Straight Talk

SO just how fast do some people want to go exactly?

I wondered that the other night as, during a pretty futile attempt to make myself seem a little more high-brow, I found myself watching a Channel Four News debate on the proposed building of a new high-speed rail line linking London with Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester.

In one corner was music producer and well-known rail enthusiast Pete Waterman, arguing that the country could not afford not to build this 225mph route, because we would be left even further behind by countries who already have extensive high-speed lines or are investing heavily in them and the existing network is already creaking.

In the other was someone whose name escapes me from a group opposed to it, complaining that the sums didn’t add up and the route wasn’t worth ripping through our green and pleasant land for.

It seems to be a classic case of how the other half doth live. After all, there they were talking about a rail link that would, if built, enable someone in London to get to Birmingham in 49 minutes, Manchester in 73 minutes and Leeds in 80 minutes. All of those times are shorter than the apparently perfectly reasonable 100 minutes or so that it takes for train passengers from Lynn to reach the capital.

And given the claim that it’s apparently meant to reduce the numbers of people taking domestic flights, I don’t really see reducing the journey time to Scotland to a mere three times the average flight time really doing much on that front.

So let’s get this straight. At the very moment that rail campaigners and politicians in this part of the world are jumping through various hoops just to get more than one train an hour to and from the capital, with the necessary infrastructure improvements that would be associated with that, the government is deciding whether to spend tens of billions on a line that will connect only a handful of places in a very short time and won’t actually be ready for another 15 years, Priorities and all that.

It did occur to me that the money needed to build the high-speed lines could go an awfully long way to bringing the network we’ve already got into the 21st century. I use the trains a lot, mainly to go to and from Leicester, and a mere trickle of the billions earmarked for the high-speed line would be very nice to put another coach or two on the slower trains or have a few more faster trains on that route thank you very much.

But something else also occurred to me. As Mr Waterman made the argument that we had to build this thing because it’s better than what we’ve got now and other countries were doing so, it struck me that argument was oh so similar to the idea that we’ve got to put up with an incinerator because burning our waste is somehow better than burying it.

Who’s right is one issue. But if the people don’t want it, should they be forced to put up with it?