Was it worth the massive disruption it would cause?

FOR a change, some good news: the Government has scrapped plans for the HS2 rail line past Nottingham – and the Midland Main Line is to be electrified, writes Anton Rippon.

Electrifying the Derby-London line is something that I’ve been banging on about for years. And I’ve always been an opponent of HS2, an eye-wateringly expensive vanity project. It’s too late to undo the damage already done, but, yes, this is good news.

I’ve long championed public transport. For well over 50 years working as a journalist and writer, I’ve travelled the length and breadth of mainland Britain, from Aberdeen to Exeter, from Liverpool to Norwich, using the country’s railway system. It could have been easier if Dr Beeching hadn’t wielded his axe in the 1960s, closing 4,500 miles of railway line and more than 2,000 stations, most of them in rural locations.

But it was still doable well before someone had the idea to build HS2, a high-speed railway that promised to get people in the Midlands, the North and Scotland to London a bit quicker.

The cost was already mind-boggling. And it kept getting bigger. In 2019 it was announced that the current estimated cost of completing HS2 was between £72bn and £98bn (at 2019 prices), compared with an original budget of £55.7bn in 2015 (at 2015 prices).

Was it worth the massive disruption it would cause to the hundreds of thousands of people whose homes lay in its intended path? I wanted to see the HS2 billions diverted to health, education, and law and order. HS2 also threatened 350 unique habitats, 98 irreplaceable ancient woods, 30 river corridors and 24 Sites of Special Scientific Interest. I’m no eco-warrior but I was in sympathy with Swampy on this one.

To me, there was also a local flaw. It didn’t take long to work out that, to catch HS2 to London, I would first have to travel to a new station at Toton. I might as well just get on the train from Derby. Now electrification of the Midland Main Line will get me there quicker anyway.

Reopening many of the lines axed under Beeching has also long been a bee in my bonnet. Let’s reconnect rural communities. And better eastwest rail links in the north will help to regenerate that region. We need to get people off the roads and back on to public transport wherever possible. That would certainly be a huge step forward.

And there’s another thing. Since the first bulldozers moved into Euston – and destroyed not just my favourite old London pub but the entire street in which it stood – we’ve been introduced to Covid.

No doubt the costs of the pandemic to the economy has helped bring about this decision on HS2. Which is ironic, since business travel is unlikely to recover as more people choose to work from home. Office workers in the rest of the country now enjoy Zoom meetings with colleagues in London. The promise of shorter travelling times to the capital isn’t as attractive now.

It’s a pity that the light didn’t shine earlier, but, better late than never.