Episode One: The What and the Why of HS2

How to Build a Railway is a twelve-part podcast series exploring the story behind the construction of the UK’s new high speed rail line.

This episode focusses on why HS2 is needed, the historical context of our country’s railways, project progress so far and upcoming goals.

Guests

• Bob Gwynne, National Railway Museum Associate Curator.
• Andrew McNaughton, Former HS2 Chief Engineer.
• Andy Street, West Midlands Mayor.
• Mark Thurston, HS2 Chief Executive.

Starting back in the 1830’s, Bob sets the scene of the original Victorian Railway and its importance both for the time as well as now. Andrew talks through the early days of the project with designing the first stage back in 2009. Andy describes what HS2 will do for the region of Birmingham as well as the rest of the country and Mark gives his thoughts on not just the future of the project, but the space in which those who work on HS2 have created.

Episode One – The what and the why of HS2 (transcript)

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Episode transcript

This is a transcript of episode one of HS2’s How to build a railway podcast, first published on 28 February 2023.

Fran Scott: Hello, I’m Fran Scott, and this is how to build a railway. For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by science and engineering, how our infrastructure, the bones of our society, works and makes us what we are.

In Britain a project is underway that could have the most significant impact on the way we move around the country, the way we meet family or friends, and the way we work… in a generation.

Every megaproject is an effort to reshape the country in some way. They mobilise billions of pounds of investment and employ tens of thousands of people to reorient a society of millions towards a better future.

The latest and largest megaproject, perhaps in British history, is High Speed 2.

HS2 is the first new railway north of London in over 100 years, with the first phase running out from Euston, through the northwest of the capital, then 134 miles on to Birmingham. Later phases will see the line split, heading into the East Midlands and Manchester.

It’s almost impossible not to have heard of the project, the advertised reduced journey times, and the much-needed capacity increases to the overloaded rail network and it being a new low-carbon way to travel.

But to understand the reasons this project is necessary, and the network it is building upon, we have to go back. Way back. This story begins 185 years ago and the original London to Birmingham Railway.

2:10

Bob Gwynne: The original London to Birmingham Railway… in 1838 it opened through to London. It’s Robert Stevenson. And it’s regarded as the biggest construction site since the pyramids really.

Fran Scott: This is Bob Gwynne, he’s the Associate Curator of the National Railway Museum in York and has lived and breathed railways all his life. His father was a railway man… and Bob has three books and many articles on railways including one on the links to computer development – which he links to a railway development from 1837 Robert Stevenson who he mentioned was the son of the famous George Stephenson, the engineer of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, which opened in 1830, the world’s first ‘inter-city’ railway.

George had worked on the first public railway to use steam locomotives: the Stockton and Darlington Railway and opened in 1825.

The Liverpool to Manchester opened in 1830. Rail mania took off and industrial  Britain had an appetite for freight, but…

3:22

Bob Gwynne: The demand was so high for passengers when they opened it, that they couldn’t run a freight train for several months, even though that was what they built the railway for.”

Fran Scott: This also held true for London-Birmingham eight years later. This project on the scale of the pyramids was immediately swamped with passenger demand as well as the freight demands of the beating heart of a new, industrial global economy.

3:53

Bob Gwynne: It would have started off with a lot of passenger demand, and then given that Birmingham was a major manufacturing centre and London even at that stage is a growing Metropolis freight would have been a close second.

And the lithographs of the period show the range of traffic quite happily show freight trains, passenger trains, you know, cattle trains…

Fran Scott: The railways changed everything. Before the Stephensons, cattle drovers painstakingly moved their herds down from the Scottish Highlands to feed a growing and ravenous capital. That life was over as more railheads were established to quickly transport goods from all over to central hubs.

New diets were enabled, but it wasn’t just about food…

4:47

Bob Gwynne: …all sorts of things you never knew you needed, from you know, umbrellas to hatstands to whatever and they’re all being made all over the place. And you got a bit of specialism don’t you?

You get the wool from West Yorkshire develops to a massive amount, you get iron from once we get into steel from various places in the 1850s onwards. And jewellery: Birmingham, Nottingham: shoes, and lace.

The fact of the matter is those products have got to be moved to where they can be bought, and they are moved by rail.

Fran Scott: The easy movement of people and goods meant the good times were here, but the new network had to be all things to all people. This was not a problem at first, but it was laying the foundations for some of the problems that our modern network faces today.

Have you ever been stuck behind a slower train, crawling towards your destination?

5:51

Bob Gwynne: And of course, locomotives are quite underpowered in those days, so it has very gentle gradients. And that’s why you have giant cuttings, like Tring and so on.

Fran Scott: The famous ‘Lickey Incline’ is a section of the 1840 Birmingham and Gloucester Railway opened 10 years later in 1840. It is probably the exception that proved the rule: a fearsome 2.65% gradient… although it did require special, heavy-duty locomotives called ‘bank engines’ to help boost trains up the hill!

Then there were the scientific limits.

6:30

Bob Gwynne: Obviously, the geography affects the railway. And there’s no science of materials to speak of. So mostly you’ve got Roman arches, because they know they’re strong. They don’t really know how strong certain things are. So they over-engineer things. And then of course, they don’t do too much geological investigation. So Kilsby Tunnel, you know.

Fran Scott: A 2.2km tunnel near Rugby, designed by Robert Stephenson and opened in 1838 as the longest railway tunnel ever built.

7.04

Bob Gwynne: …lots of ingress from water in there, and so on. But they have to find a way round all that.

Fran Scott: The engineers of the day worked engineering miracles, but still had to work with the constraints of the day, and that means we are left with inefficient, meandering routes leading to slow travel and capacity issues. If you look at a map of the British railways, the majority of the network sticks to the low-lying regions.

But it 1838 the London and Birmingham Railway is complete, and with it the first intercity line is built into London.

7:50

Bob Gwynne: It makes its grand entrance into Euston famously with its own sort of triumphal arch to access the station. And of course Euston. At that stage Euston Road is the bypass for London. It’s just outside Regency London Euston, so it doesn’t get any closer to the river. It just stops there. Effectively, it stops on London bypass at Euston and it’s the first major arterial route.

And it means you’re starting to get that connectivity across the country. And by that stage of course, both George Stephenson original engineer for Liverpool, Manchester and his son Robert are busy with lots of different schemes and George at one stage is involved with the Leicester and Swannington Railway…

Fran Scott: Which opened for coal and passengers in 1832, notably including a tunnel that was over a mile, or 1.6km in length,

8:53

Bob Gwynne: …and when the developing there somebody says to him: “what gauge should it be?” and he basically said: “well 4’8 ½’’, Standard Gauge”, and they say: “well, why? There’s no railway anywhere near us”, and he said basically says “yes, but there will be”. So the connectivity was always part of the plan.

Fran Scott: And it did connect. Europe was in turmoil after the Napoleonic Era and the railways proved, not just a safe store for capital, but an incredibly lucrative one. The railways expanded, and the foresight to stick to standard gauge, meaning the same spacing between the two rails, meant that the network was compatible across the country.

9:37

Bob Gwynne: The early returns on the Liverpool-Manchester are bonkers. It’s like 10% per annum. So, if you’ve got any spare cash, you’re likely to throw it into the railway schemes because that demand for travel is very clearly there the demand for moving goods and people and services. It’s all there.

Fran Scott: And there is no competition for the railway. It’s not just major investors, the Brontë sisters own shares with their brother Branwell… who was also the Assistant Clerk at Sowerby Bridge Railway Station…

10:11

Bob Gwynne: Anybody who’s got any money at all throws it into the railways, until of course the bubble bursts.

Fran Scott: The bubble burst with ‘The Panic of 1847’. A stock market bubble had been inflated by over-optimistic speculation in the railways, beyond realistic marketability.
After that people take a long cold look at further developments, but by that time large amounts of the network had been built, so it’s hard to stop the momentum.

Communities want to be joined up to the national infrastructure… and businesses want to connect factories to the trade network, throughout Britain and out to the Empire.

10:51

Bob Gwynne: The railways remain ambitious right up until the First World War, because in the First World War, two things happened in the First World War. One is the internal combustion engine is rapidly developed… and the other is the Royal Navy start switching to oil.

Fran Scott: The rise of the motorcar had begun, and as far as the railway was concerned, Pandora’s Box had been opened.

Larger and straighter roads were built, and the railways began to haemorrhage freight, and money. By the middle of the 1950s the government faces a supposed transport monopoly that cannot cover its costs.

11:32

Bob Gwynne: There’s a lot of questions about and people like Lord Cherwell, who as adviser to Churchill, is saying: “Well by the seventies people will be flying their own helicopters around the country, they don’t need the railways.”

Fran Scott: This launched a big debate about whether the railways are Victorian technology… which was short-lived as the UK opened its first motorway, the Preston bypass in 1958. Outside of London and the Southeast, the railways would be an afterthought for the following decades.

Even for Lord Cherwell, the scientific advisor to the Prime Minister, predicting the future was too much. Over half a century later, and we still do not have helicopters parked in our driveways(!)

Road transport of course has a place in a modern transport system, but a growing population, a growing economy… and a more interconnected world have left us with problems.

When that first motorway opened in 1958, Britain had about five million vehicles registered to drive on the roads. In that same year, atmospheric carbon measurements were taken at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii for the first time, yielding a result of 318 parts per million.

By the time High Speed 2 was first proposed in 2009, the number of vehicles in Britain had grown to 34 million. And atmospheric carbon was approaching 400 parts per million.

Waking up to the climate emergency and faced with the challenge of increasing transport capacity and connectivity in a densely populated country… major investment in rail was once again back on the agenda.

13:30

Andrew McNaughton: I started on what was with British Rail as a temporary office Junior in 1973. And that was to fit in a year before I went to university. This was before gap years had been invented. But I was too young. But by some accident, I’d taken all my exams early and I needed a year before I got to 18. And I joined a sort of area office in Leeds…

Fran Scott: This is Andrew McNaughton, former Chief Engineer and Technical Director for the project. He is the man who would eventually lead the team that would draw the line on the map… that would become High Speed 2.

14:13

Andrew McNaughton: …and did everything from making the tea, fetching the butties… I got out and doing real things like surveying for drainage for track renewals. And I had no intention of that. I was always going to do civil engineering, I was transfixed with the idea of building large bridges spanning estuaries, the Humber Bridge, the Severn Bridge great soaring pieces of engineering.

I got fascinated by the railway. Today I call it the railway system, how everything fitted, in order that you actually ran a train with people or with freight.

Fran Scott: While the railway as a whole was going through its turbulent years and the car was king, British Rail gave the young Andrew the opportunity to do a lot of different things, he designed his first bridge at the age of 19…

15:06

Andrew McNaughton: It’s a very ugly bridge. You can still see it, it’s Bridge 27 at Dronfield, just south of Sheffield. But he won’t win any architectural awards, but it was cheap.

Fran Scott: They do say engineers can do for a shilling what anyone can do for a pound.

Eventually he became Chief Engineer of Railtrack, which became Network Rail. The public sector body that owns and maintains the country’s rail assets.

15:35

Andrew McNaughton: And I stayed there until the point when Geoff Hoon got up in Parliament and announced it in a reversal of government policy. He was going to set up a government company to investigate whether there was a case for developing a new railway, which would be like all new railway, be a high-speed railway between London and the North.

Fran Scott: And if there was a case, where should a first stage between London and the West Midlands go?

The company was set up in early January 2009 and was ordered to report back with a preferred route on 31^st December. HS2 Limited was created in February and Andrew was seconded over from Network Rail on 9^th February.

Andrew says that major infrastructure projects tend to suffer from procrastination, which leads to more costs and disruption. Every decade our cities develop more, putting more obstacles in the way of infrastructure.

This project would be different. The network was struggling, the globe was warming, and the country would act.

Andrew filled the team with good people he had worked with at Network Rail, and trusted… people who knew the art of the possible, and understood what not to do on a rail project… and they set to work on the first new railway to the north of England in over 100 years.

To understand the decisions they made, it’s important to understand the context they were working within.

17:10

Andrew McNaughton: Let’s just rewind to the situation in early 2009. The country was in the middle of the global financial crisis… recession. So a whole part of people were saying, “why on earth do we need a new railway? We got no money, people can’t afford to travel”. So that was the kind of macro climate. We had just finished the West Coast upgrade…

Fran Scott: This is the line to Manchester and Glasgow and the project; the ‘West Coast Main Line Route Modernisation’ ran from 1998 to 2009. It attempted to allow faster and more frequent trains without shutting the line completely and without total replacement.

17:57

Andrew McNaughton: And it had been a thoroughgoing mess. We spent eight years never running a train on a Saturday or a Sunday, two of the busiest days of the week, but putting tens of thousands of people in buses in order to rebuild the West Coast Mainline. It had been estimated at 2 billion pounds at the time, and it cost 9 billion. And that was de-scoped from 13.

We all said at the time, including in government never again, would you try and do open heart surgery on a marathon runner mid race, because that’s what we were doing to the West Coast Main Line. The busiest route in the country for freight, for commuters, for long distance passengers, and we were rebuilding it. Every week. For eight years. It was a nightmare. We spent more money compensating train operators than we did on materials. Never again, never again, if we’re going to do something about the capacity and the future of the railway running north from London, it has to be a new railway.

Fran Scott: So, a new railway then! With the initial route running from London to the West Midlands.

19:10

Andrew McNaughton: Why London and the West Midlands? Because the capacity of the existing transport systems, not just rail… the railway, the M40, the M1 were maxing out. And they were already congested, all of them.

Fran Scott: The prediction was that by the mid-2020s these routes would be holding back the economy of the country and as an immediate priority a railway to the north had to address the looming capacity issues of London and the Midlands.

HS2’s business case was about capacity improvements first and foremost. There are the other really important benefits such as decarbonisation… but as a transportation link, it is a capacity bump.

In subsequent years economic analyses have become more sophisticated and more likely to emphasise these broader benefits in the business case. But acknowledged or not, they are there.

The three C’s of HS2 are: Capacity, Connectivity and Carbon.

Then there is speed.

20:18

Andrew McNaughton If you’re building a new railway, you may as well build it to go fast and do something different to what’s already there. Because it doesn’t actually cost much more to build a fast railway than a slow railway. A bit, but not massively so. And in building a fast railway, you bring people closer together.

Fran Scott: And a third objective was reliability… and the growing issue of climate resilience.

20:43

Andrew McNaughton: Reliable in terms of people literally relying on it punctuality if it was going to be more attractive than any other means of transport, and to build a railway designed to meet the challenges of the future climate change climate adaptation. So if you didn’t stop when he got hot, got cold, got wet, got leafy got whatever. So it’s engineering standards had to make it fit for the next 100 plus years. So we’re not designing for the past we’re designing for the future.

Fran Scott: And designing fresh for the future turned out to be intimidating!

21:18

Andrew McNaughton: This is the only time in my life I’ve ever had this privilege, but it’s actually a bit scary. We started with the proverbial blank sheet of paper. That was London, bottom right-hand corner. And there was Glasgow in Edinburgh, the top left. Remember, this is not a north south railway. I love saying to people just remember Glasgow in terms of latitude is five to eight miles west of Swansea, Edinburgh is west of Bristol, this is going Northwest if you draw a straight line to Glasgow from London, it goes through Manchester and Birmingham is just off to one side.

Fran Scott: All other things being equal, a straight line gives the cheapest and most efficient option for any route. With a string of major cities effectively on that straight line, Andrew and his team’s job was not to demonstrate that they could create the best route…

22:12

Andrew McNaughton: If you’re going to defend it in Parliament. And you’re going to take people’s property and you’re going to affect the environment. You’ve got to demonstrate not necessarily is the best route, but it’s the least worst route.

Everybody wrote in… it’s amazing the number of middle-aged men in this country who spend their evenings drawing lines on maps. We captured every idea that has gone on from previous studies from Network Rail, and strategic planning, to actually from members of the public.

Fran Scott: The studies yielded 104 different variations of routes. This isn’t 104 completely different routes, but variations.

22:51

Andrew McNaughton: We split the problem down into basically five sections. First section: Where do we go in London?

Fran Scott: The remit said that they had to connect the Thames Valley and Heathrow to Crossrail, now the Elizabeth Line. If the country was to invest this capital, the rail had to serve as many people as possible. This would be no vanity project.

23:16

Andrew McNaughton: The second was, how do you get through the Chilterns because you can’t get around the west of the Chilterns because it’s coterminous with the Cotswolds.

Fran Scott: Two Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Putting massive Victorian cuttings through protected landscape was unthinkable, while going around it was a excessive detour.

23:38

Andrew McNaughton: The third was then what you call the “open country”, between north of the Chilterns and basically, the approaches to the West Midlands.

Fran Scott: Centuries – and millennia-old villages, sensitive biodiversity and agriculture…

23:55

Andrew McNaughton: The fourth was Birmingham itself, because it is the second city and the fifth was, and this is part of a wider network. And what should the shape of that wider network be?

Fran Scott: This meant coordinating with local transport authorities, business representatives and other development stakeholders… it was not up to HS2 how Birmingham or the London should develop in future.

There were arguments that the stations and approaches should be entirely underground, with some people pointing at the central Crossrail stations, but these misunderstood the sheer scale of a high speed rail station.

23:34

Andrew McNaughton: A terminal station is going to be, when you’ve included the approach tracks about a mile long. And it’s going to be not two platforms wide but ten or 12 platforms wide. This is a hole in the ground about the size of 27 football pitches… really? And when you look under London, it’s an absolute warren of tubes for gas, for water, electricity, and of course, London Underground. So we concluded that it was technically possible to build the whole thing underground… but it would probably cost more than a national debt and take forever… or to use a phrase of a very well-known civil engineer at the time: ‘that would be a bold decision’.

Fran Scott: Euston was chosen as a terminus station, because dropping people in the London suburbs would discourage the use of the railway. The route then runs underground to Old Oak Common, out through Willesden, following the easy geography that led earlier generations of engineers to site the Grand Union canal there.

The route wound up the country, curving continuously to avoid impacting the local people and environment. In fact there will be very few bits of straight line. Every metre was agonised over.

25:49

Andrew McNaughton: There were two or three places where you could move the route further away from somewhere. But you know what? You moved it closer to somewhere else.

Fran Scott: The minimum curve radius was set at 7.2km for unrestricted high-speed running, and a bit less for the slower approaches to London.
They could have tightened this further, but it made little difference to the impacts… plus a more generous, gentle curve reduces future wear and operational maintenance requirements. You do not want to run a system at its engineering limits if you want it to last.

Special areas of the route were selected for extra environmental protection, and were tunnelled, and there are 100km of tunnel planned so far, including the route beyond Birmingham up to Crewe. The main tunnels are the Euston (7.2km), Northolt (13.5km), Chiltern (16km), Long Itchington Wood (1.6km), and Bromford (5.6km)… there are also a number of cut-and-cover tunnels in certain key locations.

Each of these tunnels is a megaproject in its own right… and a story for another day.

27:11

Andrew McNaughton: Birmingham was the most interesting thing from my point of view. After 180 years of railway Birmingham’s only good connections by rail were to London everything pointed south, all the existing stations. The good burghers of Birmingham said: ‘we want you to build a new station alongside the existing one New Street Station’.

Fran Scott: Birmingham’s main, modern, city centre station.

27:40

Andrew McNaughton: We pointed out how big a new station would be. We had the pictures of Stratford International, for example, which was built just before the Olympics. And we pointed out if we if you put that on top of Birmingham, there’s no city centre left. And this was a point of… can you build it underneath? No, it’s too expensive. Can you take over New Street Station? Yes, if you build another station somewhere else for all the commuters. None of this made any sense whatsoever.

Fran Scott: Then there was a lightbulb moment: Birmingham could be connected to the north, east, and northwest just as well as to London… if the city’s original eastern station were redeveloped. Birmingham Curzon Street would be reborn.

This would be supported by an upline station called Interchange which would link passengers to the airport, local tram network and NEC.

Curzon Street itself was decrepit. Surrounded by car parks on rough ground, in a region of Birmingham that had not been developed since the Second World War. High Speed 2 would bring a new renaissance to eastern Birmingham.

Andrew and his team had set out to design the first stage of the new rail network, and to report back to government by the end of the year…

29:03

Andrew McNaughton: And that’s what we achieved at five o’clock on December the 31st. And pressed send.

Fran Scott: And delivery of the largest infrastructure project in Europe began.

If only it were that simple! Andrew spent the next year in and out of offices, justifying every metre of the route to first one, then another Secretary of State. Nevertheless, the momentum had begun and things began to change.

29:38

Andy Street: Hi, I’m Andy Street, Mayor of the West Midlands.

Fran Scott: Andy thinks strategically about Birmingham’s position within the UK, and with HS2, here is a new map… one that is very favourable to Birmingham.

29:51

Andy Street: We will be incredibly well connected, not just with London, but also with Manchester in the Northwest, and with Nottingham, and then ultimately on to Leeds and the north east. So it puts us right at the centre of what I think will be the 100 years new transport system. So that means if you are an inward investor, thinking about where you want to locate, and you’ve got a relatively Footloose business, you are very likely to say, I’ll be at the very centre of the new transport network. And we’ve seen that in some of the inward investment decisions that have been made.

Fran Scott: Historically Britain has suffered one of the largest regional imbalances in the developed world.

30:32

Andy Street: It’s definitely true, that obviously Britain has had one of the world’s most successful cities, London, and no one’s going to take anything away from that. But at the same time, all the other major cities have probably underperformed. Now, one element of that has been the investment into transport and infrastructure in other cities.

Fran Scott: Older cost-benefit models have directed spending to where it offers the most return. This seems obvious, but it is self-reinforcing. Spending adds value, which attracts more spending.

Levelling up is charged with political implications, but there has been a move to invest more in regions outside of London, and some of the greatest relative benefits of HS2 will come “beyond Birmingham” where travel times have not advanced from the Victorian era.

Then there is the investment that will come as a result of this new investment.

31:34

Andy Street: This is not about doing down London, this is about ‘doing up’ other places getting a better balance.

Now part of that is making the most of our central location to do trade with and you know, it’s a lesson of history over 1000s of years, if you’re easily connected, you will do more business together. But I think it goes a lot further than that, actually. Because it’s actually about what businesses what type of business is going to be based here, what skills are developed here for those businesses. So we see the advent of the financial services sector, here we see advanced manufacturing, we see health tech, so they’ve got to be part of this. But and I think there’s a well a social dimension to it as well.

Fran Scott: Birmingham is the youngest city in the UK, and Andy says the one that looks most like the country’s future make-up. He says hardwiring rail travel into this society could have additional benefits over the coming century.

Someone also thinking about how to impact the way we do things in the future is Mark Thurston. He’s the CEO of High Speed 2 Limited.

32:48

Mark Thurston: One of the steps I had to take to get this job was to meet the Secretary of State at the time was Chris Grayling. So we had a big sort of, sort of set piece in his office in Westminster. And he said to me, How long are you going to do this job for? Because we’re going to need someone who’s going to stick with it and be on the first train. And I said to him, you know, to be given the opportunity to potentially finish my career in this role and create what would be a new railway for the country, having started my career, sort of working on the underground, and I said to him there’s a sort of symmetry around, that’s where I started, and then all these years later, you get given the opportunity to lead the organisation that’s going to build a new railway.

How could you not? How could you not… you know?

Fran Scott: Mark joined the organisation in 2017, a few weeks after Phase One between London and the West Midlands was approved by Parliament and given Royal Assent.

He immediately had to shape it from a studies and preliminary works organisation, to one that would deliver a megaproject.

This meant, first, that he had to set a culture. And the question of values was immediately put to him.

34:02

Mark Thurston: We have four values as an organisation… all organisations have a sort of sense of purpose and a mission. But we have these four values. And I was asked early on what do you want to do with the values? I said what do we do with them today? They said, well not very much these things are sort of like posters on the wall, but they don’t really… So I’d come from an organisation in CH2M and that was employee owned, had a very sort of family type, very connected, sort of pastoral culture for the organisation, because it was it was owned by the, the employees.

And I often referred to it as the sort of biggest small company I’ve ever worked for, because we have 23,000 people around the world, but really felt connected or felt part of this big CH2M family.

Fran Scott: The organisations core values are: respect, leadership, integrity and safety

Building on these values, Mark wanted to focus on this idea of family, a collaborating organisation.

34:57

Mark Thurston: If we can harness all this, and somehow sort of bring this to life across the organisation, we could really do something quite special here. And I took the view that my job as the CEO was to create an environment where with the right calibre of people, we create an environment where people can be their best selves and do their best work. And if I can do that, I can do no more.

Fran Scott: This stretches up the supply chain as well, and HS2 is pushing the industry to innovate.

35:34

Mark Thurston: And there is an opportunity to move the industry forward on the back of HS2 that is not just frankly an opportunity, it’s an obligation. And if we miss the opportunity to innovate, to drive skills and capability to leave a legacy that goes way beyond that sort of what Crossrail and so the Olympics did, which were very important projects, but they tend to be geographically constrained. This is a national endeavour. And I made the point as a prize that, you know, stick with me on this. Because if we embrace the opportunity for the industry in the sector that it has to presents, then I think we really could change things forever in some areas.

Fran Scott: Ultimately this project is about the future of the country. An attempt to reshape Britain to better serve its people, and deal with the challenges of the modern world.

36:30

Mark Thurston: HS2’s place in Britain and the future is an interesting one. I’ve been lucky enough to travel on the high-speed system in China and Japan, and Italy, and Spain. And when you see, particularly in Japan, or the way the Shinkansen system has sort of redefined their economy, their sense of autonomy.

And I think that’s the bit that sort of, in my mind always been sort of unwavering in that as much as we get buffeted and as we will always divide opinion until it’s open it will divided opinion, even particularly the last few years, well, the troubles it’s had but look at the way people now are embracing Elizabeth line as a game changer for travelling across the city, but also the way it’s putting capacity in the existing tube system. So you’re seeing less crowded Central Line trains or District line or whatever it might be.

HS2 will sort of redefine the economic and the transport geography of this country.

Fran Scott: Andy Street says that the critical aspect from the national perspective is simply getting planes out of the skies and cars off of the roads.

37:31

Andy Street: So just take a simple thing like London, Manchester flying, I mean, you just stand back. It’s nonsense. In a small country, we should be, we should be travelling by train, but there needs to be a reliable clean service. Enter HS2. So there is really an environmental case. When you look at the long-term debate here. I know there’s disruption in the short term. I know people are worried about trees being cut down. But hopefully they will be replaced many times over. But you’ve got to see this as a commitment overall, to our net zero ambitions.

Fran Scott: For Andrew McNaughton, easy travel is a fundamental measure of society’s development.

38:12

Andrew McNaughton: Imagine if we’d never built the M1. We would be stuck in the 18th century. We built the M1, we got into the 20th century, we’re not going to build new motorways in the 21st century. We need to compete in the world.

This is about developing the future. This is about a future where the natural way of connecting cities is by this environmentally sensitive, very low carbon very efficient transport system.

Travel is essential. Without travel, there is no economy, there is no social. We will be basically back in the Dark Ages.

Fran Scott: Against this, we are building HS2, the first major new rail investment north of London in a century.

Next time on How to Build a Railway…

39:17

Helen Wass: We can’t build the railway until all the environmental works are undertaken.

Mike Court: We had over 1,000 archaeologists working.

Rachel Wood: A single site can have 10,000 individual contact records created.

Helen Wass: It might be the biggest archaeological project ever.

Mike Court: Once you’ve started doing these kinds of projects, it’s very hard to go back into doing little bitty things, you really want to be a part of something huge.

Rachel Wood: I actually got a text message with a picture.

Rachel Wood: An hour later, I got another phone call, saying ‘You really will not believe it this time.’

39:59

Fran Scott: Your host has been me Fran Scott

Thanks to our guests Andrew McNaughton, Bob Gwynne Andy Street and Mark Thurston

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