Why does the UK not have a dedicated high-speed rail network?

Question

On the continent, high-speed lines are being built in and between most countries, but not here. There's just the one high-speed line for the Eurostar in Kent.

Answer 1

I think you can sum it up in one word - 'underinvestment'. In this country we are dogged by an establishment that thinks rail should be a profit-making business and don't understand that for it to be efficient, it has to be publicly owned, publicly funded and publicly accountable.

As a result, when the railways were nationalised they were starved of funds, now we have a privately-owned train system (Network Rail is state-owned and non-profit-making) and funds that should be going into investment are going to keep shareholders happy.

Labour promised that the railways would be renationalised and it begs the question, if they can operate Network Rail as a state-owned concern, why not the trains and maintenance?

Answer 2

A good question ... but also:-

Why do we not have an adequate motorway network?

Why do we not have an alternative to the M25?

There are powerful, well organised and well funded lobbies out there who will oppose anything like this as a matter of principle.  They talk emotive cr*p about 'concreting over the countryside'.    And just whose countryside is that?  Is it reserved for the minority who enjoy huge financial subsidies from the rest of us so THEY can have a pretty green environment while the bulk of us are forced to live in ever tighter and less humane housing densities in the towns and cities.

Of course a decent road and rail network would NOT despoil the countryside but we, the normal punters and majority of the tax payers, do not have the backing or pressure groups or the funding or the tax breaks from being a so-called charity.

Where is our equivalent of the National Trust, National Heritage Trust, Natural England, Committee for the Protection of Rural England  and goodness knows how many other bodies pursuing their own private, single-issue agenda.

Of course it will cost a lot to sort out the railways and the roads but these are essential to the economic strength of the country and the quality of life of the majority of the population - so let's start diverting public money and tax breaks to where it can do the most good for the most people.

Answer 3

Ok so what 90% of the other peoples who have answered your question have given you the right answers.....What i can add is that, the CEO (Chief Exectutive Officer) of Network Rail & alot of the TOC's  (train operating companies) are putting pressure on the goverment to plan for HS2 (HS2 is the planned name for High Speed line section 2)...The thing is that the goverment are scared of committing to this sort of project. Take the Thameslink 2000 project, it was supposed to have been completed by the year 2000, but John Prescott would not sign the 'White Paper' giving it the go-a-head and it was only signed off last August. So it will now not be completed until about 2013. All because one person did not like the idea (& he was the son of a Railway person!!!)

Answer 4

Because the country is not big enough, to make it worth while there would need to be so many stops, that the trains would never get up to speed.

Answer 5

Space and money.  All land is owned in some way by many people and the laws that allow development, the laying of a permanent way suitable for a high speed link, the noise, the damage, the infrastructure needed, etc,etc.

Answer 6

the british government clearly has other priorities in life

er, like helping to invade iraq......

Answer 7

I don't know if it's the case now but at one time the UK had a greater proportion of 100MPH lines than anywhere else in the World. Like everyone says, underinvestment is the key to not having these high speed lines. Journey times have increased since British rail! We have had the same high speed train for over 30 years!

Answer 8

Lots of reasons; successive governments have been reluctant

to invest sufficient sums in the railways to create a high speed network like TGVs in France but our main Inter City routes do run at speeds of up to 125 m.p.h. In France heavy investment in the TGV system has meant that secondary lines

have been neglected,rural lines often closed and frequencies on some routes reduced. Britain's rail network is dense and mostly high fequency with many lines running at urban metro

frequencies. For example there are 6 trains per hour between

Brighton and London, 2 to 3 between Manchester and London, 4 per hour between Birmingham and London via two different routes. The high density high frequency nature of the British system has allowed passenger numbers to rise by almost 50% over the past 10 years,

Answer 9

Because Governments of all colours have not been prepared to fund them - unlike the French. It's nothing to do with pressure groups like the National Trust or CPRE - who would probably welcome railways as opposed to more motorways.

Answer 10

No desire by any government to sink the necessary billions of pounds into building dedicated high-speed routes, despite the fact that Britain is ideally suited to such routes being built.

Under-investment of British Rail in the 1980s is the main reason for the demise of the APT tilting-train project which came very close to offering 155mph speeds on the WCML, while the off-spring of the APT, the Italian Pendolino (which was then developed based on much of the research done by BR with the APT) is only capable of doing 125mph with the current signalling.  The APT was way ahead of its time and showed what BR could have done if given a bit more money and a bit more time to fix the problems (in fact in one crucial way, the APT was still superior to the current Pendolino because of the hydrokinetic brakes it used which allowed for incredible deceleration making a 155mph speed possible with existing signalling-- unfortunately problems with it, as well as the tilting mechanism, when it was publicly launched in freezing weather were what led to the project being cancelled).

The Conservative government then and for the next ten years had the policy of privatising every nationalised industry it could, and so they sold what was BR as a number of seperate companies, and the rest is history-- the complete mess that is Britain's privatised railways.

There will never be another high speed line here unless the railways are re-nationalised, because the cost of building a new line requires massive investment by too many individual companies currently, some of which are on limited-length contracts.

Answer 11

it's all about money and the fact that the government either never has any or never wants to spend it.

Answer 12

As well as Eurostar............ there are none. Only the fast trains that don't stop at many stations from south and north england to London. However they can't really be classed as high speed trains when you compare them to the French TGV.

I don't know why we don't have any, it is a very good idea to have some.

Answer 13

Underinvestment and a clapped out victorian infrastructure. Bear this in mind - when was the last time Bangladesh Railways had major delays caused by leaves on the line or over running maintenance schedules?

Britain is a laughing stock. And our trains don't have people and livestock hanging on to the sides of the carriages.

Answer 14

For the same reason that we don't have decent motorway links around and into our major cities. The freaks and other transport haters use all the legal processes possible to prevent improvements. Also coordination within government departments is reminiscent of "Yes Minister".

Answer 15

We haven't got a dedicated anything.

A train was tested out a few years ago.  Going round a bend all the dignitaries' drinks etc were flung around.

No follow up since.