LONDON: Britain's Network Rail is proposing to construct a 15-billion-pound high-speed railway line between London and Glasgow.
The company plans to run trains every half an hour between the two cities, covering the distance in about three hours. The trains are expected to attain a maximum speed of 180 miles per hour by 2016. The new lines will be laid in parallel to the existing west coast mainline.
Iain Coucher, Network Rail's deputy chief executive, is talking at an Institution of Civil Engineers function in London Monday on the proposed rail line. He believes that the service will be able to attract good number of airline passengers and it will operate without subsidy.
The trains will stop at Birmingham and Manchester en route.
Network Rail estimates that network must carry 21 million passengers a year by 2016 and 30 million in 15 years for the project to be viable. This constitutes nearly 70 per cent of the total passengers between London and Scotland.
Earlier estimates had put the cost for commissioning such a rail line at around 33 billion pounds, but Network Rail is confident it can construct the line in around 11 billion pounds to 14 billion pounds. An additional 650 million pounds would be required to buy electric rakes.
Identical proposals were mooted some 15 yeas ago by British Rail's InterCity as part of a west coast modernization program, but the plans were shelved after the Conservatives decided to privatize British Rail.
Coucher is expected to argue that the line can be integrated with the Channel Tunnel Rail Link and other existing rail lines for access to various city centres at a later date.
Scotland's transport minister Ravish Scott had underlined the need for a high-speed rail link between Scotland and London, which he feels can obviate the need for a new runway at the Edinburgh airport.
