How many commuters in Kent are irritated that trains from Dover, Folkestone and Canterbury to London run at “only” 140mph rather than the 186mph achieved by Eurostar on the same stretch of track.
I imagine the answer is zero. Were more expensive, energy-devouring trains put on the Southeastern links to and from London St Pancras, they might save 10 minutes a day. But to a woman and man, regular rail users enjoy much more reliable services than before the High Speed One link was opened.
While you can still go the slow (and very pretty) way by train from the Kent coast to London Charing Cross, the vast majority of journeys from east Kent to the capital have moved to the fleet of 140mph Javelin expresses running on dedicated tracks. Local commuter services are more predictable, too, no longer having to make way for longer-distance trains trying to thread their way to London on Victorian infrastructure.
Other, hidden benefits including freeing up capacity on the low-speed network, allowing freight to shift from the M2 and M20 to rail.
Eurostar needs to operate at 186mph on HS1, and in France, because on a 300-mile plus journey such as London to Paris the extra speed makes a tangible difference. Were it only 140mph all the way, the 2hrs 15m inter-capital journey could take half an hour longer, losing its edge against the airlines. But in a compact, crowded nation such as Britain, what’s a few minutes between friends?
You will recall the unforgivable cancellation of the Birmingham-Manchester stretch of HS2 by railway-loathing Rishi Sunak. In a vain attempt to shore up the motoring vote, he reversed 15 years of cross-party agreement and pretended that the money saved would be spent on piecemeal transport improvements collectively called “Network North”, which surprisingly included projects in Kent and Devon.
Now the mayors of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands are seeking to rescue this vital piece of infrastructure from the last prime minister’s bonfire of transport modernity. Andy Burnham and Richard Parker are backing a cheaper, slower version of the originally planned line. It would take the pressure from the West Coast main line north of Birmingham: offering a path for Quite High Speed trains through Staffordshire and Cheshire, connecting with Northern Powerhouse Rail.
QHS2, as I shall call it, is not a perfect remedy, but would rescue the nation from transportational ignominy and magnify the benefits of the sad and ludicrously expensive little stump of HS2 that the last government left us with.
Quite High Speed is all we need. No one cares if London-Manchester takes 15 minutes longer than originally envisaged by HS2 planners, so long as the journey dramatically outpaces the car and can be relied upon. Currently, Avanti West Coast trains must jostle their way on a network crowded with freight, “outer suburban” and regional trains. That is why, even with trains capable of 125mph, the fastest journey on the 189-mile link via Crewe averages only 90mph.
As the transport guru Thomas Ableman says: “The purpose of HS2 is an investment to transform the economics of this country. At the moment, Britain is one of the most unequal countries when it comes to productivity: London, incredibly high; cities of the North, some of the lowest in Europe.
“This is about equalising that and it’s absolutely the right thing to do. Does that mean it needs to be a 200mph or 225mph railway? Almost certainly not. Putting in place the capacity to make that transformational change possible is far more important than the precise specification that was developed for the original HS2 project.
“Quite frankly, HS2 has become something of a toxic term. A more conventional railway that provides the connectivity, provides the capacity could be exactly the way of unlocking what would otherwise be a very knotty political problem.”
HS2 was always about unlocking capacity by taking all the express passenger trains from the existing network onto new, 21st-century lines. QHS2 will do just as well.