EXTRACT, full report below:

Looking at this from Manchester, the announcement by the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak cancelling the HS2 programme north of Birmingham had echoes of the previous ‘pausing’ of the Regional Eurostar services from Manchester to Paris in 1999 to accommodate the rail privatisations by John Major started in 1993.

Before HS2 became a programme, around 2007 I started working on a pro bono rail regeneration project to show how trains could run between Manchester and Paris. In 2012 the detailed report was first published showing it was possible. 

But UK rail decisions are a tough mix of complex engineering and raw politics. 

The 15-year cross-party national consensus on a major project such as HS2 is maybe a bigger loss to the UK. Ever optimistic, this 2nd edition of the report is an attempt to keep the flame alive for a timely improvement in the rail connectivity of Manchester; and to provide a model for cities in the north and south-west of England, and in Scotland and Wales, just as Regional Eurostar did.

This report shows just one solution. It isn’t the only one, and good project management always requires adjustment as the conditions change, in order to continue to achieve the original goals. Therefore I haven’t updated 40 pages of technical details from 2012 – the point is that the case is shown to be viable, and a full professional team will certainly find a better mix of engineering than this for the 2020s.

But all this begs the question, is the project politically viable?

In writing this report I consulted widely with politicians, with the commercial directors of train operating companies, and with rail experts while writing the report. Politically, the support was always warmer the further north I went.

By contrast, there was genuinely warm and help both north and south from within the industry itself. Even from some of the companies who would be facing new competition. If it is invidious to name just one person, I want to record here that John Nelson was very kind to this project and he made time to come to lunch in Manchester to cover the details. 

The two main strategic changes since the first edition are the growing popularity and frequency of night trains between the major cities on continental Europe, and the 2021 Williams Review in the UK which effectively ended the franchise model of privatisation and replaced it with paying for arms-length management.

For discussion of options involving Birmingham, please see pages 8, 24, 27, 35 and 37 of the full report on this website (free).

If I have one observation to share here it is that the ‘business case’ mantra of
HM Treasury has become just politics pretending to be maths. 

And if I have one hope to share from this project it is that some seeds do grow. I said at the top that the Regional Eurostar project was just ‘paused’ so I like to think there is a possibility above 0% that it can still be delivered.

For current contextual details, the page – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Eurostar – provides a fair account with credible sources.

This is the full report, 44 pages: