After Gutenberg

As throughout Europe, electrified fast rail networks now crisscross between major cities In the United Kingdom. High-speed rail can reduce travel time by as much as half when compared to previous train journeys. Railteam expects to have unified service later this year. From one website passengers will be able to book tickets almost instantly to destinations in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland.

Eurostar, which crosses the English Channel to France via the “Chunnel”, is an example of the electrified fast rail that joins existing international services.

Writing for the Independent Jerome Taylor reports that “Britain is witnessing the dawn of a new era of rail travel.” Such an amount of rail travel is unprecedented since the Second World War. Some are predicting that the already chronic overcrowding on some sections of the network will only get worse as demand for environmentally friendly transport increases further.

Figures released yesterday revealed that the number of miles travelled on the rail network reached a record-breaking peacetime high of 30.1 billion during 2007, capping a huge rise in popularity in which passenger numbers have increased every year for the past 13 years.

The rise in passenger miles, documented by the Association of Train Operating Companies (Atoc), indicates a boom in demand for rail transport at a time when the threat of climate change is encouraging more people to find greener ways of moving around.

“On top of the opening of the UK’s first high-speed line and securing funding for Crossrail last year” the Department for Transport “announced £10bn investment focused on increasing capacity.” Said a spokesperson, “we are planning a rail network which can carry 180 million more passengers over the next six years, growth of 22 per cent.”

George Muir, director general of Atoc, described the resurgence of train use as astonishing. “We knew that we were growing but it was only when we looked at the graph that we realised how sudden that growth was,” he said. “If you take out the war years, for much of the past 80 years passenger miles have hovered around the 20 billion mark, but within the past 10 years it has grown dramatically.”

The only time that train passenger miles – calculated as the number of journeys taken multiplied by the distance travelled – has been higher was during the Second World War when the rail network was twice the size it is now and large numbers of troops were being transported around the country. The previous peacetime record was set in 1946 – when vast numbers of soldiers were being demobilised.

Atoc’s figures represent one of the most detailed attempts to gauge the popularity of Britain’s railways over the past 170 years and show how demand for rail travel has reached unprecedented levels over the past decade since privatisation. Last year the network handled 1.21 billion rail journeys, the equivalent of 20 journeys for every citizen and a 7 per cent rise on 2006. Traffic on the railways, meanwhile, has increased by 67.6 per cent since 1994 when just 17.9 billion passenger miles were travelled.

Tim Leunig, a historian from the London School of Economics who helped compile the figures, said current trends meant passenger miles were likely to continue breaking records “time and time and time again” as demand increases. A White Paper last year estimated that Britain would need to double its rail capacity by 2030 to meet demand.