can be delivered at junctions, since critical section clearance times will not change. It is ultimately junctions that constrain route capacity. So a necessary concomitant to get the capacity benefit of ERTMS is probably to invest in disruptive and expensive junction improvement schemes. It is also only fair to point out that there is a long way to go to establish even these modest capacity benefits from ERTMS, for which the business case actually primarily rests on savings in maintenance costs once lineside signals and track circuits can be done away with.

Q. Would MAGLEV offer a suitable solution?

Sir Rod Eddington highlighted the high costs and risks of MAGLEV technology and the Rail White Paper ruled this out as a potential solution to the capacity challenge on the national rail network because it saw the risks and costs being much greater than its proponents had suggested.

Greengauge21 does not regard MAGLEV as an attractive option. It can’t interface without the need for passenger interchange so the prospect of through services such as Birmingham — Paris would be lost if the MAGLEV solution were to be adopted. Of course there are risks and uncertainties with new technology and as Christian Wolmar memorably pointed out on BBC’s Newsnight: ‘what do you do at a junction?’ is a problem for which there isn’t a really satisfactory answer. MAGLEV doesn’t fit well with a network concept which is what is needed, and neither does it offer the scope for a staged introduction, with the benefit of high-speed trains able to operate over both new and existing infrastructure.