Should an environmentalist support HS2?

I have promised previously to write about HS2 and this week presented an opportunity as I debated the issue with friends from Christian Ecology Link. The discussion was sparked off by a recent Guardian article which concluded that “areas of irreplaceable natural value along the planned HS2 route, including 48 ancient woodlands that are home to rare bats and butterflies would be damaged by just phase one of the route (London to Birmingham)”. So is it possible to justify such destruction and still call myself an environmentalist?

I believe the questions we need to ask are: is there a genuine need for this new infrastructure? And if so, how do we deliver it to get the maximum benefit and ensure the minimum damage? Many people have characterised the route as a vanity project, focused on achieving high speeds which would take 25 minutes off journey times from Birmingham to London at a high financial and environmental cost. As a railway engineer, I believe that is missing the point: the problem is capacity, and speed is a side issue.
I have already written about the huge investment taking place over the next five years across the whole railway network to bring in new, longer trains; extend platforms; increase the speed wherever possible and address bottlenecks such as Werrington Junction near Peterborough. Several closed routes are being reopened (eg Borders Rail which will open in 2015), and I expect that after the Dawlish experience reopening at least one other line to the south west will be a high priority.
The problem is, even after putting in £27bn, we will still have a massive capacity issue. Just like Heathrow, where a plane takes off or lands every 90 seconds, our mainline railways are full - we cannot fit any more trains on the network, and any minor perturbation knocks the whole timetable out, with delays affecting people for hours afterwards. The rail network carries more people now than it has done since the 1920s, before the age of mass motor transport, and we expect to see 30% more freight and 50 to 100% more passengers over the next 20 to 30 years: where are we going to put them? This is why we need a new north-south link.
Then the question arises: should it be a “high speed” railway? Given that the journey from London to Edinburgh or Glasgow currently takes more than four hours (and six hours from Aberdeen), there is potential to significantly improve journey times with a high speed link, taking passengers away from air travel. There is virtually no difference between the design of a new railway line for standard long-distance services (currently 125mph) and for running trains at 200mph. The environmental impacts are virtually the same as well: same land take, same impact on existing habitats, same energy used to build the earthworks and bridges. So for the purposes of providing more north-south capacity, it makes no sense to build a "standard" line instead of a high speed route. There is some difference in the electricity consumption, but not much.
And we need to consider that this will be a route we will be using for the next 100+ years, so we should build it with the potential for trains to run even faster in the future. The cost-benefit analysis for the route is based only on the next 30 years, with a discount rate to account for inflation. But does discounting make sense? If you look at the Victorian railway network we have at the moment, the value has actually increased over time: we run far more trains per day on it now than they did, and we expect to keep it running for another 100 years!
Conversely, converting the existing lines to run faster is a complete nightmare: we need to get rid of all level crossings, install a new cab-based signalling system because you can't rely on a driver to see 'traffic light' style signals out of his cab in sufficient time to brake at higher speeds and most importantly, we would have to rebuild most of the bridges and embankments because they were "designed" over 100 years ago (for that read: made of whatever material the Victorians had lying around, usually ash!) for trains which ran at 30 to 60 mph. Even after all that, we'll be lucky to get the trains running at 140mph, let alone 200mph. More importantly, it is very difficult to do all this work on a running railway, with short overnight possessions or the occasional weekend. The work has already been done to prove that upgrading the existing network will not provide the capacity we need, and would involve massive disruption for passengers for years on end (remember the West Coast Mainline upgrade?)
So my conclusion is: there is a definite need for more rail capacity, particularly along the north-south corridor to get people to and from Scotland. A new railway is the best way to achieve this, and if we are building from scratch we should build it to 21st century standards rather than 19th century ones, which means higher speeds can be achieved. The Japanese have benefited from high speed rail connections between their major cities since the 1960s, so it seems odd that another highly developed overcrowded island nation has taken 50 years to catch up with this supposedly “new” technology. But importantly, I support HS2 in principle – as with so many things, the devil is in the detail. In my next post I'll be looking at the question of how to address the environmental concerns with building a new railway, and how to make HS2 part of a truly effective sustainable transport network.