up the post. HS1 Ltd – bought by a pair of Canadian pension funds from London & Continental last year for £2.1bn – is the company that holds the 30-year concession to operate Britain’s first high speed railway, running from central London to the Channel Tunnel. Its jewel-in-the-crown St Pancras International is
London’s only non-Network Rail station. It also runs the international stations at Stratford, Ebbsfleet and Ashford. The infrastructure is used by Eurostar and the Kent domestic high speed services – the company has a 30-year concession from the government. As I read up on the history of St Pancras, I realise
just how shallow my first question was. ‘Are you a bit of an unnecessary tier? Wouldn’t it be better just to let Network Rail and the train operators get on with it?’ I venture, Paxman-style. I was forgetting just how multi-tiered this piece of
railway used to be. A century and a half ago, the poor old Midland built St Pancras so that it would no longer have to pay fees to the Great Northern to use Kings Cross and to LNWR to get into Euston. But Shaw, educated at Oxford and later at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has my measure. ‘It is a way of protecting the value of the asset for our investors and the government for the long term. That focus on thinking about both the protection and the value is something that we have that nobody else would have. Coming here to St Pancras, you know, you can see the difference to a Network Rail station. That is because that’s the strategy we have picked.’ You certainly can. Where else on the railway can you
pay £12 for a glass of champagne, have your picture taken with John Betjeman… and get into the gents without having to pay 30p? Retail is all and the space at the station so valuable that HS1’s 35 staff work half a mile down the road in a modern office block. And yet Network Rail is still a close friend, through
a subsidiary headed by Richard Schofield, Dave Ward’s deputy for Network Rail’s Kent region. ‘The interface between the Kent network and our network works because they have got that relationship,’ says Shaw. ‘Richard Schofield has done a great job so that the guys who work for us down on the ground understand the difference in working on a high speed asset. It’s a nice balance between having Network Rail branding and HS1 branding in our major facilities.’ She is proud that HS1’s four stations top the
Passenger Focus list of passengers’ favourite stations. Stratford International will become a really big ticket item when Westfield – the largest shopping centre in Western Europe – opens in September. Southeastern high speed trains will be whizzing
between St Pancras and Stratford every three minutes, come the Olympics. But it is important, she says, not to hog all the limelight. ‘We can take a lot of people and the seven-minute journey is a huge attractor for anybody coming to London to go the Olympics. But we have got to make sure that people understand that there are other services, too, running from central London, because the
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