East Coast Main Line
Debate between Simon Burns and Frank Doran(11 years, 6 months ago)
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Mr Frank Doran (Aberdeen North) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) on securing this important debate. The east coast main line is a vital artery for all of us, running between London and Aberdeen. My principal interest is of course Aberdeen. In the debates that we have had on this issue, it is clear that the east coast main line is generally thought to run simply from London to Edinburgh, but it runs another 130 miles further north. When the line was completed in the 1880s, it was part of the Victorian engineering miracle, producing both the Tay bridge and the Forth bridge. It allowed royalty to get away for their summer holidays, brought to London the fish and the textiles that were produced in Aberdeen and opened up the whole country to tourism in the highlands. It was an important line then, but it is even more important now, which is not always recognised.
Aberdeen is now the hub of the oil and gas industry in Europe. Over the past few decades, it has poured billions of pounds into the Exchequer, but we have a railway line, certainly the last past of it from Edinburgh to Aberdeen, that has been forgotten about. I have raised that issue in the House many times. There has been a failure to construct proper infrastructure to support the oil and gas industry. The same can be said, I think, of Norfolk, which has difficult contacts as well, but perhaps not to the same extent.
I have done a little bit of arithmetic for the debate. The journey time from London to Edinburgh, which is about 400 miles, is four hours and 20 minutes at an average speed of 92 miles an hour. Edinburgh to Aberdeen is only 130 miles, and it takes two hours and 39 minutes at 45 miles an hour. When I have raised those issues in the past, they were usually coupled with problems on the road network and with air transport. I used to be able to say that someone could travel from Aberdeen to Rome by car and find only 70 miles of single track, which was on the road between Aberdeen and Dundee. That has now been sorted. Air transport has improved dramatically as well, but we still have the same problem on the rails. One part of the east coast main line, just north of Montrose, is single track. The Minister will rightly point out that the responsibility for that lies with the Scottish Government, but for a couple of centuries it was the responsibility of Westminster, and nothing was done about it.
I also want to raise a specific issue with the Minister because it relates not just to this particular line, but to High Speed 2. In the economic evaluation for HS2, there is a suggestion on page 9 that the Government are retaining an option for removing through-trains from stations north of Edinburgh to London once phase 2 of the new high-speed rail is built post-2033. That has caused some consternation. The Minister is looking slightly bemused; he has probably not read the evaluation thoroughly.