The decision to locate the East Midlands hub of the hugely
expensive and not universally applauded HS2 high speed rail line at Toton,
midway between Nottingham and Derby is, I believe, ill-conceived (like much
else about the project, including arrangements for Birmingham, London, and many
other places). We’ve had the “experts” reviewing the situation and reaching
their considered conclusions, but – I suspect - primarily from the point of
view of “making a business case” rather than from the point of view of “making
a journey”. I don’t know how they can make meaningful predictions about
business that far into the future - most people can’t do it beyond the end of
next week - but what one can forecast with rather greater certainty is that in
the 2030s, barring catastrophes of an apocalyptic magnitude, towns and cities
will still be in the same places as they are today, along with inhabitants who
want to travel between them.
The unavoidable perception about the project so far is that it’s
all about money rather than about what real people want; it’s about posturing
with vacuous slogans rather than in-depth knowledge or practicality. One is
provoked into unkind suspicions that London politicians like to imagine that
the ungrateful peasants shuffling around with their clogs and cloth caps and
polar bears in the tundra beyond the M25 – the perimeter of the metropolitan
mind palace, the edge of the known world – will be placated by phrases like the
“Midlands Engine” and the “Northern Powerhouse”. I’m not so sure they are, especially after the
EU referendum result. Let’s consider a practical example.
If I’m lucky, extremely lucky as well as extremely old by
the time HS2 is built – if it is -
I’ll have a flock of great-grandchildren who I’ll want to take to London for
the day, or perhaps somewhere further south for a short holiday. Perhaps even somewhere
European, if we’re still welcome over there and the Tunnel hasn’t been
blockaded permanently. “Stop right there”, I hear you objecting, “HS2 isn’t
intended for silly old geezers like you”. Maybe not, but please hear me out,
with my pathetically integrated public transport scenario.
Starting in Nottingham, I’ll board a now rather creaky and
squeaky NET tram, with said great-grand-offspring, and perhaps a suitcase and a
pushchair or two, and enjoy most of the next hour listening to interminable
announcements advising me that “this tram is for Toton HS2 hub” at the more
than 15 calling points before I have to propel said personnel and attachments down
through a subway or up over a footbridge and down again onto a wonderful new train
– probably one with windows carefully misaligned with respect to the seating,
since the desired sort of HS2 passengers will be doing busywork and won’t be
looking at the scenery - that will take us at a fairly decent lick via an
imaginative dogleg (gosh, is that Birmingham over there?) and into Euston, with
its (compared to KXSP) impoverished connections (to the Underground, to
Thameslink, to Heathrow, to Eurostar, maybe to Crossrail 2 depending on its
eventual route). At vast public (and no doubt considerable personal) expense,
discomfort and inconvenience I and my extended family and possessions will thus
arrive in the capital a few minutes faster than is possible at present. If I
can remember anything at all by the time this happens I hope I’ll remember to
be hugely grateful, and that I’ll still be able to afford to make the return
journey. With luck I’ll still have my concessionary pass ready for when I get
back on the tram; “the next stop is Chilwell Road” – oh good, only about 9
stops to go now.
Really, of course, it simply isn’t necessary. Not long ago I
caught an (admittedly already delayed) train out of St. Pancras which reached
Nottingham in 1 hour 31 minutes. “Nottingham in Ninety” is a boast easily
achievable today, even without Midland main line electrification. Shave off a
few bends near Market Harborough, improve capacity (again) at Nottingham
station so as to eliminate the seemingly compulsory waits outside the station,
pull out a few fingers, and the journey could be done in one hour twenty. Very
soon and relatively cheaply.
However, if we must have HS2 (well, we do live in a
democracy and the clever people who decide what the democratic decision will be
have decreed thus), I believe we can do better than what is currently on offer.
Toton - though close to the M1 and the A52 and potentially occupying a
convenient patch of former marshalling yards just pining to be appropriated -
has no direct east-west rail connections, so that access to the two major
population centres of Derby and Nottingham is always going to be circuitous and
clunky. That’s a simple geographical truth. From Toton one is always going to
have to change onto another mode of transport (tram or otherwise) to reach the
city centres. Avoiding having to make connections, with the physical effort and
mental stress often involved, is good policy, and is part of the logic behind
Crossrail and its precursors such as the RER in Paris and some of the S-Bahn
systems in Germany. Toton will always be a kludge, a nuisance, a pain in the
bum for the traveller. Conversely, East Midlands Parkway station, as well as
being on the north-south route, already has direct rail access to the centres
of Derby and Nottingham, has large parking areas with scope for expansion, and
is close to a major highway intersection (M1, A50, A42/M42, A6, A453). The East
Midlands Parkway option avoids having to change trains to use HS2 – services will
use the high speed line from London and then go straight through to their final
destinations. Like they do at present, but slightly faster. A bit of a no
brainer, one might have assumed.
Despite its misleading name, East Midlands Parkway is not
adjacent to East Midlands Airport (EMA), though closer to it than is Toton. EMA
is a factor not to be ignored in this argument. One of the early proposals for
HS2 was that it should burrow under EMA, though apparently a station beneath
the airport was ruled out – perhaps for being too obvious and not requiring
expensive-enough consultants to come up with such an astonishing insight. It
would be rather good to have a station serving a major provincial airport, one
might think, joined up thinking and all that. Evidently not. Perhaps the clue
is in the word “provincial”.
Naturally, it would be unreasonable to expect HS2 trains to
make two stops in close proximity – at EMA and then at Toton or East Midlands
Parkway a few high speed seconds later. It would have to be one or the other.
The cake and eat it conundrum applies to more than Brexit, but seriously,
though, this particular issue does highlight the genuine difficulty of deciding
the best public transport solution for the region. The given geography is
unhelpful and dilemma-inducing. However, the EMA rail-access problem usefully
provokes another idea - and I’m surely not the first to have thought of it. A
double tracked railway already runs – currently freight only – from just east
of Long Eaton station (on the Nottingham to Derby line) to near Willington (on
the Derby to Birmingham line). As a side issue, if used for passenger traffic
it could greatly speed up journey times between Nottingham and Birmingham, by
missing out Derby, already well connected to both Birmingham and Nottingham. But
it isn’t. Never mind, it could be. Returning to the main thrust, from this line,
in the vicinity of Castle Donington, a tunnel could be bored beneath the runway
and taxiways to a terminal station directly beneath the EMA passenger terminals.
Via this tunnel, trains serving EMA could run directly to and from all the principal
airport catchment areas, namely in the directions of Derby and Stoke,
Nottingham, Loughborough and Leicester, the Erewash valley towards Sheffield
and beyond – as well as the HS2 hub.
The same arguments would also apply to a more radical
alternative, namely to site the HS2 hub at Trent junction, east of Long Eaton, at
the exact spot where routes north, south, east, west and potentially to EMA
cross each other. Road access to this point would, admittedly, be problematical,
but it’s a possibility.
The merits of East Midlands Parkway versus Trent junction
can and should be argued about, but I would maintain that either option – if
HS2 has to go ahead in approximately its current format – is preferable to
Toton. I’m not the first to suggest it – far from it – but my firm preference
would be for East Midlands Parkway. Toton should be binned as quite a good idea
but one not quite good enough
