More than a thousand miles of high-speed railway line and new rail tunnels under the Irish Sea and the English Channel will be needed to cope with the continuing rapid growth in rail travel, according to the industry’s vision for the future network.

Three new 200mph lines would fan out from London, halving journey times to all the big regional cities and to Scotland. A fourth new high-speed line would cross the Pennines, linking Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds.

Tracks could also be laid on top of tidal barrages being considered for the Severn, Solway and Morecambe estuaries. A dedicated freight train network would take millions of lorries off the roads and would remove a cause of huge delay for passenger trains.

The Association of Train Operating Companies has published a vision for the network in 2057, by which time, if the postprivatisation growth trend continues, the number of passengers will have more than trebled.

Rail passengers clocked up 30.1 billion miles (49 billion km) last year, the greatest distance travelled by train in peacetime and 10 billion more miles than a decade ago. The annual passenger growth rate is running at 7.8 per cent, with 1.2 billion journeys made last year.

The only years when the railways were busier were during the Second World War, when millions of troops were moved around the country. This is despite the network being a third smaller today than in 1945.

The association believes that the growth rate will decline slightly, but still forecasts that the network will be carrying 2.4 billion passengers by 2028.

It commissioned Jim Steer, the former strategy director of the Strategic Rail Authority, to consider how the network would need to expand to accommodate predicted demand.

Mr Steer’s report says that the first new high-speed line should run from London, via Heathrow, to Birming

“ ham and Manchester. The second should run up the East Coast to Newcastle upon Tyne and Edinburgh, and the third to Bristol and Cardiff.

New and reopened lines operating at the conventional speed (about 100mph) would be needed to avoid bottlenecks on the existing network. Trains would run between Oxford and Cambridge, via Bedford, for the first time since 1967.

The disused line between Okehampton and Plymouth in Devon would be reopened to provide an alternative to Brunel’s route via the seawall at Dawlish, which faces an uncertain future because of rising sea levels.

Mr Steer said that the forecast by the Office for National Statistics of an 18 million increase in the population during the next 50 years, and environmental constraints on expanding roads and airports, meant that demand for rail travel would continue to grow even during an economic downturn.

He said: “We need to think big and we need to start planning for expansion right now if we are to have any hope of coping with demand. Other countries, such as Japan, have had a long-term vision for their railways but we have tended only to think about the next five years.

“At some stage, Government will have to recognise the sheer implausibility of the [population] increase being predominantly accommodated in the wider South East, as it has been for the last 50 years.

“It is therefore likely to see high-speed rail as one of a number of key instruments to achieve this economic shift, while also reducing dependence on aviation for short-haul flights.”

The Government published what it claimed was a 30-year rail strategy last July, but the only commitments given were for modest expansion up to 2014.

Ministers have conceded recently that a new high-speed line will have to be considered, but they have yet to commission a detailed study.

Atkins, an engineering consultancy, published last month its own study of the costs and benefits of two high-speed lines running between London and Scotland along the East and West Coasts. It found that the lines would cost £31 billion, but deliver £63 billion in economic benefits, including helping northern cities to regenerate.

Britain has the fastest growing railway of any leading European country but is the only one that has yet to build, or to commit to building, a network of high-speed lines.

George Muir, the director-general of the Association of Train Operating Companies, said yesterday: “The railway brings people together and, as measured by passenger miles, 2007 was a record year.

“This growth shows that more train capacity is urgently needed for our passengers, for the economy and for a green Britain.

“People are increasingly turning to rail; not only is it a faster and more convenient way of travelling, it is greener than travelling on our congested roads and domestic air routes.”

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