Missing the boat
BRITISH Rail's high-speed link is now in action, stretching for some 15 miles across rich countryside, carrying trains at 125 mph and engineered for higher speed. This is the new stretch of the East Coast Main Line, built to bypass the curves and subsi- dence at Selby, and it bears out my theory that the way to link British Rail to the Channel Tunnel is to stick a pin in the middle of England and whirl it around. We have fine fast trains, but none of them runs south from London. The first morning train to Dover covers the 77 miles in 21/4 hours. It would be quicker to go to Taunton, Cardiff, Crewe, Leeds or York (188 miles). If any serious attempt had been made to bring the boat train routes up to the standards now familiar on other lines, the railways and their minister would not be in their present pickle. Mobbed last year for menacing the Kentish countryside — so different from Yorkshire? — they are now mocked for doing nothing. Alistair Morton at Eurotunnel always said that the prospect of the tunnel, pouring traffic down the unreconstructed tracks of the London, Chatham and Dover (`Smash 'em and Turnover'), would force British Rail into action — adding that he had quite enough fights of his own and would sub- contract this one. A pity, though, to subcontract it to swashbucklers who swash where they ought to buckle and buckle when they ought to swash.
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