HS2’s boss is right – it’s push on or be rubbed out

I’m sure HS2 chairman Sir David Higgins is right to argue that if we’re serious about building a new north-south rail network, we should get on with it. The greater the number of general elections between conception and completion of any infrastructure scheme, the less likely it is to happen. Lord Mandelson revealed last year that Labour only gave this one the go-ahead in 2009 as a political gimmick; Ed Balls’s comments on it last week signalled that an incoming Labour cabinet might drop the project as casually as it was green-lighted in the first place if it doesn’t suit the short-term  politics of 2015.

So the best option for Higgins is to push the boulder uphill a little faster, while finding ways to shave the costs. I think he’s right that greater connectivity and capacity in inter-city rail will help address economic imbalances between north and south, while improving opportunities for growth at both ends; right also that the more northern towns are connected, the more momentum of support there will be. I’m sure I.K. Gricer, Christopher Fildes’s former railway correspondent, has been cheering in his care home at the prospect of Crewe regaining its status as a great transport hub.

But I’m sorry to see — for the second time in recent years — the abandonment of plans for a direct link from the north to the Eurostar network. For a saving of £700  million, HS2 passengers will have to lug their suitcases from Euston to St Pancras for connections to Paris. The consolation is that ugly Euston will be redeveloped and may even have its great Victorian arch reinstalled. I still prefer the idea, sent to me by an Amersham resident whose patio is due to become an HS2 cutting, of leaving Euston as a commuter station and bringing in the track from the north on an eastern route terminating in Kings Cross-St Pancras.