To fly or not to fly

Tweet It seems certain that the UK Government will today give its stamp of approval to the scheme for a third runway at Heathrow, and that the scheme will include a new rail hub at the airport as well.

I think that the reference to a rail hub first surfaced in The Sunday Times, the week before last. The idea was being floated by the Transport Minister, Lord Adonis. His argument included the idea that such a hub would link the north of England and Scotland to the European High Speed rail network, so that some travellers could use the opportunity to avoid air travel completely for short haul flights to the continent. In short, it was an attempt to put something of a green spin on the Heathrow announcement.

I've argued before that we should be planning to connect Wales to the European network of high speed trains, so my initial reaction to the article was quite favourable. On further reading however, there did seem to be two significant pieces of the jigsaw missing.

Firstly, it was not at all clear to me how exactly the hub would be linked into the high speed network at St Pancras, on the east side of London, which seemed to be the plan. The implication was that it would be by tunnel under London - and a different tunnel from the CrossRail project which has already been approved. But CrossRail has taken many years to get to this stage, and it's not just cynicism which left me wondering whether a second East-West tunnel under London is really going to happen.

Secondly, there is absolutely no intention as part of this plan to build a high speed link from Heathrow to South Wales. That would have to be a separate future project. Despite the Western Mail headline, the government is not about to announce a high speed link from South Wales to anywhere.

Without answers to those, pretty fundamental, questions, I have to say that it looked to me that what we were left with was a diversion of the existing 125 trains from South Wales to Paddington onto a new track which allowed them to make an additional stop at Heathrow. And the main function of that has nothing to do with connecting South Wales to the European high-speed network, and a great deal to do with enabling passengers to use the extra capacity planned for Heathrow without having to travel there by road. In short, it's more to do with 'selling' the third runway and the Heathrow expansion plans.

Yesterday, the Assembly government announced its support for the plan. From the terms in which they were talking, it seems quite clear that they understand the weaknesses outlined above, because they seem to have been talking solely in terms of the advantages of Wales having a direct link to Heathrow airport.

I'm not as convinced as the Assembly government seems to be that connecting South Wales to Heathrow will have a significant effect on economic development. If the scheme is genuinely part of a wider scheme, albeit long term, to provide high speed rail links to Europe, then I'd certainly support the rail hub idea – but as an alternative to air travel, rather than as a means of facilitating it. I'm not convinced about the idea that the planned expansion of capacity at Heathrow is the right thing to do, and I have real concerns that linking the two issues means that we still aren't taking a sufficiently strategic view about the relative importance of rail.