A HIGH-SPEED railway line carrying double-deck trains at 190mph between London and Scotland is being planned by Network Rail to win back millions of passengers from domestic airlines.
The journey time from London to Glasgow or Edinburgh would be halved to just over 2½ hours, with a train departing every 30 minutes.
The line would run via Birmingham and Manchester and sections would be built alongside the existing West Coast Main Line to minimise planning disputes.
It would connect with the Channel Tunnel Rail Link in northeast London, allowing direct services in under three hours between Birmingham and Paris.
Network Rail, the public interest company created by the Government to operate Britain’s rail infrastructure, believes that the line could eliminate almost all the 45 daily flights between London and Manchester. A handful of flights would survive between Scotland and London, but only to serve passengers catching connecting flights to overseas destinations.
A combination of cheap air fares and poor train punctuality has resulted in a shift from rail to air in the past decade, with six times as many people flying from Glasgow or Edinburgh to London as catching a train.
Network Rail has previously declined to enter the debate over the expansion of the rail network, saying that it needed to focus on punctuality. But the company now admits that the need to cater for rising demand for rail travel — up 42 per cent in the past ten years — is the more urgent issue.
Iain Coucher, Network Rail’s deputy chief executive, presented yesterday the results of a nine-month feasibility study by the company on a new high-speed line. He said that the 420-mile line could be built for as little as £11 billion, a third of the sum envisaged by the Strategic Rail Authority (SRA) in 2003.
Construction costs would be reduced by avoiding building new tracks into city centres, either by constructing “parkway” stations on the outskirts, or by connecting in the suburbs with existing lines.
Mr Coucher said that minimising the need for tunnels and using more efficient construction techniques would cut the cost of the line to £24 million to £30 million a mile. That is still double the cost of new high-speed lines in France and Spain but allows for the added expense of compensating land owners in Britain’s more densely populated countryside. The line would be built in stages, with the London to Manchester section open in 2016 and the full route five years later.
Passengers would pay a small premium on today’s fares, but prices would have to be comparable with those offered by budget airlines. Mr Coucher said: “Depending on the time of day, a one-way ticket between London and Scotland would cost £30 to £60. If it cost more than that, we would not get the modal shift we are seeking from planes and cars to trains.”
The taxpayer would probably have to contribute to the construction cost, justified by the benefits of regenerating regional economies.
The line would also create capacity for dozens of extra freight trains a day on the West Coast Main Line, removing thousands of lorries from congested motorways. Cutting the number of domestic flights would also ease pressure on Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted and could allow development of new runways to be deferred for several years.
But Mr Coucher gave warning that the project could be undermined by objections from cities that would not be served by the line. The SRA, abolished last year, had considered two routes: the West Coast one favoured by Network Rail and another on the East Coast via Leeds and Newcastle.
Network Rail’s proposal is likely to win support from Rod Eddington, the former British Airways chief executive, who has been commissioned by the Government to review Britain’s transport needs and is due to report this summer. Ministers are unlikely to make a commitment to any scheme before next year, when the Department for Transport publishes a 30-year strategy for Britain’s railways.
Chris Grayling, the Shadow Transport Secretary, said: “The public are right to be highly sceptical . . . Rather than concentrate on these vague aspirations, the Government should be concentrating on delivering projects that could actually make a difference to people’s lives in the short term.”
