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Government announces high speed rail would go through Chilterns
A NEW high speed rail line is being planned from Heathrow to Birmingham which will certainly travel through the Chilterns and may pass through Gerrards Cross and Denham.
Transport Secretary Lord Adonis announced this week that the Government has commissioned the drawing up of detailed plans to be made public in December.
It wants to build a high speed hub near Heathrow from which trains would travel north to Birmingham and beyond as part of a plan to reduce the UK's carbon dioxide emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 by encouraging people to stop taking domestic flights.
Sir David Rowland, the chairman of High Speed Two, the Government backed company managing the scheme, confirmed in the Guardian on Friday that the route would run through the Chilterns. He is quoted as saying: "There will be people upset that a high-speed rail line passes through the bottom of their garden or passes through the Chilterns. You have got to take a railway through an area of outstanding natural beauty."
Talking about the route report due in December he said: "In urban areas and pinch points it will be down to a few metres of where it will be and in open countryside 25 metres."
Paul Fullwood, of the public pressure group Passenger Focus, said High Speed Two would be looking at using the existing Chiltern Line through Gerrards Cross as one option. Another option would be to build a new line close to the existing Chiltern Line and the M40, and a third being considered would be to follow the Great West Main Line west before cutting north.
Colin White of the Chilterns Conservation Board said: "The effect on the Chilterns would be devastating, unless they tunnel all the way to Thame, and they are never going to do that. High Speed Rail may be a good thing, but here, you're going to get a detrimental impact here with no benefit."
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We do need to be careful not to panic people to talk their own property values down! The line across Kent was neither ugly nor noisy compared with the adjacent M2. Nor did it end up along an existing railway line through towns!
Various options are being investigated, but across the Chilterns it is highly unlikely that the route would follow the Chiltern line through Gerrards Cross! A route following the existing scar of the noisy M40 is far more probable for various reasons. It could be straighter, it could run though a possible Park & Ride station by Junction 4 and the continual din of 6 lanes of adjacent traffic would drown out the sound of an occasional train.
It could also be cheaper to run the route by the M40 - as the cost of disrupting the existing Chiltern line would be almost as enormous as the recent WCML upgrade was. It is typically cheaper to build a new route besides a motorway.
So lets make sure we get some of those nice Javelin trains and a commuter station at Junction 4 - so we can reduce traffic on the M40!
And lets fight for this to be built as quickly as possible - as the main line to Birmingham is supposed to run out of capacity by 2015!