High-speed rail link remains in the slow lane

Date: 29/02/1996

IF visionaries of a European transport policy want an example of how much work they still have to do, they need look no further than the PBKAL high-speed train link.

This 16-billion-ecu project, germinating for 14 years in the minds of Europe's transport ministers, was designed to link Paris, Brussels, Köln, Amsterdam and London (PBKAL) by TGV.

Journey times would be slashed. From Brussels, a trip to London would shrink from 3h10 to 2h05, to Paris from 2h25 to 1h20 and to Amsterdam from 2h45 to 1h30.

Yet, as with so many dreams, the reality has been radically different.

Even though the ministers of transport involved in the project signed an implementation agreement in 1989, construction work has been chaotic.

Along the entire 868-kilometre network, it is only the line from Lille to the Channel Tunnel which is operational and the whole system will not be up and running until 2005 at the earliest.

The high-speed link from London to Folkestone has been talked about for ten years, but the route was only chosen last month, while the UK government missed its January deadline for selecting a consortium to design, build, own and operate the line.

For their part, the German and Dutch governments and railway companies have effectively been sitting on their hands while awaiting a decision from the key player in this game: Belgium.

The longest and most expensive parts of the network run through Belgium, while most of the passengers using the system are expected to be French, Dutch and German. As a result, it has taken the government seven years to agree to finance the TGV system.

“It is for a good reason that Belgian taxpayers and their politicians have been taking it slowly,” admits a railway engineer closely involved in the German side of the project. “Why should they pay the most money while others get all the benefits?”

Belgium has not, however, been its own best friend. While it was inevitable that the country would pay disproportionately for its leg of the network, its linguistic divide has added to the bill.

Town and country planning rests in the hands of the regional governments in Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels, while drawing up railway routes and concepts remains a federal responsibility.

This meant that the line from Brussels to Aachen and Köln had to run through Liège, a key demand of the Walloons, even though this meant digging expensive tunnels on both sides of the city as the track dipped into and out of the Maas valley.

Running the track 50 kilometres north would have lopped millions off the final bill for a national railway company in a state of financial crisis.

Once the routes were agreed, compensation had to be paid to local governments to fund noise abatement measures, highway diversions and new bridge building, so raising SNCB investment on the TGV from 2.6 billion ecu to 3.7 billion ecu overnight.

But, at last, Belgium is on track. On 16 February, Transport Minister Michel Daerden put together a financing deal designed to ensure that the entire Belgian section would be complete by 2005.

This will involve taking the spending burden off SNCB's balance sheet. A special 'cell', Financière TGV, will be created benefiting from 770 million ecu in government finance and 250 million ecu each from other public organisations and commercial banks.

The line from Lille to the southern Belgian town of Antoing should be operational by June and the complete Brussels-Lille track by mid-1998, although the Belgian and Dutch railways remain mired in talks over the route to be taken from Amsterdam to Antwerp.

The Belgians want to keep the line as short as possible and run it through Antwerp docks to Rotterdam, but the Dutch want to ensure extra passenger traffic by diverting it through Breda.

An agreement on compensation for the Belgians for having to build an extra 20 kilometres of track is expected soon, thus allowing the 2005 target date for the Brussels-Amsterdam line to be met.

Work in Germany is barely more advanced. Along the Köln-Aachen line, only a small piece of track between Köln and Düren is being upgraded at the moment. Deutsche Bahn decided that the Düren-Aachen upgrading was not worth the investment yet, since a mere 30-minute gain in journey times could not be justified while work on the Brussels-Aachen line was delayed.

Business executives intending to travel by high-speed train from London to Amsterdam should not hold their breath.