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airport links
The Bow Group, a right-wing "Think" tank, is calling for any north-south high-speed rail line to have direct links to major airports, and mentions Heathrow, Birmingham and Manchester.

What is wrong with Birmingham airport's current high-speed rail link? With Virgin Pendolinos and Voyagers stopping there frequently en-route to Birmingham and Euston, things couldn't be too much quicker.

All in all, travel to Birmingham airport by rail is a very un-British experience; good rail links on quality trains, then straight onto the fully automated monorail which takes you the 600 metres to the terminal. Somehow one would expect the monorail, which opened in 2003, to break down a lot. In fact, frequent users of the airport will testify, it's incredibly reliable.

The monorail runs on the track created for the maglev system which when it opened in 1984 was the world's first commercial maglev.
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big ideas, small ideas
The high-speed rail train rumbles on with a report delivered by High Speed 2 (not being published yet) to Lord Adonis yesterday; he will be making proposals on the back of it by the end of March 2010. While any decision taken will probably be retaken (and retaken, and...) after a General Election, Lord Adonis is proving a more can-do Transport Minister than any of his Labour predecessors.

Lord Adonis has also taken an interest in overhauling old carriages and moving them to parts of the country where they are needed as a stop-gap. There are certainly some inexplicably short trains on our networks. What is Arriva doing running 2 carriage trains on a morning service from Manchester to Pembroke? As this train approaches Cardiff through places like Cwmbran and Pontypool with probably quite low car-ownership, capacity is uncomfortably exposed. Can margins really be that tight?
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