High Speed Rail

Lord Watts Excerpts

Monday 20th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

Well, they were your aircraft carriers, and I am not going to let the right hon. Gentleman anywhere near designing our trains; that is for sure.

The Eurostar trains that run on HS 1 were designed nearly 20 years ago and have concentrated power cars at front and rear. There will therefore be about 30 years of evolution in train design in respect of reducing noise and increasing fuel efficiency between the design of the Eurostar trains and the design of the trains that will run on these lines.

I also say to my hon. Friend that where we can hide this line, we will hide it. Where we cannot hide it, we will ensure that it is architecturally designed and that it is something that people are pleased to look at, not a British Rail engineering-style eyesore.

[Mr Dave Watts (St Helens North) (Lab)]

Given the massive cuts to regional and local transport systems that have already been announced and the fact that the capacity problem could be dealt with by investment in the existing west coast main line, why are the Government wasting billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on this scheme?

[Mr Hammond]

Because the capacity problem could not be dealt with by further investment in the west coast main line. [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman says that it could, but if he looks at the engineering reports that have been published, he will see that, in practice, it could not. We are going ahead with additional rail cars and additional train sets on the west coast main line, and the Network Rail route utilisation study published two weeks ago shows that by 2024 the line will be operating at capacity between London and Manchester, and London and Birmingham. It is not possible, because of the design of the infrastructure—we are not just talking about platform lengths—to put longer trains on a railway that is designed in the way that the west coast main line was designed. If he recalls the chaos that lasted for years when the west coast main line was upgraded a couple of years ago and if, on the back of that, he is seriously proposing that we should add two additional tracks to its entire length while resignalling the whole thing, he needs to think again.