The news that Network Rail has produced a report that dismisses all alternatives to the High Speed 2 (HS2) line from London to Birmingham is to be welcomed.  When leading businessmen, trade unions and minsters are agitating for something there must be something intrinsically right about the project.  Even The Daily Telegraph is producing front page articles with a favourable slant (stating that the likes of Morocco and Saudi Arabia have more high speed track than the UK, let alone France and Japan). 

Not being able to drive, I am an enthusiast for train travel (though train-spotting must be one of the most tedious and pointless pursuits ever to have been created – I saw a man and his wife perched on camp chairs at one mainline station, notebooks in hand, thermos flasks in easy reach – she must really love him).  I often despair at the illogicality of encouraging more people to travel by train through fare rises (I guess the rationale is ‘it’s what the market will support’ – like BP ending their final salary pension scheme despite having vast profits; they’re ‘reflecting market trends’ – screw the market, after all it caused the global slump), but I can find gazing out the window is even more compelling than reading – you can see the strangest scenes.  This wouldn’t be possible under HS2, as anyone who has travelled on HS1 can testify.  Yet it’s dragging us into the late twentieth century and won’t be completed for another decade(!) at least and that’s just to Birmingham, let alone Yorkshire and the north-west.  It is needed through as there will not be a third runway at Heathrow and economic growth will be hampered otherwise.

The nimbyist Tories who will have the line cut a swathe through their constituencies have flung up their arms but not quite up in arms against the Coalition.  Opponents talk “it’s blah blah this and blah blah that and it’s going to run through the bottom of my garden!”  Of course, gardens in this part of the world can be several acres.  It’s the damage to house prices that they are really cross about.  I can sympathise to a certain extent.  I live in a road which was a leafy backwater when I first moved here.  Some years later the council – in the hands of a New Labour/Tory cabal – decided to make the street the main thoroughfare between the hospital servicing much of the local area for many miles around and all the regions west of the River Medway (via the Medway Tunnel).  Despite vigorous opposition, the council pushed it through (strange, you would have though right-wingers would have cared about house values – ah well, it wasn’t their own properties affected).  So some of the trees – ‘old stumps’ as they were talked down – were removed and the road was widened.  I should add that the construction violated the standard for building roads of the last 250 years by not having a gutter between the tarmac and the pavement, so that whenever it rains the water sloshes off the road and creates a raging torrent for pedestrians to negotiate.  Now oodles of cars regularly race up and down it and double-glazing windows are a must (merely to reduce, rather than eliminate the sound) – one set of neighbours chose to move because they felt it wasn’t the right environment to raise a child (they moved to St Mary’s Island, recently ‘decontaminated’ from radioactive and other toxic dumping – good luck with that).  When the high winds of last week were blowing recycling rubbish across the road, forcing cars to wend and weave through the obstacle course, I couldn’t help grinning.  It’s no wonder that the area returned Liberal Democrat councillors until last year (and two out of three were still elected).