David Wragg: Rail plans must not be shunted into a siding

By comparison with High Speed 2, known as HS2 to its friends, the Northern Hub will be a modest affair, costing a mere 530m compared with 27.5bn for HS2. Both hope to attract private investment, but admit that taxpayers' money will be needed.

That the Northern Hub, or something like it, is desperately needed is beyond doubt. Trans-Pennine links are poor. The M62 is inadequate at peak periods, easily blocked by accidents or breakdowns and as Britain's highest motorway particularly prone to disruption in bad weather.

On the other hand, the plan comes at a time when that for HS2 is far from settled. Will it or will it not go via London Heathrow, providing a convenient service for the country's leading intercontinental airport and reducing the number of short-haul domestic flights into the airport? Will HS2 link with HS1?

And what do people mean by "the North"? London to Manchester is one objective, but where will it go after that? Given the heavy cost and disruption of upgrading the West Coast Main Line, it seems a trifle rich that this should be duplicated by a new main line while there are other unresolved bottlenecks in the system.

The southern end of the East Coast Main Line suffers from severe problems around Welwyn that limit the number of trains that can be run from Leeds and York, and points further north, as the long-distance expresses are slotted between slower moving suburban trains and goods trains.

HS2 runs the risk of terminating at Manchester, with trains reverting to what might be described as the historic route north of the city, running at much slower speeds and providing less appealing journey times as result. Cut short in this way, there is the very real danger that it will not attract enough traffic to justify the investment.

There are rough plans for HS2 to continue to Glasgow and even on to Edinburgh, although an alternative proposal is that it should run from Manchester to Leeds or Bradford, then on to Newcastle and Edinburgh, before finally reaching Glasgow.

If HS2 were to run from Manchester to Bradford, it would provide a welcome increase in capacity through the Pennines. It would certainly be better value, attracting traffic from Scotland and the North East as well as that from Yorkshire. It would relieve pressure on both the East and West Coast routes, and would mean that the railway would once again become a serious rival to domestic air services.

It seems strange that Network Rail does not seem to have considered integrating HS2 and the Northern Hub. Even if additional tracks were required through the Pennines for the more localised traffic between Yorkshire and Lancashire, it would be much less expensive to plan the two railways as one, and ensure that connections and through running of services became easier.

In fact, dissatisfaction in Scotland with the existing railway links between Edinburgh and Glasgow means that HS2 could also become part of the solution there as well.

The need to ensure that the maximum benefit is extracted from these projects at the minimum cost is all the more pressing at a time when the Government is debt-ridden and the public finances will be hard pressed to maintain many existing programmes, let alone undertake costly new commitments. We all know how few major projects seem to be delivered on time and on budget.

Numerous problems affect the viability of the project. New railway links please the environmentalists, but only if these use electric traction, and even that is only environmentally friendly if the electricity is generated without producing carbon. It is questionable whether wind or wave energy will produce the vast amount of electricity that high-speed railways need. The weight of railway rolling stock and the effect of atmospheric pressure as speeds rise above 150mph mean that high-speed trains consume far more power than do aircraft cruising at high altitude. This is something that is often overlooked.

It is no coincidence that the European nation that pioneered high speed railway travel is France, the one with the highest proportion of its electric power generated by nuclear power stations.

We have been through a period when urban tramways and light railways were in fashion, with Sheffield's super trams as one example, but doubts over the viability of many such projects has led to new schemes, as in Leeds, not attracting Government support. Perhaps most telling is the fact that a line in Hampshire linking Portsmouth, Gosport and Fareham, and replacing not just buses but a ferry service as well, has been abandoned. Some local authorities, such as Leeds, are looking at the cheaper option of the trolleybus.

In fact, problems in funding railways are not new. Even in the

Victorian era when about 90 per cent of Britain's railways were built, railway mania was followed by a catastrophic crash. Desperate to attract investment, one of the great pioneers, George Hudson, who did so much to make York a major centre for the railways, even resorted to paying dividends out of shareholders' funds before his lines were fully opened, and the resulting disgrace saw him resign all of his directorships.

David Wragg is a railway historian. His most recent book, A Historical Dictionary of the Railways of the British Isles, is published by Wharncliffe.