Derailed: The Story of HS2: 1. The Railwayman

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Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be hurt.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Welcome to Understand from BBC Radio 4.

You're about to listen to Derailed, the story of HS2.

If you're in the UK, you can listen to the full series right now, first, on BBC Sounds.

If you head out of London to the west, past Wormwood Scrubs Prison, the second-hand car dealers and storage facilities, there is an enormous building site.

At its heart, a rickety metal staircase.

Climb down, and 20 meters underground, it all opens up into a cavernous concrete hall.

Here we are in the underground cathedral of concrete, as we might call it.

It's not your typical cathedral.

Scaffolding stretches between the columns, water from the open roof splashes beneath our feet, and orange-clad workers are fixing steel supports in place.

The evangelist showing me round is Peter Gow, the project director for the site.

So it's nearly a kilometre long, 850 meters, because the platforms need to be long, they're 400 metre long.

This is Old Oak Common.

one of two brand new stations being built to support a new high-speed train line between London and Birmingham.

High-speed two.

So it really starts to feel like that's going to be somewhere passengers going to be and you can imagine standing there waiting for your train.

And to its designers, this is part of something bigger.

A dream to connect the nation, drive growth and drag our public transport into the 21st century.

To be part of something that's going to be here for centuries is something I'm very proud of.

I've got a 10-month-old son now and I can just imagine bringing him and saying, look what I did.

There are plenty of people who would tell you Peter's Cathedral of Concrete is simply a money pit, symbolic of a decades-long scandal of political incompetence and a quango drunk on unaccountable power.

Depending on your view, stretching in a straight line north from here is either a major artery bringing the cities of the UK closer, or a deep, festering scar.

To find out how we got here, I've spent months poring through documents and debates, sitting down with politicians and protesters, insiders and engineers.

And the answer, I've found, takes us to the heart of how things in Britain get done and why some of our biggest, most ambitious ideas crumble away.

I'm Kate Lambell from BBC Radio 4.

This is Derailed: The Story of HS2.

Episode 1, The Railway Man.

Tucked at the back of St Pancras Station, past all the shops and just next to the toilets, is a small office, currently covered in reports and PowerPoint slides.

Ready?

Yes.

Andrew McNaughton seems a bit nervous.

Not because he isn't across the detail, he's clearly meticulous.

But instead, it's the kind of nervous energy you might expect from a man whose big contribution to public life has become a national punching bag.

And he wants to show me why HS2 is the way it is.

The corners of this are all bent because you have you referred to it.

Because

each new Secretary of State, you end up going, look, look, let's just remember what this was all about.

So this is a very thumbed document indeed.

In 2009, Andrew was a leading rail engineer.

In a country that didn't build new railways, there had been no new route route north of London for 70 years.

Think tanks and rail operators had long been pressuring the government to build a network of properly fast trains.

And now, in 2009, they had suddenly found their political moment.

With an election approaching, Labour Transport Secretary Jeff Hoon announced...

I can also announce that I'm today forming a new company, High Speed 2, to consider the case for new high-speed rail services from London to Scotland.

Days later, Andrew McNaughton received a call.

Said, the department has got excellent economists, but we don't understand railways, and I got seconded into this new body called Unimaginatively High Speed 2 Limited.

Andrew McNaughton traded in his role leading thousands of engineers at Network Rail for a blank piece of paper.

Gosh, that was the first morning was almost terrifying.

And we were sitting there with a desk, a phone, a computer and 11 months to produce a compelling report one way or another.

The dream starts here.

Having managed railways through all the compromises of dealing with a 150-year-old system, to build a new one That's fit for the 21st century.

Could you imagine for a railwayman anything more exciting?

I want you to hold that sense of optimism in your mind, that vaulting ambition, as I tell you about a project, billions of pounds over budget, years behind schedule, and hugely disruptive.

So disruptive and so expensive.

You were almost paying out more in compensation to people than you were actually putting what we call pounds in the ground.

A gigantic failure of planning is simply entirely down to us and obviously the impact on passengers passengers is dreadful.

Now, this isn't HS2.

It's its predecessor, the West Coast Mainline Upgrade, the cautionary tale that Andrew McNaughton would have closely in mind.

The budget ballooned to £13 billion.

It was in a state of disarray.

It did bring Rail Track to its knees.

And even before the work had finished, parts of the route, particularly near London, were full once again.

Rebuilding the railways is a never-ending job.

All studies were showing that the M1 was maxed out, the M40 was maxed out, the West Coast Main Line, the other railway lines would all be absolutely full by the 2020s.

The attempted upgrade had gone so badly, the industry thought.

Never again.

This is what makes a new line, a high-speed line, feel like the obvious alternative.

After all, there had very recently been a high-speed success.

High-speed one, which linked central London with the Channel Tunnel, had opened in 2007, on time and on budget.

Why not just do that again?

Sir Brian Briscoe led the local government association for a decade.

In 2009, he was asked to join the board of HS2.

And back then, he too saw the problem, which previous upgrades had not fixed.

The problem was seen to be a capacity problem, particularly on the the West Coast main line.

I think there was a different kind of optimism.

We were coming out of the 2008 crisis.

The expectation was that the economy would get back on its feet.

It was a feeling that the recovery could be infrastructure-led.

Someone else put it to me as the opportunity for an infrastructure renaissance.

This is Lord Andrew Adonis, the then Transport Secretary at a conference in 2009.

You wouldn't spend any significant money on a high-speed line till at least 2015.

You've got to have your plan, it's got to go through a planning process.

We'll be well out of the recession by 2015.

This was a vision of sunlit uplands, one Britain could build.

Andrew's team started with the stations.

Because those are the most expensive parts, but also that's where the benefit is.

Let's take Birmingham.

By building a new station on the edge of the existing city centre, it enabled the development of thousands of houses and thousands of jobs.

So you're not just trying to build a route that we might be familiar with, it's something even bigger than what we've seen before.

Oh yes, it wasn't just about a new railway.

It wasn't just about capacity.

It was about reimagining the growth that you could have in the cities of Britain away from London.

And then six months in, something important happens, something which would change the next 15 years.

Andrew McNaughton and his team had been speaking to colleagues around the world who had experience building high-speed rail.

And we had a conference in London and invited one of the legends of railways in the world, Guillaume Pepe, who's the chairman of the French railway operator.

There were other experts too.

Spanish, Japanese, all came to share their expertise.

We have managed high-speed railways.

I think it makes capacity free on the traditional.

High-speed is the new word for the railway transport.

Now, 2009 isn't actually that long ago, but somehow videos of pixelated seats in front of clumsily animated backdrops make it feel like something a substitute teacher would have rolled out in the 1990s.

Andrew McNaughton though remembers the French rail luminary making an impact.

He got up and he said, do not make the mistake of building yesterday's railway.

Do not build for today because the standards are always evolving.

Be careful not to design out future development.

Don't design out the future.

Remember, Andrew is a railway man.

He knows how rarely these opportunities opportunities come around.

We have to have maximum capacity, because you're designing this for the next 100 years.

They'd use existing technology to future-proof as much as possible.

Britain would be better.

HS2 would have the fastest, most frequent trains in the world.

In France, high-speed trains run at 200 miles an hour.

HS2 would be built to withstand 250.

12 trains run between Tokyo and Osaka an hour.

HS2 would be capable of running 18, one every three minutes.

To have any chance of doing this, any railway has to be built as straight as possible.

Trains this fast can't take corners.

There have to be more platforms, more sophisticated junctions, stronger slab track has to be laid.

It's all more complex, more expensive.

Andrew wasn't worried.

There are those who will say, oh, it's the speed has dictated cost.

And I'd say that is not supported by the evidence.

Around 90% of the costs were pretty much inevitable.

Frankly, if you're going to build a railway, 90% of it is a done deal.

Get over it.

Now, as straight a line as possible had to be threaded across our packed island.

Following existing motorways would be too curvy.

Following existing rail lines would mean levelling commuter towns.

We mapped all the population centres.

We looked at 104 routes just between London and West Midlands.

It looks like a piece, I'll show you, there's a diagram here, it looks like a piece of knitting, frankly.

So is that green blob the Chilterns?

That's the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

If you're going from London to the West Midlands and then on to Manchester and beyond, you're going to go through the Chilterns.

We knew that.

By December 2009, the first report was was submitted to government.

It mapped a route from London to Birmingham, which they said could open by 2025.

It would cost between £15.8 and £17.4 billion.

The report is over 200 pages of technical detail, but even the foreword reflects the idealism at its heart.

Building such a network will be the work of a generation.

It will need real ambition and consistency of purpose across a succession of of governments.

It will require support across the political divide of a kind our forebears showed more than half a century ago.

Once we got over the enormity of the task, we had a real belief that this

could be the biggest thing that happened to this country, certainly in transport terms, for a century.

In February 2010, Brian Briscoe became the chair of HST Limited.

Ministers were were excited about the prospect and

the fact that Labour ministers could say this does something for the North.

Now, you'd have to ask them for their motivation, but that's my reading of it.

And in March, ministers announced their vision to the public, one month before a general election.

Were you ready for the criticism that would come from the public?

No,

we weren't.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Listen to the full series right now, first on BBC Sounds.

How is it that some brands and products really capture our imagination, seem to be ahead of the game, but then somehow end up toast?

I'm Sean Farrington, presenter of the BBC Radio 4 series Toast, which unpicks what went wrong with big business ideas.

We hear from people directly involved in building the successes.

They were looking for us to build scale quickly, gain a dominant market position, and that's what we did.

And get expert insight into why they faltered.

So, in effect, Woolworths was being drained of cash, and people tried damned hard to save it.

From FHM magazine to Woolworth's via Nike's Fitness Band and FreeServe's internet service, Toast.

Listen first on BBC Sounds.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be hosted!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

We demand to be quality!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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