Several european countries are currently working on the extension and the modernization of their high-speed railways. Next year promises to be memorable with significant improvements in France, the Netherlands and the UK.
Please, post in this thread the news/pictures/opinions on this topic.
To begin with, an article about the opening of a new section of the Eurostar network to Central London.
Full speed ahead for Channel link
The Sunday Times
November 12, 2006
The railway is on schedule to be completed in a year’s time, reports Dominic O’Connell
A NEW NAME in rail transport will be launched in Britain this week when the Channel Tunnel Rail Link is renamed High Speed 1. In a year’s time it will start carrying high-speed services from London’s St Pancras station to Paris and Brussels.
Speed is what the new route is all about. Constructed at a cost of £5.8 billion, it is the first mainline railway built in Britain for more than a century. Eurostar trains have run from London since 1994, but have had to slow down in England to crawl across busy commuter lines. With the opening of the new link, they will run at the same speed as on France’s TGV tracks — 186mph.
Trips between London and Paris will take two hours 15 minutes, 20 minutes faster than the current quickest time — itself a 15-minute improvement on the original Eurostar journey thanks to the opening three years ago of the first section of the high-speed line, from the Channel tunnel to Fawkham junction, Kent. The second section runs from Fawkham across the Thames and into central London (through tunnels) from the east.
Rob Holden, chief executive of London & Continental Railways (LCR), the consortium that has built the line, said the name change signalled that construction was coming to an end and the first passenger services were only a year away.
“Channel Tunnel Rail Link is a bit of a mouthful and the initials CTRL don’t mean much to anyone who isn’t familiar with the project. We wanted to change the name, and high-speed rail has positive connotations here and in the rest of Europe,” he said.
The new name poses the question whether there might be a High Speed 2 in the pipeline, and whether LCR might want to build it.
High-speed rail is at the forefront of the current debate about transport and climate change in Britain. Iain Coucher, deputy chief executive of Network Rail, has proposed a north-south high-speed line to relieve pressure on the existing network. Sir Rod Eddington, the former chief executive of British Airways, is expected to publish his long-awaited report on transport at the end of the month, and may also back new high-speed lines.
If a new line was ordered, LCR would be an obvious candidate to construct it. Holden said the company had built up a great deal of expertise and it would be a shame to lose it. “There is a lot of experience here that could be extremely useful if the government decided to proceed. We can’t be involved in speculative development, but we are pro high-speed rail for the UK,” he said.
But if the government is to take advantage of LCR’s expertise, it will need to move quickly. Holden said his team would be ready “to step into a new railway” in 12-18 months, but beyond that the nucleus of experienced people would be dispersed. “The skills they have are transferable, and by then they will have the opening of this railway on their CVs, which will make them very marketable.”
The hype around this week’s launch of High Speed 1 will obscure some of the big questions about the rail link — such as whether it should have been built at all.
A House of Commons public accounts select committee concluded earlier this year that the economic case for its construction was “marginal”, because the number of passengers using Eurostar services is much lower than originally forecast.
When bidding for the project in 1996, LCR — a consortium comprising Bechtel, UBS, Arup, Halcrow, Electricite de France, National Express and SNCF — forecast 21m passengers a year by 2004. The actual number has turned out to be one-third of that. This year Eurostar will carry about 8.5m.
Holden said the original forecasts were “just wrong”. “When I arrived here I said — ‘so, everyone in the south of England is going to make multiple trips every year to Paris and Brussels? I don’t think so.’”
The truth dawned two years into the project and led to a financial crisis. LCR had to be bailed out by the government.
This in turn prompted much soul-searching by transport officials. Scarred by their experience on the Jubilee Line extension, which ended up late and £1.4 billion over budget, they had resolved not to entrust the management of the high-speed rail line to the public sector. By choosing LCR, they had thought the risk of cost-overruns had been avoided — only to find the solution blowing up in their face.
In revealing comments to the select committee last year, David Rowlands, then permanent secretary at the Department for Transport, said that next year the department planned to re-evaluate its handling of the project. “We would probably want to re-visit it quietly and hide it in a drawer in case of FOI (the Freedom of Information Act) . . . but there are lessons to be learnt.”
The solution was for the government to give LCR an extra £1 billion, and to issue bonds to finance the project. Railtrack was brought in to carry the cost-overruns — another clever solution that backfired when the company collapsed into administration in 2001.
Holden maintains that the public accounts committee, and the National Audit Office, have found it difficult to quantify the project’s regeneration benefits. As well as the international trains, the new line will carry domestic services that will sprint to Ashford in Kent in 26 minutes.
LCR believes the link will bring £10.5 billion of extra investment for regeneration. The big schemes are at three sites: in the brownfield land north of King’s Cross station, where developer Argent plans 50 new buildings and 30,000 new jobs; at Stratford, where Westfield plans a £4 billion development including 7,000 new homes; and at Ebbsfleet, where 3,000 new homes will be built.
“When the project began, the priorities were the international services, the domestic services and regeneration. Now it is the other way round. Regeneration is No1 and then take your pick,” said Holden.
And despite LCR’s interesting history, it can at least claim to have avoided the curse of most big projects in Britain and to have delivered on time and to budget. Under the terms of its funding agreement with the government, the line will be on time as long as it opens before the end of the first week in January 2008 — and while the expected cost of £5.8 billion is more than the £5.3 billion target, it is with- in the available financing of £6.1 billion. An insurance facility put in place with Bechtel and a consortium of insurers to underwrite construction overruns was unlikely to be called on, said Holden.
As well as speeding passengers between London and the Continent, the new line has rejuvenated St Pancras station, London’s smartest terminal when it opened in 1868 but which had long been allowed to fall into decay. The most visible sign of the work to date has been the restoration of the Midland Grand Hotel, Sir George Gilbert Scott’s famous neo-Gothic pile on Euston Road.
But from next November, when the station behind the hotel reopens, travellers will be treated to another restored Victorian marvel — the St Pancras train shed built by William Barlow. Barlow’s name is less well-known than Brunel’s, but the train shed may change that. When it first opened, its 74- metre span made it the largest enclosed space in the world, and, with ironwork repainted in the original peacock blue and reglazed, it retains its “wow” factor.
Beneath the platforms is another Barlow gem, the station’s undercroft, originally used for storing Burton’s beer. It has been opened up as a passenger concourse, but the 900 original cast-iron pillars that support the platforms above remain in place — the spacing between them by repute dictated by the width of three beer barrels.