HS2 is madness
I love railways and (aged 12) cried tears of rage and sorrow when Dr Beeching ripped them up. But even I can see that ...
AS A small boy, I actually cried when they tore up the railways. It was fury as much as it was sorrow. I could see it was wrong and stupid, but nobody else could. Railways were not just beautiful and perfectly suited to our intimate, gentle landscape. They were plainly far safer and more efficient than horrible cars and grinding, stinking lorries, with their endless scraping, scouring traffic noise that we have had to endure ever since, everywhere and all the time. Almost everyone told me it was inevitable progress, that I was a silly nostalgist in love with the past. And this was when I was aged 12.
The closure of two lines in particular broke my heart. The first was the express route which ran from Exeter to Plymouth around the top of Dartmoor. It was, as such things often are, a magnificent feat of engineering, in the midst of a rugged and lonely landscape.
Everyone now knows its closure was a mistake. Every time the sea washes away the other westbound route at Dawlish (which seems to be quite often), it is obvious that it was crazy to destroy this alternative. And in the peak months of summer, the surviving line cannot cope with the demand and so, of course, the roads to the West are jammed.
The same is true of the other line I missed the most, the ‘Hayling Billy’, which rattled and wheezed past the bottom of our Hampshire suburban garden every 20 minutes. Because its picturesque tank engines were actually Victorian, it worked unfailingly. You could set your watch by it.
Nowadays, anyone wanting to reach the beaches of Hayling Island in summer has to sit in a traffic queue for the inadequate road bridge. Try it. As you drum your fingers impatiently on the steering wheel, you can admire the surprisingly solid remnants of the dismantled railway bridge alongside.
SIMILAR remnants are to be found all round my home town, and probably yours as well. Fair-sized market towns, now much bigger than they were in the 1960s, were cut off from train services by some modernminded idiot in Whitehall in thickrimmed glasses and a stripy suit. The result? More traffic, more accidents, more filthy air, more noise, more imported cars and oil. And more blighting of the landscape by ugly new roads. So I should surely be cheering on any plans to build new railway lines, such as HS2. Well, I am not. HS2 is a stupid waste of space and money. Our country is too small to benefit from the high-speed lines that work well only in the huge empty spaces of France and Spain.
The gains are not worth the everincreasing cost. What is more, we are no good at this sort of thing.
My journey to work has been bedevilled for years by endless costly renewal projects. Paddington Station has been besieged by construction works for nearly ten years, thanks to work on the Crossrail tunnel, which never seems to be finished and has risen in cost by 25 per cent since it began. I am also now supposed to be benefiting from the separate Great Western electrification, which has never been finished because the costs tripled and work overran so much that important chunks of it were pathetically abandoned. Flashy-looking new trains were delivered with what must be among the most uncomfortable seats ever inflicted on passengers – a decision for which nobody, anywhere, takes responsibility. The fares are high enough to make Bill Gates wince. And the trains are still reliable for one thing only – they are almost always late.
By contrast, Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the whole Great Western line from London to Bristol, to superb standards, in just five years from 1836 to 1841. I think the trouble is that, when we privatised the railways, we scattered to the winds more than a century of accumulated wisdom and experience, which we are now painfully trying to recreate. If we have billions to spend on railways, and I hope we really do, can it be spent first of all on putting back what was so stupidly destroyed in the 1960s? It’ll take us much longer to restore than it took the Victorians to build it, but we might relearn the skills we have lost.