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The Greenhouse Gas Direction of Rail Travel
The proposal to build a high speed rail link between London and the North sounds like lunacy to me. Let me declare that I have no financial interest in the proposal. I do not live anywhere near the affected route, I have no interest in rail companies or construction companies or in any of the various businesses that might benefit or lose by a high speed rail link.
As far as I can ascertain there are two advantages in the project. The first advantage is that you would be able to travel from London to Birmingham in an hour, and you would knock about an hour off journey times to Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and Liverpool. The second advantage is that the building of the rail link would create a lot of jobs and a lot of economic benefit while the rail link is being built.
It has been claimed that getter there faster also creates an economic benefit in itself but in these days of cheap electronic communication you can set up a video conference for a lot less money than a train ticket, even in your own city. I have never understood why shaving thirty percent off a journey time heralds an economic benefit; let us assume it does, for the purpose of the discussion. Then it is reasonable to assume that extending journey times creates an economic disadvantage. Building a high speed track and setting it up will take ten years or so. That activity will cause all sorts of journey delays and men and kit are transported over the country inevitably by road, adding to traffic and delaying the road users considerably.
So, all in all I cannot see the advantage in these relatively small islands to build such a rail link. If we do, then environmental considerations should be paramount and central to the decision.
There is certainly an economic benefit in creating jobs; every large infrastructure project does this; you do not need to build a high speed rail link in order to gain the advantage of job creation. For considerably less money you could give away free solar water heating systems or rent of provide very soft loans to every home off the gas grid network, saving them and the environment bundles.
If that is not to your taste the spend the money overhauling the existing rail network so that we have better trains that can hold more people and improve the track? Or if that is not to your liking and you believe increased travel to be beneficial to the national economy why use the money to subsidise rail travel.
The disadvantages of high speed rail are I think several. First and foremost are the environmental ones and here we have a double whammy: the building of the new track will disturb land releasing masses of carbon dioxide sequestrated therein, as will the manufacture of the cement and other materials: the building of the track will despoil countryside and will blight homes that have been established along what will now be the route of the high speed rail. O a life cycle basis at least half the emissions will be created from making and maintaining the infrastructure of high speed railways, according to American research.
Finally the operation of a high speed rail system will create significantly more emissions than the operation of a low speed rail system. The faster any vehicle travels the more energy is needed to propel it along its way. Trains, even electric trains, are just like cars in this respect. Once you have gone above a certain speed the energy required to drive the vehicle along increases.
My statement that high speed trains in their operation create more emissions than traditional trains may not be completely accurate. Some think that compared with diesel power trains high speed trains emit 30% more. It can be very difficult to judge with certainty because it depends whether you measure emissions per journey, per passenger or per seat. We do not know how full the new high speed trains will be and we also have to consider the emissions created in getting to and from the stations where the train operates.
On a per seat basis there seems little doubt that high speed trains provide more greenhouse gas emissions – around 9% more at present electricity production. As the electric grid becomes “decarbonised” this will drop to 4% more – according to the studies that are relied on. On a per passenger per kilometre travelled basis the same studies claim 15% fewer emissions because the modelling assumes in effect more seats on high speed trains will be occupied than on conventional trains.
I think that these kinds of modelling and comparisons do not take into account all the alternatives; the case is not about whether high speed trains produce fewer or more emissions but whether the investment overall produces fewer or more emissions compared with what the same investment can do if it was spent on what one Minister called patching up the railways. It is easy to characterise what should be a comprehensive overhaul of the railways as patch and mend and the money being spent on high speed rail would do far more than patch and mend. It would be enough to provide us with a railway system that was not terribly fast, but very fuel efficient and which would emit fewer greenhouse gases than the present system or a high speed rail system. That seems to be the direction that future rail travel should go.
Government thinking on this issue seems to be a bit like a rail system; it is limited by the track and can only go backward or forward on that track. We need to be able to think in every direction to ensure a greener cleaner railways which produces a a greener cleaner environment.
Filed under: carbon emissions, climate change, electricity Tagged: disadvantages of high speed rail, high speed rail, high speed rail. emissions of high speed rail, rail travel 
Read more at Ideas for the Environment
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