Maglev is a chance for Scotland to set the agenda on strategic transport
The February 2008 Transport Special Edition of Holyrood Magazine carried a major feature by UK Ultraspeed CEO Alan James placing the Glasgow – Edinburgh project in the context of UK Ultraspeed progress elsewhere in Britain and of general maglev development worldwide. Link here to go to the Holyrood website.
The text of the article is reproduced in full below.
UK Ultraspeed is a proposed 500 km/h (311 mph) strategic transport network, using the German-developed Transrapid magnetic levitation (maglev) system. Cruising at 250-300 mph, maglev is fast enough to use a single route link to all the major city regions from London toScotland, via the Midlands, the Northwest of England, Yorkshire and the North-east to Edinburgh and then across the Central Belt to Glasgow.
A Glasgow to London journey, stopping in all the intermediate cities, would take only 2 hours 40 minutes. With up to 1,200 passengers on board, compared with around 200 in typical domestic jets, maglev would thus convey up to six times more passengers from the Thames to the Clyde faster than air, once travel to Heathrow, check-in, security, taxi-ing and ATC delays are factored in. Yet maglev emits at least eight times less CO2.
Attention in Scotland has focused on the Glasgow-Edinburgh link, with Strathclyde Partnership for Transport having led the early stages of the debate, as first major transport body in the UK to make the maglev case. With a non-stop journey time of under 15 minutes, the line is seen as a key investment in boosting Scotland’s competitiveness by creating a single ‘super-city’ able to compete for investment with top-class global business locations. Glasgow-Edinburgh is also a potential stage one of the UK-wide project. With support growing, the question now is ‘can it really happen here?’
There’s no question that the technology works. The Transrapid system is already in service in China, linking Shanghai to Pudong International Airport. Services conveying up to 500 passengers depart every few minutes and reach 250mph in less than three minutes. Running in part along the central reservation of a motorway, the Shanghai Transrapid completes its 30 km (19 mile) journey in 7 minutes 23 seconds. Driving the same route can take up to an hour, given Shanghai’s notorious congestion. The highly-automated maglev operates to a timetable defined to the second, with entire weeks passing with cumulative total delays of zero seconds, with a cruising speed of 430 km/h (267 mph) used in daily operations since January 1 2004.
Extensions to the Pudong line are now in development, firstly, through the heart of metropolitan Shanghai to the 2010 World Expo site and onward to Shanghai’s other main airport at Hongqiao, from where maglev will then race to the city of Hangzhou on an alignment designed for 500km/h. The extended system will then total approximately 200km (125 miles), roughly the distance from Edinburgh to Aberdeen. A city-to-city trip will take under 30 minutes, compared to the 2 hours 26 minutes today’s trains take to link the Scottish cities.
Maglev projects are also moving ahead elsewhere. Germany’s first Transrapid line, in Bavaria, gained funding approval in September 2007. On Boxing Day, Japan Railways Central announced a US$44.5bn (£22.5bn) investment in 500km/h (311mph) maglev to replace the 250-300 km/h (155-186 mph) Shinkansen, initially between Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. News that the Japanese are already planning to replace their Bullet Train has certainly focused minds in Britain, where ‘High Speed 1’ from St Pancras to the Channel Tunnel only started in November 2007, some four decades after Japan ushered in the high speed rail era.
Certainly Transrapid has impressed visitors from the UK. As the then Shadow Secretary of State for Transport, Chris Grayling, put it in March 2007 after riding maglev: “No one who has travelled on the only commercially operated maglev route in Shanghai could fail to have been impressed. It could well be a vision for the future. Not only is it fast - it also appears to offer much more versatility than conventional rail. “If maglev were to be the right option, my view is that it should be used initially for high speed intercity Metro services, between cities that are linked by a congested corridor that is a few tens of miles long. Leeds and Manchester and Edinburgh and Glasgow are two obvious route options.” said Grayling.
The Conservative Party’s engagement with maglev firmed up during 2007. Firstly, John Redwood’s Economy and Competitiveness Working Group “concluded that an incoming Conservative government should explore the feasibility and costs of implementing the new maglev technology, which offers the opportunity of far faster intercity travel, and hence a more effective challenge to the aeroplane.” Then, in November, Grayling’s successor as Shadow Secretary of State, Theresa Villiers, confirmed that the Opposition are considering maglev alongside conventional TGV-style trains. In a Transport Times interview, she said: “I want us to have very clear ideas about what we want to do – either conventional high-speed or maglev – and to have done a significant amount of the preparatory work so that when we are in government, we can start delivering within a reasonable timescale.”
Ms Villiers then went further, stating the Conservatives’ intention to go beyond studies into actual delivery: “In our first term of office, we hope that, in addition to feasibility studies, we will have a pilot project for either high-speed rail or maglev.”
Whilst the Tories have made public their engagement with maglev, it is by no means solely a project of the right, or one exclusively driven by Westminster politics. Senior Labour figures and powerful voices from the Northern English regions have been amongst the most vocal champions of Ultraspeed. Transport Select Committee member and Tyne Bridge MP, David Clelland, for example, champions maglev, stating that “current thinking on high speed rail links is based on old technology that will be as outdated as steam trains by the end of the 21st century”.
However, it is Scotland which has made much of the early running. In the 2007 Holyrood elections, the Scottish Conservatives became the first political party in any Western democracy to include a maglev link in a political manifesto: “The economic benefits of a high-speed link from Edinburgh to Glasgow would surely be even greater. Maglev technology would effectively twin the cities into a single economic powerhouse – a sensible and exciting aspiration for Scotland.” Time will tell whether they were blazing a trail which the Westminster Tories will follow in the 2009/2010 General Election.
For Labour, then Finance Minister Tom McCabe made the case, again on macro-ecnomic grounds: “It is the kind of project that will more than pay itself back. The economic benefit of such a system, in terms of linking the two cities and producing what is effectively a joint labour force, could amount to about £500m a year.”
And although he stressed that the SNP’s immediate focus would be on incremental upgrades to the existing infrastructure, including electrification of the Falkirk route, Alex Salmond also commented: “The maglev proposals are very interesting. I’m open to looking at a fast link between Edinburgh and Glasgow.”
With Alex Salmond now well established as First Minister, with electrification now committed and with EARL killed off, Ultraspeed looks forward to a period of intense activity in Scotland. The task is clear.
Firstly, provide the world’s fastest intercity link between Scotland’s two key cities, enabling them to combine their strengths and compete in the premier league of the global economy.
Secondly, provide the world’s best integration of a super-region with the global air network, with Edinburgh Airport to the city taking under four minutes, and Glasgow around ten. This also would enables a potential link to Glasgow Airport, opening the possibility of combining Scotland’s two key gateways into a single two-runway super-airport, without building an inch of new tarmac.
Thirdly, provide seamless interconnections with heavy rail, underground, tram and bus, with the Glasgow terminal easily accessible from both Queen Street and Central stations and Haymarket serving as the Edinburgh hub.
Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, Ultraspeed will deliver a compelling alternative to the private car. Studies just completed in Northern England have quantified the carbon impact of journeys switching from car to maglev.
Using DfT emissions figures, and assuming maglev powered by today’s UK electricity generation mix, every driver switch ing to maglev saves up to 75 per cent of the financial costs of commuting and 50 to 75 per cent of total CO2 emissions. Emissions savings would rise,ultimately, to 100 per cent if Ultraspeed were powered by Scotland’s greenest renewable electricity.
With Ultraspeed providing a capacity equivalent to 40,000 typically-laden cars a day along the M8 corridor, these are potentially massive benefits for Scotland. Just imagine whata super-smooth maglev, powered by Scotland’s wind, wave, tidal and hydro power, would say about Scotland the business location, as it silently accelerates through the urban fringes to link her two key cities with the fastest ground transport on Earth.
There is, of course, opposition to maglev. But it’s not coming from those quarters where it might have been most expected. The airlines, for instance, are sanguine. For them, perhaps somewhat bizarrely, maglev looks like a win, as they could then replace loss-making domestic flights with maglevs, producing at least eight times less emissions, thus racking up immediate credits on the carbon trading markets. Crucially, switching short haul domestic services to maglev would free up around 500 runway slot-pairs at Heathrow every week. Airlines would then use them for profitable long-haul services.
But whilst the transport industry is largely at ease with maglev, the most entrenched opposition to Ultraspeed has come from the Whitehall Department for Transport itself. Sir Rod Eddington’s first draft report in summer 2006 is widely believed to have been supportive of the concept of a North: South high speed link, but by his December 2006 Final Report, DfT and Treasury pressure had him reaching the conclusion that: “The UK has good levels of connectivity – the national networks are in the right places, comparing well with European competitors.”
Whilst many in Scotland and the North of England were puzzled how the £10bn failure of the West Coast Main Line upgrade (whose modest promise of even 140mph trains is now abandoned for good) ‘compares well’ with France’s TGVs, Germany’s ICEs and so on, DfT landed what at first seemed a killer blow in July 2007, in the Rail White Paper, which prioritised incremental improvements to the existing network, mostly south of Birmingham, over any kind of high-speed link.
On maglev, the White Paper firstly clearly identifies the possible benefits, saying: “Maglev would be sufficiently fast to provide a London–Glasgow service that could compete with air on journey time, whilst providing intermediate stops at Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and Edinburgh.” But it then goes on to specifically dismiss further work on (of the order of £60 billion)” DfT’s number is a grotesque error of fact. The cost estimate attributed to Ultraspeed is wrong – and we know it to be wrong, because the White Paper is citing our figures. In fact, the £29bn figure is itself an upper-range estimate of the order of magnitude of total capital costs for the entire 840 km national system. It already includes land and the other risks the White Paper has then double-counted into its £60bn figure.
The Ultraspeed team expects 2008 to see the debate around high speed returning to a solid foundation of fact. In the first quarter, we will ourselves be bringing forward evidence on capital, carbon and operating costs, all of which outperform rail or road alternatives.
Most importantly, UK Ultraspeed stands ready to bring to the table technology, construction, finance and operations partners with 100 per cent of the resources required to enable Glasgow-Edinburgh (or other similarly scoped stage one) to be procured with absolutely zero up-front public sector grant. We will commit to doing so once government indicates its willingness to engage with a mutually acceptable project finance mode.
Ultraspeed has long put forward the argument that maglev is the only system fast enough to connect all the great cities of the North of England and the Scottish Central Belt, not only with London but with each other to create a ‘North Britain Super Region’.
The North of England is almost universally underwhelmed by the damp squibs of Eddington and the Rail White Paper and is, as the Newcastle Journal recently put it, looking to “the increasingly confident nation on our northern border” for “bold and visionary” leadership.
With the English seeing a Scotland capable of grasping that “a maglev link between Glasgow and Edinburgh would so speed connections as to make one city out of two, and transform the economic prospects of both as it did so”, there’s a real chance for Scotland to seize the initiative and define that super-region.
In the eyes of many, and not only Scots, maglev is clearly an opportunity for Scotland to set the agenda on strategic transport. We expect 2008 to be a decisive year for maglev. In 2015, time will – quite literally – tell whether the Scottish Government was equally decisive back in 2008. If it takes you only 15 minutes to get from Edinburgh to Glasgow, you’ll have your answer.
Maglev: holyrood magazine feature
Monday, 11 February 2008
