SCOTLAND'S history with high speed rail has seen various projects floated before falling flat, and wider connections to the UK's network scrapped before they had the chance to prove themselves.
Transport Scotland – an arm of the Scottish Government – was tasked with producing a business case for the prospect of inter-city high speed rail in 2012, connecting Glasgow and Edinburgh.
The SNP Government had hoped that the hypothetical route could function independently while the UK-wide high speed project, HS2, was built out, with future connection in mind, but the business case determined that without confirmed links south, it likely would not be feasible.
Instead, the line was upgraded to cut the journey down from upwards of an hour to around 42 minutes, with the Edinburgh–Glasgow Improvement Programme completing in 2021.
But as the key commuter route and the surrounding central belt network is now “virtually at capacity”, the prospect of a high speed connection should start to come back into the minds of ministers, railway engineer Gareth Dennis told The National.
In a previous article Dennis spoke of the need for “a triangle of lines that would provide high speed direct services between Glasgow, Edinburgh and the south” in order to free up capacity on the central belt’s dense railway network, particularly the Falkirk High express line used by the Glasgow Queen Street – Edinburgh Waverley trains.
Faster services could also facilitate a “modal shift” – the decision taken by people to change what form of transportation they use – away from the often-congested M8 and surrounding roads and onto the railways.
The same rationale can be extended to any potential southward extension or connection but in relation to moving people off of short, carbon-intensive domestic flights and onto more sustainable trains.
While high speed rail is mainly sold on journey times, one of the largest benefits is its ability to “free capacity on the classic routes for more local passengers and freight services” while also facilitating this modal shift, to “help rail replace short-haul flights,” according to a Transform Scotland report on the prospect of high speed rail.
Despite hopes that high speed connections could free up space while supporting investment, the UK’s foray into high speed rail has been an expensive, public ordeal.
As the delays and cost of the High Speed Rail 2 project continue to spiral, now up to more than £102 billion, and the length of the route continually curtailed, with stretches into Scotland now scrapped, the prospect of Scotland having its own high speed network appears a distant possibility.
But looking abroad for case studies, countries of varying sizes, economies and topographies offer alternative ideas to developing a new high speed network, but a core factor remains political will.
The UK lags far beyond other developed economies, with just 109km of operational track, compared to more than 1100km in Finland, 2760km in France and 3993km in Spain.
China – the world leader in high speed rail services – has been building out an extensive network since 2008, with most urban centres linked to each other or the largest regional hubs, with more than 1.7 billion journeys made each year. Its interweaving high speed network of 29,800 track miles accounts for close to 70% of the world’s total.
While incomparable in terms of wages, workers rights and institutional frameworks, it offers an example of what long-term strategic planning could produce.
With all of the companies involved in the construction of tracks, manufacturing of the locomotives themselves, and the operation of services being state-owned enterprises, it’s easy to dismiss the efficiency of the project as being a quirk of an authoritarian regime.
But one of the lessons Scotland, and the UK could look at is the commitment to long-term horizons – with the initial high speed rail blueprints being produced in 2004, before an update in 2008, which set out ambitious targets the developers aimed to hit by 2020 and 2035.
Another is the position the project occupied within government policy – a core part of its national infrastructure development ambitions, in sharp contrast to the perception of HS2 as a costly side-bar, regarded by many as a vanity project.
A future Scottish network connecting Glasgow and Edinburgh, with potential routes to Aberdeen or elsewhere, could open up capacity to run more frequent services on smaller local routes, forming a key part of a future railway network which prioritises the modal shift away from roads.
Closer to home, the example of Spain also shows the importance of producing long-term blueprints that can be maintained. The country invested heavily through its own state-funded rail operator to back the project – with costs of around to €57bn – that has risen to become the world's second largest network, behind China.
But this commitment to high speed rail has been a core part of the government structure for more than 30 years, with extensions to more cities continuing to garner support, despite having virtually no prospect of repaying the large sums of investment and debt used to build them. The priority is opening up access and capacity so that goods and people can move, serving a public-good while spreading investment and economic growth opportunities.
Therefore, while cost is always a factor in major infrastructure decisions, the weighting the sunk cost of development is given when compared to regional economic benefits like spreading investment across a more efficient network with more capacity for freight and people, the sustainability improvements from a modal shift, and the public good of more efficient transport can be debated and changed.
If these factors are prioritised, alongside long-term plans to see the benefits materialised within a broader transport network overhaul, there remains a future where Scotland, and the UK could benefit from their own high-speed networks.
