Harper pays tribute to outgoing HS2 chief on visit to station construction site

Transport Secretary Mark Harper hailed the ‘fantastic job’ done by outgoing HS2 chief executive Mark Thurston as he visited Birmingham on Monday to see the new Curzon Street Station taking shape. Mr Harper was joined on the rainy visit by his Australian counterpart, Catherine King, as they inspected the city centre’s new 300 metre-long viaduct to see the view passengers will have while travelling into Birmingham on HS2 trains. Despite delays to the controversial rail project, which was initially scheduled to open in 2026 but has been pushed back to between 2029 and 2033 due to construction difficulties and rising costs, Mr Harper told the PA news agency he was confident it was making ‘great’ progress. His visit came just days Mr Thurston, 56, announced he would leave his role in September after six-and-a-half years leading the Government-owned company. Speaking about Mr Thurston’s resignation, Mr Harper paid tribute to the businessman and engineer. He told PA: ‘The chief executive has decided to leave the company and he has my thanks because he has done a fantastic job getting it to this point but he himself has said he wants to hand over the baton to fresh leadership and that’s what the company will be putting in place in the weeks and months to come.’ Mr Thurston’s departure comes at a time when Phase One of the project between London and Birmingham is at peak construction, with major work taking place at more than 350 sites, including Curzon Street. The Transport Secretary said a ‘huge amount of progress’ has been made on the construction of the station since he last visited the site seven months ago. In the next decade, the new station will welcome high-speed services into Birmingham city centre, which HS2 said will increase the capacity of the rail network and connect cities and towns across the West Midlands and beyond – creating new jobs, business and educational opportunities and boosting growth in the regional economy. Mr Harper said: ‘It’s great, I was here seven months ago, you can see a huge amount of progress already. I get briefings on the project that says it is making progress but it’s nice to come here and see it myself. ‘Catherine has been here to listen to our experiences of this for what they are planning on doing with high speed rail in Australia and it’s great to show her the project in action. ‘We had a great meeting this morning with Andy Street [mayor of the West Midlands] to talk about the economic benefits of HS2, which he explained really clearly – the investment, the new jobs coming into the city, so it’s all very exciting.’ Explaining why Curzon Street was so important, Mr Harper said: ‘This is going to be the gateway to the city for people using HS2 and coming in and out of the city. ‘If you look at the designs, it is going to be a fantastic space. The design has been done so the railway doesn’t actually cut anything off. ‘People will be able to use the space below it and it will create a whole new exciting part of the city.’ Once built, Curzon Street Station will be ‘one of the most environmentally friendly stations in the world’, HS2 has said. It will eventually welcome nine high-speed services per hour into the city centre. With seven terminal platforms, it will form part of HS2’s opening phase, with the first services expected to run from west London into the station by 2033, serving around 25,000 passengers a day. Mr Harper said he was confident the in-service dates for when trains will be running on the first phase of the railway are ‘absolutely on track’.