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 Not HS2



Not HS2

This is low speed 1, the antidote to HS2 a world away from not in my back yard, from extravagant vanity scheme, from the wrong line, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and all at way to too expensive in time of Austerity. Oddly, the ‘other man’s grass’ really does look greener, in this photograph it does, but, in what we usually refer to as ‘real life’, we all know that the other man’s grass is turf.

Some years ago, when No.35005 Canadian Pacific was at the Great Central Railway, I was a guest at the ‘re-naming ceremony’, when she first steamed again and enjoyed lunch, and a couple of hours of chat, with a chap by the name of Alistair Vartan. The conversation was about the Great Central Railway and the manner in which Canadian Pacific shipped goods from Europe to Canada.

Goods from Europe were landed at Felixstowe and taken from there to Liverpool – bottlenecks on the WCML were an issue, an issue which CP spent almost £2 million investigating. Part of that investigation was to see if the old GCR route, between London and Rugby, could be re-opened to alleviate the problem, the results of their survey concluded that too much of the old trackbed had been built over, it was no longer a viable option – today, even more will have been built upon. Mr. Vartan was CEO of CP Europe at the time, so I guess he knew what he was talking about.

Closing, and then building on, the old GCR route was industrial vandalism, it was bad for business, CP certainly thought so, and, as things have turned out, it was shockingly short-sighted. I doubt we’d be kicking the HS2 political football now if the GCR had stayed open.

The photograph shows Ex-GWR 2-8-0 No.2857 crossing Oldbury viaduct, on the Severn Valley Railway.

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