The Channel Tunnel Rail Link in the UK: is it all that it seems?
The Channel Tunnel Rail Link, rebranded as High Speed 1 (HS1), is perceived as a physical and political success and has provided the springboard for further proposed investments in HS2 and even HS3. This paper focuses on traffic impacts of rail services using HS1 and the Channel Tunnel. Using, and u...
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| Izdano u: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/rhcf, |
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| Glavni autori: | , |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jezik: | Anglais |
| Izdano: |
Revue d’histoire des chemins de fer
2022
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| Teme: | |
| Online pristup: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sažetak: | The Channel Tunnel Rail Link, rebranded as High Speed 1 (HS1), is perceived as a physical and political success and has provided the springboard for further proposed investments in HS2 and even HS3. This paper focuses on traffic impacts of rail services using HS1 and the Channel Tunnel. Using, and updating, a series of research and student projects undertaken at the University of Southampton, in combination with publicly available data sets, the traffic impacts of HS1 are re-appraised. It is evident that taken as a whole the usage of rail services on HS1 has been substantially below forecast and that competition from other modes for cross Channel traffic has been more stubborn than expected. Although performing well in terms of market share of the capital to capital market, demand forecasts of Eurostar have had to be revised down on a number of occasions. The performance of through freight services has been even more disappointing. It seems unlikely that these rail services have been an economic success in a purely transport sense, and therefore that the UK’s Channel Tunnel Rail Links cannot be justified on their transport benefits alone but are dependent on wider economic benefits. |
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