High Speed Rail: It's not going to Happen

It hadn't really occurred to me until George Monbiot's quite good piece about high speed rail, but I realised that it's not going to happen. None of the 3 main parties really cares about it.

How do I know this? Because there's no targets within the life of this parliament. No-one is going to be badgering them within a year or two about progress because journalists have no experience of being project managers so they don't get this. They'll just see the target a decade or more away and by the time we get there, the government can just blame it on someone before or circumstances or whatever.

In the mean time, high speed rail buys some votes from naive greens. At no cost. Genius.

More High Speed Rail

I've taken a look at the government's proposals for rail between London and Birmingham (link).

1st claim: Journey time from London to Birmingham City Centre cut by over 30mins to 49 minutes.

I find this hard to believe. London to Birmingham is, as the crow-flies around 100 miles. This suggests an average speed of 122 mph.

TGV-Est, the fastest TGV service does Paris to Strasbourg direct in 2h19. That's 300 miles. That's an average speed of 129mph.

Before it sounds like it's easily achievable, it has to be remembered that Paris to Strasbourg is 3 times longer, so the urban distance (when you can't go at thundering TGV speed) is a lot more of the journey. You're probably looking at 10 miles at low speed (and then you've got to accelerate).

It's why TGV works so well in France - the distances to major cities are huge, so benefits are good (also, French trains before the TGV ran at dismal speeds - the effect of the TGV was huge on journey times).

High Speed Rail

From The Independent:-

Under the proposals, the new trains would run from London and travel to Birmingham, Manchester, Warrington, Liverpool, Preston, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Passengers could reach Birmingham in just 45 minutes.

The thing is, I'm quite sceptical about that "Birmingham in just 45 minutes" thing. The fastest TGV service, TGV-Est takes 45 minutes to travel from Paris to Reims. Paris to Reims is about 90 miles, where London to Birmingham is 110 miles.

Now, there's no doubt that high speed constantly gets quicker, but over relatively short distances there is so much time in acceleration and braking (as well as limited speed in suburban areas) that the room for improvement is slight. The thing that almost no high speed advocates recognise about France is the scale of the country and the distribution of cities.