HS2? No thanks, I'd prefer broadband, heat and lighting

When I was young I found it ridiculous that every newspaper story wove its subjects’ ages into the text: what bearing did that have on anything?

Now, at 59, I know that nothing has more influence on our attitudes to any bright idea than our assessment of whether we are likely to live long enough to witness the outcome. That is why I feel the pain of seeing giant wind turbines advance across the beautiful uplands of Northumberland so acutely; because I know there is no chance that I will still be around when they come down again, if they ever do.

Image courtesy of SOUL, the Barmoor Anti Wind Farm Group

It does not take a genius to see that nearly all the arguments advanced in favour of building these gigantic bird-swats are self-interested or simply wrong-headed.

Which makes them curiously like those put forward for construction of the HS2 high speed rail line. On which, like Kevan Jones MP, I experienced a moment of horrible discomfort last week when I suddenly found Lord Mandelson agreeing with me.

Still, it could be worse. I’ve Googled “Gordon Brown HS2” and found no evidence that the new Sage of Kirkcaldy has come out against it, so there must be a sporting chance that I am still right after all.

The theoretical cost of this project keeps going up. It was £42 billion at the last count, and that was apparently without one small but useful addition: some trains to run on it. Still, why worry about that? We all know that the important thing is to get the aircraft carriers built, not fuss about whether we can afford any planes to put on them.

A chimera, and apparently an unbudgeted one at that

The Business Department now seems to be admitting that its key assumption that time spent on trains is economically dead because no one does any work on them is, to use a technical term, cobblers.

While the chief defender of HS2 tracked down by Radio 4 at the weekend claimed that the extra speed of journeys was irrelevant: the project was really all about creating much needed additional capacity for a rail system bursting at the seams.

Except that, as a regular traveller on the West Coast Main Line, I often survey masses of empty seats, particularly at those peak times when all those without calf-length pockets have been priced off the railway altogether.

If we do need more capacity, why not reinstate some of those passing loops and diversionary routes cleverly axed by Dr Beeching in the 1960s?

The Number One Hate Figure of my childhood, surpassing even the bloke who taught swimming at my school

If we’ve suddenly found a huge amount of spare cash to invest in transport, how about creating a Transpennine rail service that is genuinely worthy of the name “Express”? Reopen the freight lines in South East Northumberland to passengers, extend the Metro, build some more urban tramways (first learning all the lessons from the debacle in Edinburgh), stop cutting back bus services, relieve the congestion on the Gateshead western by-pass, and, yes, dual the A1.

I write as one who adores trains and whose youthful blood was regularly brought to boiling point by letters to this paper from the Railway Conversion League, arguing that the answer was to rip up all the rails, lay concrete and run buses. Even a schoolboy could see that their case was total rubbish.

I am delighted to have lived long enough to see rail emerge triumphant and enjoy a renaissance that seemed as least as implausible, back in the 1960s, as a British man ever again winning Wimbledon.

But it really is time to get back to reality and stop politicians grandstanding with ludicrous promises of massive public expenditure that actually cost them nothing because they will be long gone from office when the bills start rolling in.

In the vanishingly unlikely event that we really have got a spare £50 billion to improve the national infrastructure, please let’s spend it on something genuinely useful. If we must invest in something high speed, make it broadband. And spend the change on some new power stations that will keep working when the wind isn’t blowing at just the right speed.

Otherwise we are likely be spending our winter evenings in the cold and dark not in some imaginary, distant future, but uncomfortably soon.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A train is the perfect place for writers and thinkers

I am writing this column on a train, as I often do. I also write emails, letters, speeches – even company reports and presentations when I can secure one of those individual airline-style seats that afford some protection to client confidentiality.

In short, I find rail travel hugely productive and always have done. There are usually fewer distractions than in the office. This is particularly true for those like me who supposedly work at home, where the temptation to make a pot of tea, potter around dusting the bookshelves or take the dog for a walk so often proves irresistible.

If I do say so myself, over the years I have done some of my very best writing on trains. Helped no doubt by the 5.30am start required to get me on the first departure from Alnmouth to King’s Cross. Because like many people I am at my best for work purposes, if not for small talk, early in the morning.

But even late journeys home are rarely a waste of time, enabling me to catch up on much accumulated reading. Before the accountants abolished that civilised institution, I also made more useful and interesting contacts in the restaurant cars of the East Coast main line than almost anywhere else.

An image "The GNER restaurant car, RIP" has been removed to avoid potential charges (financial, not criminal) from the money-grubbing image copyright police. I wish I had taken my own photograph while I had the chance.

Partly, no doubt, because it was one of the few places where one would routinely share a table with total strangers.

Hence I am a great – some who have ventured into my attic might say obsessive – fan of trains and rail travel. Yet according to a study commissioned by the Department of Transport last week, I am in a tiny (well, ten per cent) minority in actually finding train journeys useful.

The other 90 per cent of business travellers apparently waste their time watching other people, staring out of the window, reading trash or surfing the internet. This seems completely at odds with my own experience and observations.

Is he bored? Or is that a light bulb above his head?

But what a helpful coincidence that these timely survey findings should back up the Department’s claim that there is a sound business case for splurging £17 billion of our money to shave a massive 23 wasted minutes off the fastest journey time from London to Birmingham New Street through the construction of the HS2 high speed rail link.

A project which will, at the same time, lead to a marked deterioration in service for those travelling from the current intermediate stations on the West Coast line.

The problem for the Transport Department is that anyone with half a brain can see that high speed rail between London and Birmingham makes no sense at all. This is not to deny that they could make a case for it between London and Glasgow, though only if one believes that faster transport links boost regional economies rather than sucking life out of them to the centre, as all the evidence of the 186 years since the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway suggests to me.

But for PR purposes they surely need to start building the thing in Sauchiehall Street, so that by the time it reaches the West Midlands adding an extension to Euston could be presented as a no-brainer.

The last traditional main line constructed in Britain, the Great Central Railway’s London extension to Marylebone, was developed that way around. Purpose-built to the Continental loading gauge for connection to a Channel tunnel, it was ripped up in the 1960s by a typically forward-thinking Government that assumed trains had had their day.

How useful some of the main lines, diversionary routes and passing loops destroyed by Dr Beeching would be today. Would it not prove more cost-effective to increase capacity by reinstating those rather than embarking on the HS2 project?

Beeching: the prime hate figure of my childhood

Unless, of course, you believe that all time spent travelling is wasted. But if that is the case, why aren’t we all flying on the rocket-powered successor to Concorde?

And are the Department’s researchers really on the right lines when they loftily dismiss the time business travellers spend staring out of the train window as “daydreaming”? Perhaps they are actually indulging in that most important activity for any of us: thinking. It might be helpful if our politicians and civil servants tried it more often.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.