A NEW NAME in rail transport will be launched in Britain this week when the Channel Tunnel Rail Link is renamed High Speed 1. In a year’s time it will start carrying high-speed services from London’s St Pancras station to Paris and Brussels.

Speed is what the new route is all about. Constructed at a cost of £5.8 billion, it is the first mainline railway built in Britain for more than a century. Eurostar trains have run from London since 1994, but have had to slow down in England to crawl across busy commuter lines. With the opening of the new link, they will run at the same speed as on France’s TGV tracks — 186mph.

Trips between London and Paris will take two hours 15 minutes, 20 minutes faster than the current quickest time — itself a 15-minute improvement on the original Eurostar journey thanks to the opening three years ago of the first section of the high-speed line, from the Channel tunnel to Fawkham junction, Kent. The second section runs from Fawkham across the Thames and into central London (through tunnels) from the east.

Rob Holden, chief executive of London & Continental Railways (LCR), the consortium that has built the line, said the name change signalled that construction was coming to an end and the first passenger services were only a year away.

“Channel Tunnel Rail Link is a bit of a mouthful and the initials CTRL don’t mean much to anyone who isn’t familiar with the project. We wanted to change the name, and high-speed rail has positive connotations here and in the rest of Europe,” he said.

The new name poses the question whether there might be a High Speed 2 in the pipeline, and whether LCR might want to build it.

High-speed rail is at the forefront of the current debate about transport and climate change in Britain. Iain Coucher, deputy chief executive of Network Rail, has proposed a north-south high-speed line to relieve pressure on the existing network. Sir Rod Eddington, the former chief executive of British Airways, is expected to publish his long-awaited report on transport at the end of the month, and may also back new high-speed lines.

If a new line was ordered, LCR would be an obvious candidate to construct it. Holden said the company had built up a great deal of expertise and it would be a shame to lose it. “There is a lot of experience here that could be extremely useful if the government decided to proceed. We can’t be involved in speculative development, but we are pro high-speed rail for the UK,” he said.

But if the government is to take advantage of LCR’s expertise, it will need to move quickly. Holden said his team would be ready “to step into a new railway” in 12-18 months, but beyond that the nucleus of experienced people would be dispersed. “The skills they have are transferable, and by then they will have the opening of this railway on their CVs, which will make them very marketable.”

The hype around this week’s launch of High Speed 1 will obscure some of the big questions about the rail link — such as whether it should have been built at all.

A House of Commons public accounts select committee concluded earlier this year that the economic case for its construction was “marginal”, because the number of passengers using Eurostar services is much lower than originally forecast.

When bidding for the project in 1996, LCR — a consortium comprising Bechtel, UBS, Arup, Halcrow, Electricite de France, National Express and SNCF — forecast 21m passengers a year by 2004. The actual number has turned out to be one-third of that. This year Eurostar will carry about 8.5m.

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