High-speed line wins go-ahead

The most eye-catching aspect of yesterday's package of rail announcements is the establishment of a company to plan and build Britain's second dedicated high-speed rail line.

High Speed 2 will be set up to explore the options for a rail line heading west out of London to a new Heathrow International hub near the airport, before going on initially to the West Midlands, but possibly eventually to Scotland.

However, in the immediate future, another aspect of the announcement will prove still more significant for the national rail network. It promises a decision before the end of this year on restarting the UK's rail electrification programme, which largely ended in 1991 with completion of work on the London-Edinburgh East Coast Main Line. The next lines to be electrified are the Great Western Main Line from London to Wales and the West Country and the Midland Main Line from London to Nottingham and Sheffield. Electric routes are less prone to delays because electric trains are more -reliable.

"We need to see a high level of network resilience," Lord Adonis, the junior transport minister, said yesterday.

The plan draws heavily on two pieces of work done outside government. The first, prepared by Arup, the consulting engineers, proposes a hub serving Heathrow on the Great Western Main Line and a dedicated, high-speed rail line to the hub from St Pancras in central London.

The other work has been done by Greengauge 21, a pressure group set up in 2006 to press for construction of a new high-speed rail line. Its work addresses the key problem faced by construction of a high-speed rail line in the UK - that there are insufficient domestic air passengers on most routes that could transfer to high-speed rail to justify a new line. Greengauge's work instead bases its case on another factor - that within two decades all the capacity on the southern part of the London-Glasgow West Coast Main Line will be exhausted and some kind of alternative will be needed. Greengauge's work has consequently foreseen construction of a high-speed link first to Birmingham then on to Manchester and possibly further north as more and more of the line's capacity is used up.

Lord Adonis acknowledged that the work of both organisations had been important but said the government was setting up a separate company because it wanted detailed, independent advice at this point in planning. The same route had been taken with the development of High Speed 1, the line between St Pancras International and the Channel Tunnel completed in 2007, and with Crossrail, on which work is just starting.