UK: Heathrow faces threat from high-speed rail

[John Ashworth]

Heathrow faces threat from plan to link high-speed rail route with Birmingham

Site near Birmingham International airport being considered as station on new route, according to rail sources

* Dan Milmo, transport correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Sunday 7 February 2010 20.18 GMT

A modestly sized airport off the M42 in Birmingham could become a serious competitor to Heathrow under government plans for a 200mph high-speed rail network.

A site near Birmingham International airport is being considered as a station on a new route that will link Britain's largest cities by a 50-minute train ride, according to rail industry sources. If the government pushes ahead with the plan it would take no longer to reach Britain's sixth largest airport from London's Euston station than it currently takes to get to Heathrow.

The route would see the line emerging from Euston before travelling to Old Oak Common in west London where an interchange would link the route to Heathrow airport and Crossrail, a £16bn rail service joining Heathrow to Canary Wharf due to open in 2017.

The line would then sweep through Buckinghamshire to the West Midlands where a parkway station, where drivers can park their vehicles and use buses to complete their journey, would be built near Birmingham International and the nearby National Exhibition Centre.

The first phase of the line, which the government hopes will become part of a UK-wide network, will terminate at a new station in Birmingham city centre but the main spur would continue up from Birmingham International through Trent Valley to join the west coast line north of Birmingham, where the services would continue at conventional speeds to Manchester and Scotland.

Ministers are particularly sensitive about where the route goes once it emerges from London because the line is expected to go through a section of the Chiltern hills in Buckinghamshire – one of 40 areas of outstanding natural beauty in England and Wales. The Chilterns Conservation Board, the public body responsible for protecting the area, has warned that parts of the countryside could be "trashed" by a high-speed route.

A 1,000-page report compiled by High Speed Two, a government-backed company, was delivered last year to the transport secretary, Lord Adonis, including a detailed plan for the first phase placing the tracks within five metres in urban areas and 25 metres in the countryside.

It will include three broad proposals for a UK-wide network that would reduce the journey time from London to Edinburgh from four-and-a-half hours to two hours 40 minutes. London to Birmingham is expected to take 50 minutes using a service that will carry 18 trains per hour. Adonis is due to publish the report before the end of March, with construction on the first phase due to begin in 2017 and finish in 2025. A spokesman for Birmingham International said the airport had received no "formal or informal" indications that it will be on the high speed route, but added that a strong case exists for making it part of a new rail network because it will allow the airport to win back Midlands passengers who use Heathrow.

Birmingham International airport plans to nearly treble in size from 9.2 million passengers per year to 27 million by 2030 without adding a new runway. Instead, it is building a 400m runway extension that will allow the airport to host planes with heavier fuel loads, opening up destinations such as San Francisco and China.

A spokesman said that airports such as Manchester, Newcastle and Glasgow would also benefit.

Birmingham International broke ranks with the aviation industry last year to lambast the government's apparent obsession with Britain's largest airport. Birmingham International's chief executive, Paul Kehoe, said it was "preposterous" to let Heathrow develop further.

He added: "Heathrow sucks in traffic, we have to support it and if you don't support it you are made to look like climate change deniers."

A report by the Committee on Climate Change, a government advisory panel, has made the case for a third runway at Heathrow by forecasting that British airports can handle up to 140 million more passengers per year ‑ which would allow at least four runways at Heathrow ‑ by 2050.

However, connecting Birmingham International to a high-speed rail line would suit the Conservative party, which has pledged to block a third runway and build an ultra-fast rail network instead. The shadow transport secretary, Theresa Villiers, expects regional airports such as Birmingham to soak up the airport growth permitted by the government's advisory body on climate change. The committee said that UK airports could add 140 million travellers per year, on top of 230 million currently, without breaching the government's target of limiting aviation's carbon dioxide emissions to 2005 levels by 2050.

BAA, the owner of Heathrow airport, said any attempt to transform Birmingham International airport into a serious competitor would not work.

Heathrow connects 66 million passengers per year to 181 destinations around the world thanks to its two runways, while an attempt by British Airways to turn single-runway Gatwick airport into an alternative hub was a failure, it said. BAA executives estimate that 1.5 million people per year use Birmingham airport to fly to major European airports such as Frankfurt, Paris Charles de Gaulle and Amsterdam Schiphol and believe that establishing a high-speed link between Birmingham and Heathrow would see those travellers come to Heathrow instead.

A Department for Transport spokesman said the Birmingham airport station was "complete speculation".

He added: "We have yet to reach a view about specific routes. If the government decides to go ahead with plans for high-speed rail, it will publish a white paper by the end of March."