Whats not to like about high-speed rail?
Hallelujah. Heathrow’s third runway is history, the biggest victory for the environment movement since the scrapping of the last Tory government’s road-building programme. Gone, too, is the planned expansion of Gatwick and Stansted (though the government has so far said nothing about airport expansion elsewhere). Instead we’ll have a high-speed railway connecting London to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. All hail to the new age of the train. Perhaps. I don’t dispute the problem. Both roads and railways are close to gridlock. New motorways, government figures show, scarcely improve journey times between city centres. Upgrading old railways snarls up the system even more, costs a fortune and adds little to their capacity. New lines, by contrast, free up the old tracks for freight and local trains. They allow companies to run longer trains and additional services. High-speed rail cuts journey times almost twice as much as new conventional tracks while costing scarcely any more. The gree
