It's about another Government review -- "Lord" Mahwinney's investigation into whether the proposed new high speed London-Birmingham railway (and, eventually, maybe Manchester/Glasgow/Edinburgh) should be routed via Heathrow Airport.
Sounds turgid? To a train geek like me it's fascinating. And Mawhinney's report has thrown up a heap of fascinating issues.
So that'll be something to look forward to, then.
2 comments:
It would of course be a somewhat longer route if it was to take in Heathrow, but it would be a huge benefit to those from northern places who would then be able to head straight for home after a gruelling overnight flight without first having to get into London, change stations and so on - which most of us refuse to do, so we take the shuttle or the flying breadvan. It might even render flights to Birmingham and Manchester superfluous. In such a Londoncentric country this aspect could easily have been overlooked.
Mawhinney (and HS2 before him) has done his sums, and the business case for that scenario does not stack up -- yet.
Mawhinney's view is that when HS2 reaches Manchester and Leeds the business case will look very different, hence the need to build-in at the beginning the engineering options to enable the addition of a through-route loop at that later date.
But now I'm just spoiling the surprise that's in the longer post...
One other thing, though: seems to me that HS2 is overwhelmingly for the benefit of the country north of London, not so much for London itself. This transport initiative will overcome regional isolation, will make regional cities more attractive places to relocate to for those activities which require access to London, and will also dramatically improve inter-regional connections (enabling, in one scenario, the development of a northern megalopolis stretching from Hull via the big cities of Yorkshire to Manchester and Liverpool -- though whether or not that's A Good Thing is another question).
If it were all about London, HS2 would be a second line and tunnel to continental Europe, to bring Frankfurt and Berlin within easier reach and to provide some necessary redundancy on the cross-Channel route to cope with fires, accidents and terrorism without cutting London off.
There's a lot of Londoncentrism about but, ironically, I don't think HS2 is part of that.
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