The British reached a milestone in their railway history recently, although they are probably too embarrassed to celebrate. They have finally finished digging the tunnel that will allow high-speed trains to travel between London and Paris.
It's been 20 years since former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and France's then-president François Mitterrand announced their grand vision for a rail link between the two European capitals. It's been 10 years since the Channel Tunnel opened to passenger service.
But while trains sped through northern France at 300 kilometres an hour from day one, they trundled through southern Britain at the pace of a milk train, because the tracks had not been built for high-speed use.
Even with last month's completion of the tunnel linking St. Pancras Station in London to the Gare du Nord in Paris, it will still be another three years before the route is completely high-speed. Why has it taken the British so long?
I blame Margaret Thatcher, who strongly believed that whatever the government could do, the private sector could do better. This has not proven to be the case with Britain's railways.
The Thatcher revolution derailed the high-speed train project in two ways: It caused endless problems in financing the construction of the 109-kilometre link between the Channel Tunnel and St. Pancras, and it threw the entire British rail industry into a state of turmoil from which it has yet to emerge.
The starting premise was that the private sector would shoulder the entire burden of building, financing, and running the link. When that proved unworkable, the government said it would contribute, but only towards the end of the project. There was endless dithering about the route from London to the Channel Tunnel entrance in Dover. This was decided in 1994, the year the tunnel opened.
London and Continental Railways, a consortium, won the contract for the link but quickly ran into financial difficulties. The British government was forced to bail it out. The official line was that taxpayers would not be asked for any more money, but that only meant the financial assistance took the form of government loan guarantees and other instruments whose value is difficult for the public to track.
In 1996, the Conservative government, now under John Major, went ahead with a wholesale privatization of the national railway system. Individual routes were sold to various private companies at fire-sale prices — selling the family silver, as one critic complained — and the tracks and the mandate to run the network were given to another. This private company proved incapable of running a railway and was put into receivership in 2001. The government placed it in a type of limbo between a private and a public body.
Public patience with the railway has been stretched to the limit.
Complaints to the rail companies about services in London and the southeast of England, which is where most rail commuters live, soared by 31 per cent last year. A study released last week by the Chartered Management Institute said the combination of train delays and traffic congestion cost managers two million hours of lost time per year. Vital meetings were missed and productivity depressed.
You can get a feel for commuter frustration by visiting a website called trainpain.com, which gives members of the public a place to vent their spleen. It also tracks complaints and directs them to the right companies.
While the national rail privatization did not have a major direct impact on the Channel Tunnel rail link, the turmoil it created has preoccupied the government and made investors wary of putting their money in anything associated with trains.
All of this has salience for Canada because of our continuing debate over whether a high-speed rail service should be constructed in the Windsor-Quebec corridor and, more importantly, who should pay for it.
Canadians should look very hard at the British experience before deciding that this is a job for the private sector. The French and the Belgians, who are partners in the Channel Tunnel project, decided quite sensibly that it was the job of a government. The French section of the high-speed route has been open for a decade. The Belgians completed their bit in 1997.
Yes, rail transport in both countries is heavily subsidized. But isn't that the way it should work for major investments whose benefits are widely dispersed among the general public? We sometimes lose track of the fact that it's our money the government is spending and that sometimes it does make sense to use those pooled resources for the public good.
This is not to say there should be no private-sector involvement in a high-speed service. But as the British have shown, handing the entire thing over to business is no way to run a railway.
