The UK government has made a commitment - and a clear policy shift against domestic air travel. Andrew Adonis, the transport secretary, has told a national newspaper that “it is manifestly in the public interest that we systematically replace short-haul aviation with high-speed rail”, and that plans for a new 250mph railway network are already “well advanced”. The proposals for a first GBP7bn ($11.8bn) line between London and Birmingham, which could be built by 2020 and further extended to Scotland, are to be published by the end of this year. Forty-six million domestic air passengers could thus travel on such a West Coast line. For those unfamiliar with British railway network, there is a parallel East Coast line, which links London with Edinburgh. The government also proposed high-speed services on the existing tracks, which should cut travel times between the capital and Scotland to three-and-half hours, although I think I have heard that promise before.

However, the nation’s domestic air passengers are not enough! “I would like to see short-haul aviation - not just domestic aviation, but short-haul aviation – progressively replaced by rail, including high-speed rail,” Adonis has been cited as saying. Mainland Europe is to be made more accessible too, and not just from London. Given the geography, this should be a challenge. I can already imagine the transfer between different trains at London St. Pancras station being just as time-consuming and boring as at Heathrow. Or is the government thinking of short 100-seater trains that run non-stop between, say, Manchester and Dusseldorf? That would make the two-track Channel Tunnel very busy indeed.

It’s right to consider alternative ways to satisfy our transport habits at the same time as reducing our environmental impact, and maybe also to propose radical change. Cutting CO2 emissions is, of course, the main driver behind these proposals. The UK government aims to reduce the country’s CO2 emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. But will the transfer of passengers from aircraft to trains really lead to reaching these goals? How much more environmentally friendly is rail travel to air travel really?

All this leaves one important point unmentioned: the reasons for growth in short-haul traffic. It has simply become very cheap – much cheaper than going by train, certainly in the UK. Will that be any different with high-speed railway lines and trains which need yet to be built across Britain?

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