There has been much media coverage of the UK's plans to build its second high speed railway line, HS2 - a new line between London and Scotland that will cost, according to Network Rail, £34 billion.
http://www.networkrail.co.uk/aspx/5892.aspx
This is impressive, but when it comes to passengers and their travel habits, smaller projects can affect more people, especially if you consider the social aspects. It may seem odd to talk of any project that costs billions as small, but a large engineering activity like the ongoing improvement to the Thameslink service just does not cut it as a headline-grabbing improvement to Britain's rail network.
Never mind that the Thameslink Programme is supposed to cost £5.5 billion; that is pocket money in railway terms. Perhaps people overlook lesser trackside ventures because they aren't, literally, green-field projects. Nor do they qualify for the glamorous 'high speed' label.
In reality, Thameslink could change the 'travelling experience' of as many people as HS2. It is one of the UK's busiest railway routes. Nearly 80 per cent of those who trudge into London every day do so by train and 70 per cent of all rail journeys begin or end in London and the South East.
The programme's website says that the work will benefit "tens of thousands of passengers daily". At the end of the whole programme, in 2015, there will be many more train connections between the South East and East Anglia.
One reason for taking an interest in Thameslink is that it has messed up the entertainment of some of us who live south of the Thames. No longer can we hot-foot it south on the Brighton line after a concert ends at the Barbican. The line has to close early enough for construction companies to rush in to carry out a night's work.
It may seem sad, but because this line means something personally - it is also a great way of getting to the Eurostar station at St Pancras - I keep my eye on progress on the Thameslink project. (Anyone can sign up to receive regular newsletters.) Network Rail promises that the agony will diminish in 2011.
Perhaps it is the nature of the work that prompts a "ho hum" response to the Thameslink changes. For example, the current upgrade at Blackfriars, itself a multi-million pound project, will make the station "able to handle 12-carriage trains and many more trains per hour".
Longer trains may not be a big deal to would-be train spotters on HS2, but they will ease the misery of thousands of people. So will the new rolling stock, which replaces trains that seem to be cast-offs from an eastern European rail network.
The Thameslink Programme is a major engineering venture, complicated by being on an active railway line. Commuters can already see changes, albeit most of them making life harder rather than easier.
The project's website and newsletters are good at informing passengers about progress and likely interruptions to services – the passenger communications campaign has even won a Railway Industry Innovation Award. It is a shame, though, that there is so little information on what the engineers are up to, work that might be more exciting, and challenging, than digging up fields and laying new lines from scratch.
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