Taxpayers have been forced by the Government to spend millions of pounds on public relations to persuade themselves that a new high-speed rail track to the north of England is a good idea. A 60-strong team has reportedly been “building trust and respect” in the project, yet not a week passes without this white elephant suffering another body blow. The money has been wasted.
So far most publicity has been expended on the route across country. The train not only blights landscape but, despite being publicised as “time-saving”, it has been revealed as stopping nowhere near the centres of some of the cities on its route, such as Derby and Nottingham, but in surrounding countryside. Time taken to get to the new stations could cancel the gain from being “high speed”.
This time the trouble is London, and particularly the London end of the route. Here the Euston terminus has never made sense. HS2 trains will reach the capital somewhere north of Acton and go neither down to Heathrow nor direct across London to St Pancras, the Channel Tunnel and the Continent. Nor will they link with the new London rail artery, Crossrail, any further into town than at Acton.
The cost of just reaching Euston has become astronomical. The line will burrow under Primrose Hill and downhill into Euston, London’s oldest and most ill-sited station, with the worst east-west links in the city. The route will deliver a decade of chaos to north London at incalculable cost, demolishing some 500 homes along the Hampstead Road and Camden Town corridor. Approaching half the compensation cost of the line will be concentrated on just a mile of inner London. One estimate is that this will drain the project of as much as £5 billion.
Once at Euston, bemused passengers will have access only to the Northern and Victoria lines. If they want to get to HS1 and France, a feeder line is planned to crawl along the old North London Line round the back to St Pancras, causing goodness knows what chaos to this line. Or passengers can trundle their bags down on the Northern line or along Euston Road, London’s own “HS3”.
Slowly the worm is turning. Crossrail executives have been quietly suggesting that, if the line ever happens, it should stop at Old Oak Common, at “Wormwood Scrubs International”. There passengers could at least connect with Crossrail, if that line were modified, and get to Heathrow. London’s transport chief, Sir Peter Hendy, like his boss, Boris Johnson, recklessly signed up to HS2 when any old infrastructure project was thought a good idea, however daft. Now he has had to deride the idea of stopping at Old Oak Common, with thousands of Midlanders “dumped in the middle of nowhere” and having to be rescued by his beloved Crossrail.
One solution touted by supporters is a second Crossrail, running from Euston underground to Wimbledon. A more imaginative idea would be one day to run HS2 trains on Crossrail tracks across London. Almost all high-speed rail lines have overstated their expected demand (not to mention profit), HS1 to the Channel Tunnel among them. Crossrail has been expensively over-engineered precisely so as to take mainline trains. Why not let it? Whatever the cost, it would be less than HS2 to Euston.
Adapting Crossrail to come to the aid of both HS1 and HS2 through London makes sense. If Crossrail connected with HS1 in Stratford, which it will not as planned, that would enable trains one day to run from Scotland and the north through London to the Continent. This would correct the mistake made when HS1 was diverted east through Stratford into St Pancras, rather than coming directly north under London and on up to Scotland, as originally planned in the Eighties. A child with a map can see this makes sense.
HS2 is a stupid project. It was a contractors’ fantasy sold by lobbyists to Labour’s transport guru, Lord Adonis, and then to David Cameron, somehow as an alternative to a third runway at Heathrow. Like island airports it was a nice idea until you stopped to think about it. The project has now been dumped on transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin, who seems miserable with it.
But there is sense dawning. Labour in opposition has capped HS2 at £50 billion, which is just £7.4 billion more than current official estimates but more than £20 billion below unofficial ones. That is as good as cancellation, added to by shadow chancellor Ed Balls’s warning yesterday that Cameron and Osborne “seem willing to put their own pride and vanity above best value for money for the taxpayer”. The National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee have ridiculed the “time-saving” justification. This has forced McLoughlin to shift his ground from time-saving to capacity-raising, but this immediately raises the option of increasing capacity by other means and other north-south corridors.
The business minister, Lord Deighton, was reported at the weekend as sympathetic to a halt at Old Oak Common, or at least to “looking at opportunities to do things more efficiently”. Like many of his colleagues, Deighton insists that there is “no blank cheque for HS2”. He should knows about such cheques, having watched the Olympics project triple its bid cost.
The toughest thing is to admit that a project on which hundreds of millions of pounds have already been spent and thousands of staff employed is a nonsense. The ideal thing would be to divert this effort into making Britain’s existing rail capacity more productive, and stop talking of “standing room only” out of Euston. HS2 is a premium-fare train. Euston intercity services are not Britain’s most overcrowded, and I have yet to see standing room only in its first-class carriages.
But if, for any mad reason, HS2 were to go ahead, at least London could inject some sanity into it. Bring passengers into Old Oak Common and on to Crossrail, and one day take them to France. Save London a decade of pointless misery at Euston.Reuse content