The High Speed 2 Company submitted its plans to Lord Adonis who will declare the preferred routes in March 2010. To date the proposal has shown a line up the west coast via Preston to Glasgow but yesterdays newspapers seemed cooler on this idea. The routes being showed seem to favour going to Leeds from Manchester and then to Newcastle with Glasgow being fed via Edinburgh. With a route via Nottingham, Sheffield to Leeds as well. One paper said the Conservatives favoured the east coast route to Scotland, missing Preston, and that Lord Adonis is trying to get all party agreement on the routes.
Politics will play as big a part as economics in the decisions. Already noises are being made about damage to the countryside and cities are vying to get a station on the route. This matches the French experience where too many stations were built as a political sop and made the service less attractive.
The timescale for the service is also much too prolonged. To say the service will start to Birmingham in 2025 means the north won’t be linked possibly for 30 years. By then the technology will be on the verge of obsolescence. High speed rail has been around for 40 years now, after 70 years most transport technologies are looking old.
Making the service available in under 10 years could bring a boom. With London 1 hour from the northern cities it could transform work and leisure.
If Preston doesn’t get this line it will damage the local economy and the north west beyond Manchester will become a remote area. This space needs watching.