Railway Dreams

Monday, 23rd March 2009

Place your bets, please, if you think this is actually likely to happen:

The fastest, most frequent train service in the world could run between London and the North within 12 years, according to the chairman of the government-owned company planning the high-speed link.
Double-deck trains travelling at 225mph (360km/h) and carrying up to 800 passengers would depart every four minutes, cutting the journey time from London to Birmingham to 30 minutes and from London to Manchester to just over an hour.

I mean, it would be grand if it did but given this country's record on large scale infrastructure projects this seems a highly improbable venture. After all, in this part of the world it's taking the best part of 15 years to reopen the Waverley line from Edinburgh to the Borders. That's 15 years for no more than 40 miles of track...

Filed under: Britain (736 more articles) , Trains (5 more articles)

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Rhoda Klapp

March 23rd, 2009 12:48pm Report this comment

The Victorians built the entire railway system in a couple of decades. We could not do it again, nor one tenth of it. This one is probably a pipe dream, but the object today is the project, not the completion of it. Let's not let them start unless we are guaranteed a commissioning date, with penalties for failure.

Occasional Ostrich

March 23rd, 2009 2:48pm Report this comment

You state "between London and the North", but it appears the plans reach no further than Manchester. Viewed from Northumberland, and even more so from Edinburgh, that's somewhere in the south Midlands.

Fergus Pickering

March 24th, 2009 2:22pm Report this comment

Manchester s in the North. Mancunians are Northerners. Edinburgh is in Scotland and was positively crammed with Scots last time I looked. As for Northumberland, I thought it was mostly sheep in those parts.

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