HS2 will be transformative - just not quite yet, says transport head

This is the year HS2 gets real. At Euston, giant diggers are munching their way through old Sixties buildings at the side of the rundown main-line station, clearing a huge site for what should be the first six platforms of Britain’s new super-railway. Thousands of people are working on the project. More than £4 billion has already been spent. It should be a national sensation. So why haven’t we noticed?

Perhaps it’s because HS2 — the planned fast link between London, Birmingham and key cities in the North — seems to have been talked about for ever. It’s 10 years this month since the Government first put a plan forward. In that time a lot has happened. Laws have been passed, maps designed and routes proposed — but nothing has been built. A child born on the day HS2 was announced would now be approaching the end of primary school.

At last things are changing, promises Mark Thurston, HS2’s chief executive: “By this time next year it will feel very different.” He’s the latest leader of a project that already has had more than its share of trouble at the top. Sir Terry Morgan, picked by Transport Secretary Chris Grayling as its chairman last summer, resigned before Christmas after delays at his other project, Crossrail.

Talking to Thurston you get the sense of a man who has his head down, trying to get the job done despite the chaos at Westminster which has seen Government attention to HS2 drift. He says his team have a sense of “mission” and that the project has “a momentum all of its own”, which is lucky since the Prime Minister rarely mentions it these days and the HS2 minister, Nusrat Ghani, is little known. You don’t have to go far, either, to find critics who think the project should be cancelled. Before Christmas Boris Johnson, a longstanding opponent, sought advice on how to bring it down.

Thurston’s job is to ride out the politics and keep the project moving forward — and that’s what’s happening. You can see it if you climb to the top of a now-derelict tower block outside Euston station.

It’s about to be pulled down to make way for London’s new gateway, but for now, stepping around the rubble, you get a sense of the scale of what’s about to take place. The huge, dreary roof of the existing station dominates the view but next to it a vast area is being cleared for HS2. A tent covers the site of an old graveyard, busy with archaeologists, which is due to vanish under the new platforms. Nearby, new housing blocks accommodate people whose homes have already been knocked down. Building the new Euston seems a smooth process — if a slow one.

In the 1830s, the last time a railway was built from Euston to the Midlands, things were quicker: on April 14, 1838, this paper carried an advertisement on its front page telling Evening Standard readers that “The RAILWAY is now OPEN for the conveyance of Passengers, Private Carriages and Parcels between London and Birmingham”.

That was less than five years after plans to build it were agreed — and remember, trains had only just been invented. By contrast HS2, using established technology, will take at least 17, much of it soaked up by a far more complex planning process.

That’s assuming the first stage opens, as promised, in 2026. At the other end of the route from Euston, Curzon Street in Birmingham, new hoardings hiding the site proudly show the opening date — but so did those for Crossrail in London, and that’s been missed. Few think 2026 is realistic — it would, after all, mean the line would need to be ready for testing in less than six years.

New site hoardings for HS2 at Euston, I noticed, don’t have a date on them, just friendly signs encouraging people to visit Drummond Street’s famous Indian restaurants, which fear being isolated as part of the road they are on is removed. What matters is not a date but getting it right. What’s the best way? Over a beer, one former leader of the project sketched out the challenge ahead as a triangle of time, cost and what’s called scope — by which is meant: which bits of the project will actually get built and what sort of trains will use it.

All of these aspects are adjustable but it’s widely agreed that it will be impossible to build the line in a hurry, to a fixed price, and do everything all at once. Want to stick to the budget? Then phase in some of the route. Try to open on time? Costs will go up as you rush.

Another former insider told me it was an error to be pressing on with work at Euston now — the priority should be to get the line built to provide fast, reliable services to the Midlands and the North where it’s needed most.

To do that it would be best to open the service from Old Oak Common in west London — a site just outside Paddington that will be served by Crossrail — before extending it to Euston. It’s probably where most passengers will get on anyway, since the Crossrail connection will be a lot more useful than Euston’s already swamped Tube lines — especially since the Mayor seems to have let his enthusiasm for Crossrail 2, which will serve Euston, slip.

And there’s another reason to get Euston right too: there is no agreed plan for the whole site. HS2 is building six platforms next to the old Euston station and later will knock part of that down to build more, but the impact of all this work on the current train service is still uncertain and Transport for London hasn’t got the plans or the money to modernise the Tube station. Until there’s a funded masterplan, opportunities for redevelopment will be limited. And no one wants to see endless closures on the old lines out of Euston while HS2 is built.

Thurston won’t admit to such dilemmas directly. Things, he says, “will continue to be in play on something this complex for many, many years”. That sounds like code for “there will be changes — and it is the right way to run something this big”. But now he’s facing understandable pressure to stick to HS2’s already massive budget of at least £56 billion. Scope and timescale are secondary to that, though he isn’t able to say so — from which you can conclude that HS2 won’t open in 2026 and not all of it will be built in one go.

Right now, however, the project team are cracking on. That means tendering building contracts for Euston and Old Oak and getting ready to submit plans for the new Euston station to Camden council. At Westminster they are getting on with a new law to build the railway beyond the West Midlands, which could pass by Christmas.

In Birmingham and Manchester there is massive support for a project, which people see as a game-changer. It’s not just the speed of the new service, though that’s dramatic — Old Oak to Birmingham Airport in 38 minutes, which is less than it takes to get from Archway to Tooting Bec on the Northern line. It’s the promised reliability, frequency and capacity too.

A service such as HS2 will change Britain. For London, it will have massive benefits. For the rest of Britain, there will be more. But getting from here to there will take much more work.