In 1900 a man called John Elfreth Watkins predicted high-speed rail.
He wrote: “Trains will run two miles a minute normally. Express trains one hundred and fifty miles per hour.”
Genius. Mind you, the same bloke predicted that by now flies would be extinct, and rats.
And there would be no X, C or Q in the alphabet. Which would have made Scrabble easier, but apart from that would never catch on.
But trains he was good on.
In fact Watkins slightly undersold his prediction. There are lots of examples of high- speed rail all over the world.
There’s the 267mph Shanghai Maglev – Magnetic Levitation– which is the fastest, though not really rail, technically.
At 249mph there’s the Chinese Fuxing Hao – which, coincidentally, is the exact phrase that goes through your head when it reaches top speed.
There’s fast stuff in Italy, Germany, Korea, all over the place.
But not here. At the moment.
New rail system will scrap split ticketing for good with 'revenue neutral' fares
All that, we’re told, will change in the coming years.
HS2 was a great idea in principle. Or was it?
It’s a bold notion linking parts of the North to the capital.
But objections were raised pretty quickly.
There is no significant benefit to shaving several minutes off a journey time.
Telecommunications have come on since then, as has homeworking.
And, as eloquently put by a bloke in my former local: “Why would anyone in their right mind want to get to London faster?”
There’s a real risk that all you do when you connect the regions to the capital is suck everything down south. And, trust me, no one really wants that.
In France when they opened a high-speed rail line connecting Paris to Lyon – in the early 80s – everyone moved to Paris.
Same when they connected Madrid and Seville.
Anyways, this week a House of Lords report found HS2 needs a real rethink.
Here I would normally attempt to shock you by inserting the estimated cost of HS2 but – this is even more scary – its former chairman said: “Nobody knows.”
They point out that connections between the North and South are already fine.
What’s needed is a real overhaul of northern railways.
Data from the IPPR think-tank identified lots of “quick wins” that could rejuvenate areas of the North through rail investment.
For example, opening Ashington Blyth and Tyne railway for passenger services would boost the economy by £70million a year.
Connecting Leeds and Bradford airport to – you know – Leeds and Bradford would help. So would a bridge across the Tees. So would hydrogen trains.
In the last ten years the North has received £289 per head on transport. That compares with £708 in London.
It genuinely is time to think again about this stuff. The cash is there. It just needs, for a change, to be spent wisely.
After all, when the Liverpool to Manchester railway was opened in 1830, statesman William Huskisson was killed by George Stephenson’s Rocket.
