Why?
Fast access by rail offers:
- Clean travel fit for the 21st century.
- Connections with Northern England, the Midlands and the South East England from Scotland in a fast, comfortable transit that enables people to work while they are travelling, maximising their productivity.
- It connects us into HSR1 from London through the Channel Tunnel to the Continent enabling Scottish & Northern English Businesses to share the benefits of that major investment – having fast convenient access to European markets.
- It offers significant environmental benefits over internal flights – and also frees up space on our pressured runways for international destinations which cannot be reached by other means and routes connecting Northern Scotland to London.
- Connectivity as good as our principal competitors in what is increasingly a global market-place.
- Cost savings by creating easy day-return access to key markets.
- Better tourism travel provision internally.
- Release of capacity on the existing rail network to grow short distance passenger and all freight traffic – encouraging modal shift and reducing environmental damage and road congestion.
There is no doubt that the financial challenges of 2008 will lead to greater burdens on businesses in 2009. Perhaps High Speed Rail could be the Hoover Dam of the present era – a magnificent boost to the construction industry delivering a vital piece of infrastructure which will support new found optimism in our future economy. We are not pretending this is a project that could be delivered overnight – by any stretch of the imagination it will be a gigantic undertaking. But that is much more likely to happen if we can show the strength of business support for building HS2S – High Speed 2 Scotland.
Our paper outlining the case for HSR for Scotland follows:
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