A high speed train travelling at 220mph taking passengers from Glasgow to London in less than three hours will top the Scottish National party’s transport programme if it wins power in Scotland next year (link below.)
http://www.rmtbristol.org.uk/2006/10/snp_promises_220mph_train_link.html#moreA Nationalist-led administration would enter into early talks with the UK government and offer to pay up to 10% of the costs of constructing the rail line across Britain.
The move is seen as an effort to seize the initiative from Labour after reports that a government-commissioned study by Sir Rod Eddington , the former British Airways chief executive , will reject a new north-south high-speed line.
Under the SNP strategy, a Nationalist-led coalition in Edinburgh would meet the cost of new track in Scotland if the UK government paid for the required new railway in England.
The Treasury estimates that the rail link could cost £33 billion to construct but Iain Coucher , deputy chief executive of Network Rail , believes a high-speed rail network could be built for about £15 billion.
Here is a link to the High Speed Line feasibility study conducted by Atkins for the Strategic Rail Authority.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_railways/documents/page/dft_railways_032564.pdf“If you can get around 70% to 80% of people who travel from London to Edinburgh or Glasgow on the train then you are also talking about raising significant income,” Coucher added.
The SNP favours a link that would connect Scotland to Birmingham, London and Manchester. This is likely to be cheaper than a network that would include Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle because it would require fewer miles of new track.
Here is a further article on German reaction to the recent Maglev train crash (link below.)
http://www.rmtbristol.org.uk/2006/10/germanys_troubles_with_transra.html#moreA post-mortem report of the Emsland accident , released eight days after the accident , suggests that the local authorities were negligent in applying safety regulations. The train was speeding at 170km an hour when it collided with a maintenance vehicle on a test track , killing 23 of the 31 people on board.
A report in the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung claims that the authorities in the state of Lower Saxony had failed to notice that the maintenance vehicle did not have operating approval or a valid safety certificate.
However , this claim is being disputed by other politicians who point out that there had recently been a fire on the train in Shanghai and that the Chinese government had , in fact , sent a delegation to Emsland to find out more about the accident , suggesting that it too had serious doubts about the train's safety.
The accident has put politicians of the ruling German coalition on the defensive; the Munich rail link , expected to cost nearly 1.8 billion euros , is likely to see greater opposition than in the past.
However , Hans Eichel , a former German finance minister and presently the head of a working group called "Transrapid" set up by the government , warned that if the Transrapid rail link at Munich airport was killed , then it would be "dead as a German product" but , he added, it would appear, in a couple of years , in the world markets as a "Chinese product".
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