Let me start with a confession. With one exception, I have always viewed the railway as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.
The exception was when I was five years old, and lived in Omagh in Northern Ireland. Pulling myself up on a kitchen stool, I could just about see the old Portadown to Derry service puff its way along the banks of the Drumragh river on a summer’s evening, at the bottom of my garden. That golden memory is still vivid in my mind today.
After more than a century of service the line closed in 1965, and gradually my attitude to the railway became much more functional.
As a student in the 1970s, the Stranraer boat train was a means to get backwards and forwards from Belfast to Birmingham. These days the Stansted Express does the same job as I commute to London each week, albeit in much more comfort and with much greater reliability.
But while my view of the railway may have become more functional, my appreciation of the role it plays in our country and our daily lives has grown year on year. And it is that understanding that has informed both my approach to HS2 and my reaction to what was genuinely an historic moment on February 23 - Royal Assent for Phase 1 of the first railway to be built north of London for a century and a half (or thereabouts).
That achievement, and the huge amount of skill, effort and persistence necessary to achieve it, was rightly celebrated. But my focus was on the difference it is already making in Birmingham - now almost unrecognisable from my Stranraer travelling days - and the potential it has to do the same along both the Western and Eastern legs.
Because what I have seen during the past few years is not just a welcome and consistent approach from central government, but also a growing determination at a local level to take advantage of the one-off opportunity that HS2 offers. I see a realisation not just of the critical role the railway has played in our national life, but the even more important role it can play in the future.
Sadly, as we know, it took a series of tragedies to first shape that understanding.
I was the official spokesman in 10 Downing Street during the final days of Railtrack, as the horrific litany of accidents in the late 1990s and the early years of the following decade drove home not just the importance of the railway to the nation, but also the need to invest in it.
Successive governments have now done so, with the result that by the time I arrived at Network Rail in late 2011 the most pressing problem facing the industry was a doubling of passenger demand in the previous decade, and the pressure that was putting on the network.
If ever an industry was the victim of its own success, this was it. And that success was due not only to the skill, commitment and hard work of our predecessors at Network Rail, but also to the ingenuity and professionalism of the train operating companies who had turned what had seemed a ‘has been’ into a service offering that the public couldn’t get enough of.
The railway still mattered - and the country knew it mattered. Millions of people relied on it, as did the businesses they worked for. It was, as it had been since Victorian times, part of the lifeblood of the nation.
But enormous as the gains had been, a law of diminishing returns was at work. We had reached the point where supply could no longer keep up with demand - the point where, in too many places, there just wasn’t enough room on the tracks for the services that were needed.
There was also the beginning of a wider realisation: that the British economy was grossly unbalanced, both in terms of activity and public investment in infrastructure. The North/South divide had been on the agenda for decades, but it gained new sharpness as an issue in the wake of the financial crash, as the country reassessed the national economy and the differentials in wealth and opportunity it contained.
