"High-speed has well and truly arrived in Britain," he says as the sleek purple express that has carried us from London pulls away. A Paris-bound Eurostar roars past, but already Adonis is up the utilitarian metal stairs and grilling the station manager about the route's performance. So far, there have been few problems on the new Javelin service, which began, in limited form, last month and opens properly in December. It has hit 99.1% punctuality, and the Ashford trains have had to be doubled in length to cope with commuter demand.

The man who wants to have the biggest impact on Britain's rail network of anyone since Dr Beeching is determined to link London and the great cities of the north with a fast line. "This is the country that led railway development in the Victorian era and there is absolutely no reason why we can't at least catch up, he says. "I think it will bring about a wider social transformation too. If you look at those things which systematically bridge the north-south divide, high-speed rail has a big part to play."

The hard part will be finding the money: a new line would cost well over £20bn. Funding the line, when transport budgets are being cut, will be tough. "Other countries which have made high-speed rail a priority have found it affordable by allocating long-term infrastructure funding to it. The French have decided to allocate €16bn to high-speed rail between now and 2020. It looks to me the more you build it the cheaper it becomes," he says.

Some critics wonder if this is not a distraction from the financial woes of the existing network, although Adonis argues that Britain can have better commuter services, as well as fast rail. Most of the cost, which he wants to be shared with the private sector, will fall after the recession is over, he says. "If we make it a national priority it is affordable, if we don't it's not – it is as simple as that. The only thing holding us back was absence of a plan and absence of political will."

Adonis is more than a train spotter in charge of the tracks. A former Liberal Democrat who became head of policy for Tony Blair, he pushed through radical education reforms and still sometimes slips into Blairite language. "You have to be a change-maker," he says. "The hard part is having a concrete plan which can be implemented, which will involve some tough choices in terms of routes and financing."

Appointed rail minister by Gordon Brown less than a year ago, and promoted to the cabinet as transport secretary in June, Adonis is a politician in a hurry. He wants to nail down plans for the first stage of the line between London and Birmingham by the end of the year, aware that the election could see him out of a job. "I would regard it as a great success if all three parties went in with similar commitments to building high-speed rail so that after a general election the plans do then proceed," he says – omitting to mention that the opposition parties backed high-speed rail well ahead of Labour. Some wonder if he might find a place championing rail in a Cameron government – although he adds dutifully: "I have every confidence Labour will win."

Adonis says: "We have had a massive national aversion to long-term transport planning. We had this view that high-speed trains might be suitable for France and Japan but these were highly exceptional. While we were busy conducting ideological experiments in rail privatisation most of the rest of Europe was getting on with the serious job of building high-speed railway lines astonishingly fast." He rattles off the facts like an enthusiast. "Spain, which didn't start until the 1990s, now has 1,600km in operation, 2,200 under construction, and 1,700 planned. This year Spain has a budget of €6bn just for building high-speed rail lines.

"We've set up a dedicated company, High Speed Two, which by December will produce a dedicated route plan for the first stage of a high-speed line between London and the West Midlands including all associated environmental and economic assessments. We've also asked it to recommend a broad route north to Scotland."

His dream is that before the middle of the century a rapid line will curve through the country like a reversed letter S – first to Birmingham, then Manchester, then under the Pennines to Leeds, before heading north to Newcastle and Scotland. The dream sounds thrilling. Adonis knows he has only a few months to turn it into a reality.

See also:

High-speed rail: Fast train coming

The Guardian: 4 August 2009
Editorial

There was a time when all the world firsts in rail took place in the UK – the first modern locomotive, the first intercity line and the first train-travelling monarch. That time, however, was the second quarter of the 19th century, and for very many years now Britain's railways have, as it were, been stuck on the slow train. No principally domestic mainline has been built in over a century, and the spread of high-speed services – from Japan in the 1960s through France in the 80s to Spain in the 90s – has all but failed to reach these shores. The transport secretary, Andrew Adonis, today tells the Guardian of his lofty ambitions for bridging the rail gap.

It is telling that Britain's one new line, and its sole high-speed service, connects St Pancras and the Channel Tunnel. That project invited cross-channel comparisons, and the shaming contrast with the French convinced Whitehall that muddling through over creaking old tracks was no longer a viable option. At all other times the government, and perhaps the public, have grown used to thinking of high-speed rail in the same way as figurative art or winning Wimbledon – a wonderful thing that the British are not cut out for. That makes Lord Adonis's talk of replacing all domestic flights – and some European ones – with high-speed rail an apparently bold break with the past.

The past lack of ambition reflected many things – the quarter-century of falling public capital investment that followed the 1976 IMF cuts; a botched privatisation and the 2000 Hatfield crash, both of which led to problems that drained money and energy when the public expenditure taps were switched back on; above all, a crippling sense of self-doubt about the British ability to pull off a grand projet. The completion of the Channel Tunnel link – which was built on time and on budget – make this the time to exorcise the demons of doubt.

Spain had no high-speed rail at all as recently as 1992, but now has some 2,000km, and is set to build far more. The conventional assumption has been that rail will decline. This reflected the post-war reality of a growing proportion of journeys being made by road and by air. But it obscured the potential for rail in the deeper connection between the slow rising tide of prosperity and the total volume of travel. People have grown richer over the decades by travelling further to seek out opportunities, and in addition they have also spent a portion of the resulting extra affluence on going further for leisure. Thus, despite all the setbacks, total rail traffic is up by a third since privatisation. Meanwhile Eurostar – and other high-speed lines on the continent – have now more than proved that they can compete with aviation. The lesson is plain: build it – and they will come.

Climate change reinforces the argument, as the carbon emissions from a train journey are only a fraction of those from boarding a plane or driving. Another consideration is re-energising the regions. That task that has attracted more failed policies than just about any other, but a high-speed link between – say – Manchester and Leeds would be almost bound to help integrate business in these two cities. It is not just a question of speed, but also of reliability and, equally importantly, capacity: business travellers will be much more inclined to take the train if they are certain they can get a seat.

First the Liberal Democrats and later the Conservatives committed themselves to a rail renaissance before Lord Adonis finally nailed Labour's colours to the mast, and he is taking shrewd account of this. He has tasked engineers with drafting a ready-to-go manual for building the line Britain needs, hoping to win all-party agreement on a definitive blueprint ahead of the election. The government urgently needs to give some thought to the country it is likely to be leaving behind in less than a year's time. High-speed rail has been a slow train coming for Britain. If Lord Adonis can now give it momentum, it could be a proud part of the legacy.

See also:

Make do and mend: how Britain neglected its railways

The Guardian: 5 August 2009
Julian Glover and Dan Milmo

Clapham Junction station in London. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP

In July 1837 Britain opened an engineering marvel: the world's first, fast intercity railway between London and Birmingham. A century and a half later, the route came to symbolise Britain's disastrous transport planning. Taxpayers spent £9bn upgrading the line, only for trains to run more slowly and less frequently than promised. Figures last week showed that the west coast route is one of the least reliable services in the country.

The west coast shambles is the reason that the transport secretary and rail engineers want to escape from the make-do-and-mend approach which has seen Britain slip down the railway league table. While Japan, France and now Spain made the leap into a new generation of rail technology and high-speed routes, Britain neglected its trains.

"Railways were not the priority. The priority was to complete the motorway network and manage the railways as best we could on an annual budget," says Jim Steer, former head of strategy at the Strategic Rail Authority.

A succession of transport ministers aimed to keep trains out of the headlines.

"In the 1980s British Rail was expected to manage the railways better, to be more customer-responsive. There was no thought that rail might do more – or in fairness, less – than it had done over the previous 10 years. Any investment expenditure was expected to be more or less self-financing," he said.

In tight circumstances, BR did its best, investing in some electric routes and the InterCity 125 diesel express, still the mainstay of many services. But modernisation always faltered in the face of political confusion and a lack of cash.

In 1955, the recently nationalised British Railways promoted an upgrade plan that aimed to put the network back in profit. Instead much of the cash was wasted.

"British Rail was obsessed with setting out a vision, but never defined what the railways were for or what they were good at," said Tim Leunig, an economic historian at the LSE. "The government threw huge sums at BR, which always promised to break even and never did. It was the most bailed-out organisation in Britain."

While France was setting out plans for its TGV fast network, Britain was experimenting with incremental improvements, including the short-lived APT tilting train from London to Scotland.

"Nobody was prepared to find the money for the investment under the Tories, and not a lot under us," admitted John Prescott, transport secretary from 1997 to 2001.

Stephen Glaister, professor of transport and infrastructure at Imperial College London, said: "British governments have been much more concerned about value for money and have been much less willing to spend taxpayers' money on any form of transport and big infrastructure. The French and Spanish have taken a completely different line."

Decline set in long before privatisation, which ministers hoped would free railways from the political neglect that had left them underfunded.

"The principles behind privatisation were to create a train-operating industry with a number of players," said Sir George Young, the transport secretary who oversaw the process. "The aim was to increase capital investment by placing the industry in the private sector so it was no longer at the end of the queue for Treasury investment."

Bound by tight Treasury spending rules, however, there was never enough long-term money for Britain to copy France and build new routes.

"In an ideal world unconstrained by limited resources, I would be wholly in favour of new high-speed rail lines," said Young. "But if the funding for them comes out of a highly constrained rail transport budget, one has to ask some hard questions about priorities."

Privatisation, completed in 1997 as Labour came to power, put the brakes on strategic thinking.

Companies bought new trains and passenger numbers climbed by 40%, but costs rose too: the current rail subsidy of almost £5bn a year is well above levels under nationalisation.

Prescott said that in Tony Blair's first term the government was preoccupied with bailing out the high-speed Channel tunnel route from Dover to London and the task of dealing with the now-defunct Railtrack, the owner of Britain's privatised tracks, stations and signals which was taken over by the government-backed Network Rail in 2002.

"That was a real bloody problem because we had people in control who had more interest in getting profits than doing the work properly," he said.

Prescott's lessons from the Channel tunnel rail link, since renamed High Speed 1, contained a veiled warning about the private sector's ability to underwrite a major transport project.

HS1 was completed only after the government stepped in to guarantee bonds issued to pay for the £5.7bn route: "The government was the only one that could find the resources, so we nationalised it [HS1] – and it came out on time and on schedule."

See also:

Can the train take the strain?

The Guardian: 5 August 2009
Christian Wolmar

Andrew Adonis is promoting high-speed rail to cut short-haul flights in the UK, but the environmental case is far from proven

The idea of a high-speed line connecting London to Scotland has obvious appeal. Economists support it because major transport infrastructure schemes are seen as having enormous regenerative benefits, especially in deprived areas; passengers like it because trains are seen as a nice way to travel; and environmentalists are supportive because railways are reckoned to be the greenest way to go from A to B.

However, it is not that simple. While the idea of having a high-speed rail network appears attractive, all these reasons have strong counter-arguments. Transport links are only useful if they are accompanied by other forms of development, and just because people like the idea of rail travel, it does not mean that they will necessarily use it unless the pricing signals are right – that is, unless it costs less to travel by train than by car.

Unfortunately for its advocates like Lord Adonis, it is the environmental argument for high speed rail that is the weakest. The most common assumption is that high-speed trains will attract people who otherwise would travel by flying. Indeed, this has happened in France where the TGV has virtually wiped out the air service between Paris and Lyon, and in Spain where the same thing has happened between Madrid and Seville.

But these are far larger countries where major towns are separated by much bigger distances than in the UK. London and Birmingham are 120 miles apart, far too short a distance for aviation to attract a major share of the market. While considerable numbers of people do travel by air between London and Manchester, most are taking connecting flights and would not be attracted onto high-speed rail unless there were a station under Heathrow. And then the issue is whether that would not simply attract more people onto domestic air services by improving access to the airport.

Few people fly between London and Leeds, and even Newcastle has only a small share of the market. It is only when one considers London-Scotland routes that aviation starts to dominate and, again, one has to ask whether a high-speed line would attract a sufficient proportion of them to justify the huge cost of building the line.

Moreover, the conventional train services in many European countries are nothing like as good as those on what was British Rail's InterCity network. We already have four trains per hour between the capital and Birmingham, taking just 90 minutes, which is far faster than can be achieved in a car, even taking into account the trips to and from stations. To be sure, there is a capacity issue, and essentially the main function of a high-speed line would be to provide an extra pair of tracks to allow more train services to be run. But that is not a green argument. Many of those people might otherwise not travel at all or would do so on conventional rail services, which will be more fuel efficient than high-speed lines.

The environmental case for high-speed rail is not proven and cannot rely on the vague notion that people will be attracted away from air, especially while government policy favours aviation through low taxation and a planning regime that is designed to accommodate seemingly unlimited growth.