Tony Lodge is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies and chairman of the Bow Group's Transport Committee. The Right Track – Delivering the Conservatives’ Vision for High Speed Rail, by Tony Lodge and with a foreword by Lord Heseltine, is published today by the Bow Group.
Britain risks getting the next stage of high speed rail (HSR) badly wrong. A number of proposals to link London with the rest of the country, known as ‘High Speed 2’, have been submitted to Ministers but Bow Group research shows that many fall well short of what is needed to make high speed rail travel a success.
The new Bow Group pamphlet, The Right Track – Delivering the Conservatives’ Vision for High Speed Rail, has analysed each of the proposals and highlighted major weaknesses in some of the routes, one of which could still be chosen before the next general election.
A popular exhibit in the National Railway Museum is the Japanese Bullet Train. A design icon, it transformed how the world thought about and experienced rail travel. However, the Bullet Train is in a museum for a good reason. To the Japanese, high speed rail is old news as the first bullet train sped between Tokyo and Osaka in 1964. Tragically, for the nation which invented rail, it would be a further 42 years before Britain could boast of its own high speed railway.
The Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL), now rebranded High Speed 1 (HS1), is Britain’s first, and only, high speed railway line, and it is the creation of not one, but two Conservative Governments. Having successfully secured Britain’s budget rebate in 1984, and eager to promote free-trade within the EEC, Margaret Thatcher signed the Channel Tunnel Treaty with President Mitterrand in 1986. However, the important decision of how to link the entrance to the Channel Tunnel in Folkestone to a Central London station was left to the Major Government, and in particular, to the Secretary of State for the Environment, Michael Heseltine, who has assisted the Bow Group with this research.
In 1991, the Conservative Government vetoed a route proposed by the monopoly-giant British Rail that followed existing mainline rail corridors into central London. They chose instead to maximise the opportunity presented to them by using the new high-speed railway line as a catalyst for regeneration. By carefully selecting an alignment which entered central London from the East, rather than from the South as British Rail had proposed, the Government set in place the foundations for the radical regeneration of Ebbsfleet, Stratford and Kings Cross. Today’s Thames Gateway is the spectacular result.
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