Forward thinking: We’re creating a backbone for the 21st century
Andrew McNaughton is rather nonplussed – in a laidback, amiable kind of way. “I’m not a wannabe movie star,” he points out, helpfully, just in case PE’s photographers were getting other ideas. The thoroughness of their work may have taken him aback – “I’ve survived that bit” – but, sitting down to talk at HS2’s offices in London, he’s quite ready to discuss his true passion, high-speed rail – and he doesn’t have to fake enthusiasm for that.
McNaughton is the technical director – and former chief engineer – for the controversial High-Speed Two rail project. He certainly has the experience necessary for the role: he was chief engineer for Network Rail during the noughties and is professor of rail engineering at Nottingham University, as well as holding visiting professorships in engineering at Imperial College London and Southampton University. He advises the Australian government on rail and lectures frequently – and internationally – on regional, long-distance and freight rail development. He has been with HS2 from its inception in 2009.
Perhaps this allows him to be relatively sanguine about threats to the project. He points out that it has survived not only a change of government but also several ministerial shake-ups. Does it bother him when politicians cast doubt on the line’s viability in a manner that seems to be playing politics with crucial infrastructure, as shadow chancellor Ed Balls arguably did at the Labour party conference?
Choosing his words carefully, he says: “We live in a democracy and that’s important. Our job is to keep delivering what successive governments have wanted, which is a very high-capacity system that draws people closer together and improves connectivity between the north and south of the country – that will trigger growth in cities and free up the existing network.
“It’s our job to do it within a budget, and the government has set us a budget: and we will stay within it,” he says. Balls had cast fresh doubt on the affordability of the project. But McNaughton is in no doubt that it is needed: “We’re creating a backbone for the 21st century: big cities need improved urban transport.”
Why is high-speed rail attractive? When cities are too close together to make flying between them efficient, it is the solution of choice for large numbers of people who want to make the journey, says McNaughton. A “transformational” level of additional capacity is required.
For instance, the upgrade of the west coast mainline solved some capacity issues but the line is now facing a “triple whammy,” he says, in which increasing numbers of passengers use intercity services, increasing numbers commute into big cities, and there is more strategic freight to be transported.
“You’ve got the same tracks that were laid down in the 1830s trying to take three times the growth.” In this scenario, he says, in which several different services are vying for space on the same line, the most effective strategy is to lay down an entirely new one, as the French did to create capacity between Paris and Lyons – a comparable journey to the London to Birmingham route.
Another good example is Paris to Brussels, where there is high demand and a relatively short journey time. “You’re matching a need, which is high capacity and short journey times, with a technology that is high capacity and also high speed.
“Because you’ve got a dedicated route, other trains don’t get in the way.” Other benefits include high levels of reliability and safety. “We’re setting out to take the best of what’s been developed in France over the last half century and other countries to create a high-capacity, high-reliability system that is also utterly safe,” he says.
He is candid about a previous infrastructure project he was involved in at Network Rail. “The west coast mainline modernisation was an enormous task, but we got to the end of it saying ‘never again’. Never again will we create that level of disruption for the travelling public over 10 years, involving enormous cost, to deliver an incremental improvement to an existing railway.”
He says that engineers acknowledged, ultimately, that only so much could be done with the existing rail line. “It’s at that point you think – the French have got it right; the Germans have got it right; the Koreans have got it right; the Spanish have got it right – and maybe we’re the ones who have got it wrong.”
Building a new high-speed rail line, he says, is “fundamentally easier”. “You design it for the 21st century, rather than knocking around with something that was designed to take coals to Newcastle, almost literally. And you avoid disruption to the existing service.” He also argues that it makes sense economically. For instance, he says, it would cost more to rebuild the York-Darlington line than to construct a new line between the two places. “And you couldn’t rebuild the existing line and get the same capability: it would still be a mixed-traffic railway; you would still be running out of capacity; it still wouldn’t be reliable.”
The HS2 route was suggested logically by the largest centres of population – and population growth – in the UK, says McNaughton. The route would take the form of a Y, with a trunk between London Euston and Birmingham. The line would split into two spurs, one continuing to Manchester Piccadilly, running under Crewe railway station and Manchester Airport, and the other to Leeds via the East Midlands and Sheffield Meadowhall. The option exists to extend the network to the North East, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
“Where does high-speed rail need to go?” asks McNaughton. “It’s pretty obvious if you look at a map of Great Britain and where the big cities are. It’s not always obvious just how fast the country is growing in terms of population, and most of that growth is taking place in cities. But we can reach eight of the top 10 city regions with a relatively small network. It’s a question of demand – and demand gives you volume.”
Where does high-speed rail need to go? See the full map (opens new tab)
It is important that the system contains options for links to Heathrow – if that is chosen as the UK’s hub airport – Crossrail, and High-Speed One, and therefore the Continent. But McNaughton emphasises that the line’s core business will be the large volumes of passengers wanting to travel quickly between big cities.
“So, yes, we have to have a direct link into High-Speed One so that passengers wishing to travel straight from Manchester to Paris can do so. But compared to the numbers of passengers wanting to travel from Manchester to Birmingham or Manchester to London it’s relatively small numbers: international travel is never as intensive as domestic travel.”
That’s the big picture stuff, of course. Then there are myriad decisions to be made over the specifics of the route – and inevitably there will be those for whom it runs in their backyard, or for whom the environmental impact of HS2’s construction is unacceptable. Just for the London-to-Birmingham trunk of the network, the engineering team has considered more than 100 options for the route, says McNaughton. When the entire Y-shaped scheme is taken into consideration, that figure rises to more than1,000 options.
It’s a balancing act, weighing up the potential toll on the environment or local communities versus considerations of speed and cost. “It’s that balance that matters: you will always have the cheapest route, you will always have the quickest route, and you will always have the lowest-impact route – but you need to balance those factors – so we whittle away at them with the transport economists, the environmentalists and the engineers in the room.”
More than two-thirds of the details of the proposed route have been revised under public consultation, he adds. “That’s where you get into the real detail with people – for example, ensuring that the train roof is 4 or 5m lower so that the residents of a village won’t see it.” Or that cut-and-cover tunnel is used to conceal the line, he adds. “That’s one use of taxpayers’ money where the government can take the decision it’s necessary to reduce the impact of HS2 on a particular community,” McNaughton explains.
It might be difficult at this stage to envisage what engineering design work has taken place for HS2. A large element concerns the civil works, and include tunnels, bridges and earthworks. McNaughton says: “Civil works are a big issue because they are so visible. Civil engineers are responsible for about two-thirds of the cost and, as far as most people are concerned, all of the impact.”
The engineering of the trains, signalling systems, stations and track and the way in which these elements work together operationally is also being examined. High reliability – of a level similar to Japanese high-speed rail – is one operating condition, along with a minimal number of stations and quick movements of trains through them to reduce the number of platforms. In turn, this reduces the impact of station construction on local communities, McNaughton points out.
And HS2 is examining potential train performance using a reference train that is said to be the most up-to-date example of a high-speed locomotive in the world, Alstom’s Automotrice à Grande Vitesse (AGV), a standard-gauge high-speed electric multiple-unit vehicle designed and built by the French company that has a top speed of 360km/h.
It does not matter that the AGV will probably not ultimately be the loco used on HS2: there will be a new state-of-the-art train when the line is complete. The aim was to pick a model that exemplified the best of high-speed train technology without relying on concepts that had yet to be proved in reality.
McNaughton says: “One of our guiding principles was that we would design on the best of today’s technology. I didn’t want us to be in a position where people said: ‘your railway only works with stuff that hasn’t been invented yet’. But I didn’t want old technology either. I wanted the latest being used worldwide, and it’s only been possible to travel on this in the last 18 months. The engineering has developed. It accelerates faster, brakes better, saves more energy and makes less noise than previous generations of trains.”
The AGV relies on the latest European standards for interoperability which were also desirable for the HS2 team. “EU technical specifications have become the world standard for high-speed rail. Pretty much any high-speed line in the world, including in China, is built to European standards,” says McNaughton.
The technical challenge for HS2 engineers is not designing a system that delivers high speed: it’s stopping the trains once they’ve reached maximum velocity. So recent work has focused on developing better brakes. Engineers are also working to ensure that trains are quieter and use less energy.
Noise is generated by the movement of steel wheels on steel rails, the nose of the train punching through the air, and the overhead pantograph arm whistling. One way of reducing noise is to sink the rail line a couple of metres into the earth; it’s also possible to build an external noise barrier. “Sinking the rail can hugely mitigate noise, which is obviously one of people’s biggest concerns,” he says.
Engineers are working to ensure HS2 trains are quieter and use less energy
Train body shapes can be streamlined to reduce noise, and the flow of air around the pantograph arm can be smoothed. The noise is also affected by tunnel size: too tight a fit creates sonic booms as a train speeds through making it uncomfortable on passengers’ ears. McNaughton explains: “Our tunnels will be much bigger than the trains – it’s a fluid mechanics problem and we have some of the best CFD engineers working on it.”
High-speed trains are relatively light, which means viaducts do not have to deal with very heavy rolling stock. Whereas traditional railways need to be able to cope with carrying fully laden freight trains, high-speed rail and its viaducts need to cope with extreme longitudinal forces, rather than downward ones. This dictates viaduct design. “They are going to look a bit different to a 200-year-old viaduct.” The sophistication of modern high-speed signalling and braking systems, meanwhile, makes it possible to run frequent services and for trains to be placed close to one another.
For McNaughton, the potential of HS2 marks the culmination of a renaissance in the rail industry. “I’ve been in rail for 40 years, and for 30 years of my career we were quietly managing a declining industry,” he says. “But in the last decade, it’s dramatically changed: numbers of passengers have doubled; intercity travel grew throughout the recession; commuting is growing, freight is growing, and we’ve got a really successful railway network – but it’s going to be completely maxed out in 15 years’ time.”
He is clear that there is no alternative to building a high-speed rail line. “We are not going to build new motorways – they are inefficient and unsustainable. The most efficient way of transporting large numbers of people between cities that are close together is high-speed rail.”
There’s plenty of space aboard global HS2 for UK manufacturers
Can HS2 benefit the economy to the tune of £15 billion, as a report by KPMG has claimed? And what are the implications of the scheme likely to be for British engineering firms?
High-speed rail technology is international, so we are not going to see entirely British-designed and built trains used on the route when it opens – though few perhaps would have imagined this. But this does not mean that UK manufacturers will not be able to contribute, says the project’s technical director Andrew McNaughton.
“There’s no such thing as a British high-speed train but a lot of British companies are going to be involved in HS2,” he says. “You can make an analogy with Airbus: it’s an international effort but some of the cleverest bits of the technology are British.
“With HS2, there is a huge opportunity to integrate components from all over the world in a railway.”
There are also opportunities in the civil engineering space, where two-thirds of the money goes, says McNaughton. “It will be an international effort there too, but I think British companies are well-placed whether they be small firms or bigger companies in the Midlands and elsewhere.”
The existence of the network could provide a showcase of engineering expertise that the country currently lacks, he says. “We don’t have a TGV like the French or shinkansen like the Japanese and we produce really good products but it’s sometimes difficult to sell them around the world. This is a chance for British industry to showcase itself.”
Debate will continue to rage on the economic benefits for the regions and cities that surround the new line.
Some fear that the lifeblood could be drained from towns within the fast commuting times of the big cities. Others argue underdeveloped regions will benefit economically from coming into the orbit of the cities.
McNaughton argues that in France, the proximity of Paris to some towns meant not only that commuters could journey easily between the two, but also that businesses moved out of the capital to exploit cheaper rents in outlying regions, helping to boost these areas economically.
Just under an hour from Paris on the new TGV Est service, Reims is now connected by the high-speed link.
“Some residents will become commuters into Paris but some Parisian firms will move out there because the cost of business is a lot cheaper. What you will see is it’s not just the capital that benefits and that the economics stack up both ways,” says McNaughton.
“At the end of the day, we think HS2 will make Britain a better place to do business in.”