Brian Micklethwait

Further to the previous posting, I took some pictures last week of St Pancras, and mentioned as an afterthought, that the place didn’t look entirely finished.  Fellow Transport Blogger Michael Jennings responded thus:

It is also worth observing that as well as being unfinished in the sense of shops not open and stuff like that, the station is very much unfinished in an operational sense as well. When St Pancras is finished, there will be four sets of services running from it. The first set is the long standing Midland Mainline services to places like Derby and Sheffield. The second set is the Eurostar services to continental Europe. The third is the Thameslink services, which will move from the present disgusting station in Pentonville Rd to a new set of platforms at St Pancras underneath the main station on December 9. Then in a couple of years time high speed domestic services to Kent (which will be operating Japanese Shinkansen “bullet trains” by the way) will start operating from more platforms inside the main old trainshed. And finally, the Thameslink line is going to be upgraded in the next few years to at least quadruple its capacity, which is going to mean that a large range of services to Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Surrey, Sussex, and Kent will be operating from St Pancras as well.

The point is that when all this happens, St Pancras will be just about the most important domestic station in London, even regardless of the international services.

I want to press Michael on the Shinkansen thing.  Will trains travel towards Kent at three hundred miles an hour, like in Japan, or will they trundle about the countryside at a mere hundred and fifty miles an hour?

Patrick Crozier

A French train driver passes his verdict on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link.

Hmm.  You know I could say:

You Bastard French.  You build some fancy-swanky rail link to your end of the tunnel turning our commuter lines (circa 1850) at the other end into an international laughing stock, forcing us to spend years in planning enquiries, and billions of our hard won treasure to make ourselves look like good Europeans, in the process succumbing to Zairean levels of corruption and graft, digging up half of London, even getting me to think this was a good idea, and after all that you dare to claim that actually, all things considered, you preferred it the way it was.  Fuck, fuck, fuck!

But, I won’t.

He’s right about high-speed trains, mind.  They are monotonous.

Patrick Crozier

Slow coach

This is not the BBC.

As updated 19th Century technology finally arrives into an updated 19th Century trainshed we ask why is it that Britons literally fly around Europe while Europeans still choose to dawdle on trains.  Why is it that, in the shape of the budget airlines, Britain has succeeded in providing fast and frequent travel for the masses while Europeans lavish ever greater sums on a technological dead end?

It is far from a simple question and there are plenty of potential culprits.  Many put the blame on the powerful climate change lobby.  Since the time of Asterix, Europeans have worried that something very bad is about to happen.  By the clever use of well-funded propaganda, the climate change lobby have convinced European populations that the something very bad is all the fault of the airplane.  As, in an attempt to appease Gaia, ever greater sums have been squandered on Europe’s so-called “high-speed” rail network Europeans have found themselves locked-in.  To admit the mistake would be to admit that they have been very wrong and very stupid for a very long time.

Meanwhile others look to latent militarism.  Many of Europe’s original railways were built at the behest of the military in order to ferry troops to national borders as quickly as possible.  Although Europe has to a large extent exorcised the ghost of militarism many see the obsession with new railways as a way of rekindling the flame.

But we can’t ignore the possibility of deep cultural differences between ourselves and the continent.  Europeans have a far greater appetite for the likes of Sartre, Goethe and Kierkegaard whose works continue to fly off the shelves. 

Put simply, Europeans like being miserable.

Further reading

The Success of the Industrial Revolution and the Failure of Political Revolutions: How Britain Got Lucky, Findlay Dunachie, Libertarian Alliance, 1996.

Why I am not that worried about the absence of high-speed lines in the UK, Transport Blog, 10 August 2004.

Against state-funded rail schemes, InstaPatrick, 6 December 2006.

Patrick Crozier

...on the Shanghai Maglev.

Fun. (Hat-tip: More Than Mind Games)

Julian Taylor admires France's TGV system. I quite agree with him. Just like it's Japanese counterpart, it is wonderful. Until, that is, you start looking at the bills - I seem to remember an estimate of £30bn from a few years ago.

There is another problem specific to the French system. The pursuit of high-speed services has apparently distorted the French railway leaving the rest of the network starved of funds struggling along with infrequent and irregular services.

Patrick Crozier

Link

356mph.

Which is a lot less than the fastest car (763mph).

But a lot more than the fastest production car (253mph).

Which in turn much faster than the fastest production train (186mph).

But is almost the same speed as the fastest Maglev (360mph).  Whoops.

And, in the final analysis, doesn’t really amount to a row of beans. To have trains running at that sort of speed in service would almost certainly require a lot of new track, although given that TGV’s already have in-cab signalling, they might be OK in that department.

And I haven’t even mentioned the cost.  High-speed rail schemes are without exception a financial disaster.

We are better off without them.

Pendolino crashes in the Lake District. 48 taken to hospital. No reports of any fatalities.

Update. One dead.

Patrick Crozier

The lead item on BBC Breakfast this morning (for the second time in little over a week) was transport.  An “official” (hmm, thinks: “I’ll have to add that to my list of banned words sometime") report calls for road tolling.

This I am in favour of.  Sorta kinda.  Ideally, I’d have private roads some of which would be tolls and some wouldn’t.

It’s just that I don’t go a bundle on the particular scheme that the government has in mind.

But then the item really started to go haywire.  Where would all the people priced off the roads go?, the reporter asked - neatly avoiding the possibility that road pricing might actually increase the number of people using roads.

But assuming he’s right one would have thought the answer was more roads but somehow that possibility didn’t come up either - so the suggestion was a new high-speed railway.  Again, he didn’t consider the possibility that people might like to stay at home, far less the possibility that a new high-speed line might be a very bad idea indeed.

Patrick Crozier

Lead item on BBC Breakfast the other morning was on the West Coast Main Line (WCML).  Apparently it’s running out of capacity so either they’ll have to put up the fares or introduce a fancy “computer-controlled” signalling system or the government will have to build a new, high-speed line.

(Is the comma in the right place in that last sentence?  It should mean a new line that is high-speed and not a new high-speed line to go with all the other ones.  Oh well, never mind).

The reporter also added that because the government was going to introduce toll charges on the motorways that would push lots of people onto the railways - again putting pressure on capacity.  He went on to suggest that what this showed was that the government needed to plan more and it would, therefore, be a good thing when the 30-year plan turned up.

A little later they interviewed Ian Coucher, a high-up at Network Rail.  He thought that all the problems could be solved with a few extra carriages and, anyway, the whole kerfuffle only served to underline that the whole thing was a “success story”.

Oh God.  Where does one start?

Well, let’s try the low-hanging fruit. 

“Computer-controlled" signalling.  I am far from an expert on the subject but I am pretty sure that the signallers have already managed to get the odd ZX80 into their control centres over the last 30 years or so.  What the reporter was probably referring to was “moving block” signalling which is an incredibly snazzy way of putting more trains through the same amount of track.  Snazzy, that is, in all respects apart from actually working.  It was tried on the Jubilee Line Extension.  It didn’t work.  It was thought about for the WCML.  The bosses thought it was spiffing.  The boffins took one look at it and realised it was a non-starter.  The company (Railtrack) went bust.

“Success story”.  The upgrade to the WCML (WCRM as it was known) cost, according to the report, £8.6bn (a sum that looks suspiciously low but I won’t bother arguing about on this occasion).  The tax payer will be lucky if he ever sees more than a few pennies of that.  So, it’s made a loss.  Losses are bad.

Now for the hard bit.  First of all, what’s wrong with it:

• The assumption that higher road prices will mean fewer people using the roads.  It could easily mean more.
• The assumption that if people do flee the roads they will end up on the railways.  They could equally easily end up at home.  Or on marble-smooth super-highways built by road entrepreneurs.
• The assumption that the state is any good at planning.
• The assumption that if the ultimate answer is a new railway that the state should fund the construction.  It shouldn’t.

And here’s how things should work:

• The roads should be privately owned.  So should the railways.
• Polluters should compensate their victims.  Railways just as much as roads.
• If there is enough of a market then road builders will build more.  Ditto railways.
• In the resulting market roads may still dominate but or it may be that railways become viable (though I doubt this) or neither.  Staying at home could well prove the best option.

But how would these new roads or railways be built?

Well, you’d have to abolish planning laws.  Not that that would be any big deal.  The lack of compulsory purchase might be an obstacle but I don’t think so.

Why do you doubt that rail would become viable?

I just don’t think that pollution charges for global warming would ever be that high.  And even if they were high, rail would be punished along with everyone else.  While on a per passenger per mile basis, trains may produce less greenhouse gases, a lot of energy will have gone into the creation of the infrastructure.