It was announced on the BBC Countryfile programme on Sunday evening that a 250-year old pear tree in Cubbington, Warwickshire had been voted as England’s Tree of the Year 2015 in a public vote organised by the Woodland Trust. The ancient tree will have to be destroyed in order to build the HS2 line between London and Birmingham.
Who cares, supporters of HS2 may cry? Isn’t it the ultimate bit of nimbyism to raise a fuss about an old tree standing in the way of progress?
The reason why the planned destruction of the Cubbington pear tree is important is that it exemplifies everything that is wrong about the way in which HS2 has been designed and is being rolled out. The design speed of 400 kph, which is quite unnecessary for a small crowded island such as ours, has determined a route which allows minimal deviation from a straight line, either horizontally or vertically. Just like the Roman roads two millennia ago, HS2 has to go straight through things rather than round them.
What is true for the Cubbington pear tree is equally true for the village of Burton Green, a little further north in Warwickshire, which falls within the county division I represent as a Lib Dem councillor. HS2 will go straight through the heart of the village, originally planned to be in a cutting but now to be in a short “cut and cover” tunnel. But this form of tunnel building will still cause massive disruption to the village during the years of its construction.
As is reported in the Guardian today, saving the Cubbington pear tree by putting HS2 in a deep bore tunnel would cost £46 million. The price for saving the village of Burton Green using a deep bore tunnel would be lower, between £ 28 -32 million. And yet the HS2 Select Committee has rejected both options, saying they would not represent “value for money”.
And so the HS2 juggernaut lumbers on, seemingly unstoppable. At some point in 2016, after the interminable proceedings in the House of Commons have been exhausted, the HS2 Hybrid Bill will transfer to the Lords, and it is to be hoped that our strong team of Lib Dem peers will subject it to much more critical appraisal than it received from MPs in the last Parliament.
What particularly frustrates old hands like me, who have been living with the realities of HS2 for 5½ years already, is that better options exist for a high speed network which have been studiously ignored by successive governments – for example the High Speed UK scheme, which is now being promoted by the Rethink HS2 group. Is there still time for sanity to prevail? I’m afraid I’m not holding my breath!
* John Whitehouse represents Kenilworth Abbey division on Warwickshire County Council
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73 Comments
The party’s support for this scheme is baffling. Every substantial, independent review of the case for it has torn it to pieces as being based on flimsy, outdated or even non-existent evidence, while the evidence from other high speed rail networks has shown that the arguments for re-balancing the economy are laughable. It is the classic case of “It’s the policy because it’s the policy.”
It has no support to speak of outside the Commons and I can only hope that the party’s confidence in taking a stand against the Government will be applied here.
The supporters of HS2 have backtracked by saying that the main objective is capacity, not speed.
One Tory MP left the cabinet because she objected on constituency grounds.
London to Birmingham is only about 110 miles, which does not offer much time saving compared with airlines, except that airports want passengers to shop for two hours before departure. There was a fringe meeting at federal conference in 2010 including interested parties from the railway industries, who were unenthusiastic about Aberdeen, Swansea, Liverpool or Belfast.
i asked transport Minister Norman Baker about a fast rail service from Heathrow to Gatwick, which must have been considered because he knew exactly how long the journey would take. Getting passengers off the crowded M25 would also help the noxious air quality and avoid the noise pollution which happened with the previous helicopter service.
Cynics will look forward to the Tories announcing new ideas, such reducing enviromental destruction and meeting passengers; objectives.
Capacity was always at least as important as speed. Nobody has “backtracked”…
HS2 is the transport equivalent of Trident – too expensive and a totem pole to Tory nonsense at a time when the gap between rich and poor gets wider.
Capacity is an issue, as is connectivity (try travelling from Stoke to Sheffield), however the proposed speed is a nonsense. Cut the speed down, ensure the lines are more flexible and cheaper to build/run, and you have the makings of a practical transport system that could meet all the needs. It is time this party promoted a common sense option.
(as a councillor David was a member of his council’s HS2 working party)
400 kph appears to be a pretty minimal/moderate planning sped for an HST network these days. Capacity ans speed appear to be pretty interdependent and equally-important.
HS2 is a vanity project. The financial case was proved to be garbage years ago but when did costs matter in a vanity project?
put up a bat box then no one can move it
There is a case against HS2 – saving one tree is not it.
“Just like the Roman roads two millennia ago, HS2 has to go straight through things rather than round them.”
Those are the Roman roads that stayed in use for a couple of thousand years ?
The cost of HS2 is no more than the cost of a handful of local schemes in London which will only increase the dominance of London in the economy of this country. Crossrail, Crossrail 2, Thameslínk and some underground extensions. But they are all in London. The Mayor even suggested a new ring rail round London at a mere £40 billion and no-one blinked at the cost.
But of course trees are sacred!
Tony Greaves
I was puzzled by the HS2 team assertion that the tree was hollow. are they just digging up irrelevencies or is the Tree going to be near the track rather than actually in its path ? This is a genuine question as I havent been following the details of all this.
On HS2 generally, wasnt the whole point of it to increase capacity ? The point about speed is simply that if we have to build it anyway we might as well make it up to date. Britains size is about the same as Japan isnt it ? They have trains which already go faster than this is proposed to.
We have the finances, we have the technology to just move the pear tree. Gentlemen we can rebuild it, we can create the worlds first transported old pear tree!
I don’t give a damn about the pear tree. Yeh I said it.
It’s just a bloody tree. The amount of gridlock in the transport system HS2 will clear up will not only make the new line fast, but will make every line which has a connection between or to London and Birmingham faster. Which is a lot.
The southern West coast mainline is full; it needs an additional pair of tracks. As this can’t be built on either side if the existing route at anything like a sensible cost, you build a new route. When building a new route, you decide the line speed (design speed) and the incremental cost versus the benefits of 140 mph vs 250mph weighs heavily in favour of the higher speed. Not only do you get the faster, you reduce the number of trains required for a given level of service and capacity increases.
HS2 should’ve been built to Scotland under Darling. We’re doing it now and once it is opened we’ll never understand how we lived without it within a couple of years.
@Richard Underhill
“The supporters of HS2 have backtracked by saying that the main objective is capacity, not speed.”
Like crewegwyn I’ve always understood that HS2 was primarily about capacity, but I appreciate that I might have got it wrong.
Could you please indicate where people used to claim that the main objective was speed?
The tree should be moved, preserved. Whilst a modern railway is needed, God knows how slow we are to catch up with the modern world. Nature should be respected, it has been around longer than the human race has been,
No HS2 was and has always been a political vanity project – the supporters of HS2 are simply those who believed the hype about the emperor’s new clothes, hence the 45 minute journey time was always important. The capacity dimension (and there is a capacity issue on the existing infrastructure that can be resolved by spending significantly less on the existing infrastructure than on HS2) is just something tacked on to try and beef up the non-existent economic or business case for HS2.
The real reason why the tree is standing in the way of the proposed route of HS2, is down to the stupid way we do planning for infrastructure projects, namely we have to place the new infrastructure (road/railway etc.) as far away from people as possible, because that reduces it’s ‘impact’, hence they always go straight-through places we’ve avoided building on for various reasons: such as them being SSSI’s, hill’s (remember Twyford Down, now a void) ancient woodland etc. Yet when it comes to the suburbs great efforts are gone to totally compromise the route so that 250mph trains get restricted to 30mph… So if HS2 can justify cutting down a tree and ripping apart Burton Green, they can also justify the cutting a real high-speed through north London and making other sensible alterations to the route.
John Wheelhouse – looking at the map for High Speed UK I can see that the Midlands to Manchester arm will have to pass through right through the middle of the Peak District National Park and the Newcastle to Edinburgh arm through the Northumbria National Park. So straight away I can see a couple of flaws in the argument.
Richard Underhill said ‘London to Birmingham is only about 110 miles, which does not offer much time saving compared with airlines, except that airports want passengers to shop for two hours before departure.’ and Roland said ‘the supporters of HS2 are simply those who believed the hype about the emperor’s new clothes, hence the 45 minute journey time was always important.’
Except Phase 1is not just running to Birmingham is it? That’s always the great con, saying its just about Birmingham. Opponents also usually forget to say the £50bn price tag includes Phase 2. Phase 1 is running between London and a connection with the WCML just north of Lichfield and will cost £22bn. (All the rumours and David Higgins recommendations are saying that Phase 1 should/will be extend to Crewe). So straight away you already speed up services between London and Manchester, Liverpool, Preston, Glasgow, Edinburgh etc. Not to mention there will be also be HS2/Crossrail interchange station at Old Oak Common providing a 20min service to Heathrow and better connections to the west of London. So you’ve speed up services there just by building an extra station. This is all before Phase 2 is built, extending the HS lines to Manchester and Leeds, (which also has the potential to speed up slow Cross Country services) and the Scottish Governments (‘Phase 3’) Y-shaped HS line between Glasgow, Edinburgh and the south. (I won’t digress into the cost of Crossrail (£17bn) compared to the cost of HS2)
Richard Underhill also said ‘The supporters of HS2 have backtracked by saying that the main objective is capacity, not speed’
They are connected and interchangeable. If you increase speed on a railway line you automatically reduce capacity. We could vastly increase capacity on the WCML overnight, but that would involve slowing everything down to 30mph. As new plane services between Scottish and northern cities and London are opening every year there is clearly a demand for fast services to London. HS2 Phase 1 will help to reduce some of this demand and the more sections that are built the more efficient the HS network will become at reducing internal flights in the UK, and providing fast services between the regions, and not just London.
The problem is that it’s one of those totemic schemes like the Saunders Roe Princess based on flawed logic and an optimistic price tag the main aim of which seems to be PR.
These 2 new tracks are the cheapest way to add CAPACITY to the 3 old lines – WCML, ECML and Midland Mainline.
Right now long distance trains get in the way of slow commuter trains on those old main lines. Each long distance train moved onto HS2 actually makes space for 4 new commuter trains – and with demand growing at up to 5% per year that capacity will soon be needed.
If we instead tried to widen the WCML, ECML and Midland Mainlines it would cost MORE as each of those lines run through lots of towns these long distance trains never stop at. And of course the disruption costs of closing those lines for 10 years (as the Atkins comparison report showed) mean that upgrading an old route costs more than building a new one in a new place.
As for the speed, today’s trains already run at 225 mph. It does not cost much more to future proof this line for the likelyhood of 250mph trains by 2030 – we just need a slightly straighter line. But it does give us this sort of problem.
Higher speeds where we need the capacity means less new track is needed for the rest of the route to Scotland.
Trains to Scotland will be able to continue on the old line but still get there faster to win more air passengers.
There is no way we want more costly tunnel. We didn’t put the M40 in tunnel and it makes FAR more noise than these trains will. (Look at the M20 and HS1 for evidence of that).
I guess we should ask how much longer we expect this 250 year old tree to stay standing anyway – compared with a line being built in 10 years time which will carry 40 to 50 million journeys a year for the next 150 years. We need those people to see this tree’s descendants as they pass (from the window) as believe me you DO want to see countryside as you travel at 200mph. We travelled to (and across) Spain and Italy by train in the past 2 years and we really did value the scenery from our 200 mph trains. (And Italy is just about to raise line speeds to 225mph).
A number of respondents have rather missed the point of the article, which was not primarily about the tree, but the tree as a symbol of the impact of HS2 on communities and individuals. However, just to be clear, moving the tree is NOT an option – everybody involved agrees about that.
Anyone doubting that the HS2 case was initially about speed should go back to the original business and economic case documents from 2010 on. The supposed economic benefit from time saved by business people on shorter train journeys was the largest single contributor to the original Benefit Cost Ratio calculations for the project. This was subsequently debunked by the realisation that business people actually work on trains, and indeed can do so very productively. The same fallacy was used to justify a number of individual route choices along sections of the proposed line, where again the calculated benefits from speed outweighed all other factors including environmental ones. By the time the HS2 case switched to capacity, the route choices were pretty well set in stone.
@John Whitehouse
“Anyone doubting that the HS2 case was initially about speed should go back to the original business and economic case documents from 2010 on.”
Are you quite sure about that, John? Perhaps you could provide a link that shows that to be the case.
@ Simon Shaw
It is a shame that you will not accept the word of one of our highly respected Warwickshire County Councillors that HS2 was originally justified on the grounds of speed. There is probably a clue in the government’s choice of a name for the project.
Would you regard Gordon Brown as a more reliable witness? He said “Britain’s future prosperity depends upon investing in technologies that drive economic growth. High speed rail has a crucial role to play… . Not only France’s TGV and the pioneering Japanese Shinkansen but new high speed networks across Europe and Asia are increasing capacity, slashing travel times, transforming the connections between cities, and offering the most comfortable and convenient travelling experience in history. Where high speed rail connects cities in less than about three and a half hours, traffic moves en masse from the plane to the train. It is striking that countries which have built a first high speed rail line have gone on to build more …Britain’s High Speed One line, from St Pancras to the Channel Tunnel, shows what can be achieved… High Speed One has cut journey times from London to Paris and Brussels to around two hours and seen rail’s share of the travel market to these cities grow to over 70 per cent. The introduction of Javelin high speed domestic services last December has radically reduced journey times to London from towns across Kent, opening up major growth and regeneration opportunities… . This Command Paper sets out the Government’s proposed strategy for High Speed Rail. As a first stage it proposes the development of a core high speed rail network linking London to Manchester and Leeds via Birmingham, with high speed services connecting directly to other cities in Northern England and Scotland from the outset… . High speed rail has a transformational role to play at the heart of Britain’s twentyfirst century transport infrastructure”.
You can look it up here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/228887/7827.pdf
‘Not only France’s TGV and the pioneering Japanese Shinkansen but new high speed networks across Europe and Asia are [B]increasing capacity[\B], slashing travel times, transforming the connections between cities, and offering the most comfortable and convenient travelling experience in history. ‘
Sadly that didn’t highlight. But you get the point. As I said earlier capacity and speed are two sides of the same coin. Change one and it impacts the other. Just because the media and anti-HS2 groups initially decided to focus on speed doesn’t mean capacity hasn’t always been a major part of the business case behind HS2.
The business case hangs on the monetised value of time saved, not on capacity gained. The latest iteration of the business case simply reversed the ratio of business to leisure passengers in order to keep the business cost ratio positive. If you want see the Secretary of State fail to answer why this was done, search YouTube for Patrick McLoughlin’s interview with Emily Maitlis. Calling it a car crash is being kind.
What supporters of HS2 overlook when advancing the capacity argument is that in order to maximise speed the line by-passes major city centres such as Sheffield, Nottingham and Derby in favour of parkway stations (see also Manchester Airport, Birmingham interchange and a field somewhere South of Crewe), which by their nature also bring transfer time penalties and produce many extra car journeys, undermining the environmental case still further.
It is true that capacity is mentioned in the original business case but the design taken forward is all the proof you need that speed is the principal objective.
It is also obvious to point out that there are many other and cheaper ways to increase capacity, a problem which is chiefly a feature of the Southern end of the West Coast line. HS2 does nothing to increase capacity on some of our most overcrowded lines such as South of the Thames or for that matter will it make a jot of difference to capacity on the West Coast North of Crewe or on the East Coast North of York as classic compatible trains would occupy the paths currently used by inter cities.
It’s hard to imagine a worse scheme for any of its stated objectives (other than being very fast) and there are plenty of better ways to spend £50bn (or whatever the cost might end up at after they undertaken a proper ground survey of the route – after all it was unexpected ground conditions on extremely well surveyed land that have caused huge cost over-runs and delays on the GWR and between Liverpool and Manchester).
Jon – On the “business case” everybody knows that you cannot work on a train if you have NO SEAT. The main reason for these 2 tracks south of Birmingham is to prevent 50% of the passengers from needing to stand all the way by 2025.
But this is ALSO a line to Manchester and Leeds that will take trains to York, Newcastle and Edinburgh and also to Preston, Carlisle and both Glasgow and Edinburgh the western route too.
Speed matters for long journeys. These trains should also be able to run from Manchester and Leeds via Birmingham international and St Pancras Cross to Paris, Germany, Switzerland and Holland too.
We need to chat about this Jon. Well done on finding a tree. But 50 millions rail journeys a year matter too!
Nigel – my design for St Pancras Cross (instead of a Euston Terminus) would indeed enlarge HS2 benefits to more London stations – such as London Bridge, Liverpool Street and Paddington.
Every REGIONAL train that we can turn into a through train (via HS1, central London through platforms and HS2) means two 20 minute turnarounds (ie 40 minutes of wasted train time) are turned into a 4 minute stop. We don’t need as many trains, depots or drivers to carry more people – and WE ALSO FREE UP London terminii platforms to take more commuter trains.
St Pancras Cross could save £5 billiion of public money from needing less new HS2 or HS1 trains (saving £3 billion) , two less new depots (£800 million just spent by Seimens on 2 depots), TFL would save £800 million by no longer needing to rebuild Euston tube (as St Pancras Cross spans to Thameslink/Kings X tube) and we’d also need about 10% of the expensive city centre land – as a 4 platform through station needs rather less Camden land than an 11 platform terminus.
St Pancras Cross also makes the Heathrow spur viable – as a link from HS1 to Heathrow and GWR routes to Reading, Southampton, Swindon, Oxford and Bristol. Through trains from Kent, Essex and East London to Heathrow, Reading and the west mean free’d up platforms at Liverpool St, London Bridge and Paddington.
Every HS2 train diverted via that route to Heathrow is a free slot across London from these services – and we could couple pairs of trains together at Stratford and decouple them at Heathrow to double those through trains.
(And that is before we think of the Airtrack possibilities of extending HS2 trains through Heathrow to Waterloo or even Gatwick to replace both the Heathrow and Gatwick expresses with one train from Gatwick via Heathrow to Birmingham International and Manchester (using a Clapham curve).
We need a bit of vision on this – instead of just pondering the fate of a tree that is about to fall over anyway !
@Simon – please accept that there is more than one reason for these 2 extra tracks.
1) Capacity – is the main reason for phase 1. Its also urgent as the WCML to Rugby will be full before 2025.
Price is a factor or demand and supply. Extra capacity = more seats = lower average seat prices on the route.
2) Speed – matters for long distance journeys too. The UK really has to realise that these days 125mph does not count as “high speed”. It breaks the trade descriptions act. And the UK is a long thin island – with far bigger distances than other countries (South Korean, Belgium, Taiwan and similar distances to Paris-Lyon or Cologne-Frankfurt).
If you HALVE journey times (and HS2 cuts one hour each way to Manchester, Leeds or York), you DOUBLE business hinterland to recruit staff talent or sell goods. That itself creates a lot of jobs. Speed = more jobs = more tax
Even the LSE opponents of HS2 agree that HS2 will create enough new jobs to earn about £1 BILLION per YEAR extra tax over its 150 year lifetime – at current prices. Inflation will increase that tax take to well over £150 billion.
3) Connectivity. It connects more places – like Birmingham to the East Midlands, Leeds, York and Newcastle in under half the time it takes now. That east side of the Y really matters to the “Northern Powerhouse” which INCLUDES both sides of the Midlands.
But I do agree that parkway stations don’t work as well as city centre stations. We need more HS2 trains to be able to go through Nottingham or Derby – ie the hybrid trains. HS2 Ltd is so keen on having a pure Japanese style reliable new railway (ie one that is not polluted with useful trains) they have lost sight of the need to connect this line more.
It ain’t perfect yet, but it does need to happen.
What a load of nonsense. We need to get on with HS2, like yesterday. A pear tree indeed. I watched the Tv report on Midlands Today, it is just a sort of emotional red herring brought up by No campaigners who will seize on anything, deny anything and sound just like the anti mtorway campaigners of the 50’s, who no doubt used the motorways as much as anyone else.
@simonshaw Try this for starters: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110720163056/http:/highspeedrail.dft.gov.uk/sites/highspeedrail.dft.gov.uk/files/hs2-economic-case.pdf
The original case was that the travel time saved would be make more time available for work and would therefore increase productivity. This rather odd justification for spending billions was quietly dropped when it was pointed out that those intending to do work simply got on with it using laptops or reading reports and lopping a few minutes off travel time made little difference.
I’m fully behind HS2; we’re on the West Coast Mainline so feeling the full effects of the lack of capacity.
I can’t believe we live in a country where there’s no spade in the ground 5 1/2 years after the Coalition Agreement committing to it, but maybe that’s a sign of how seriously the objections are being treated, and mitigation pursued where possible.
As others have said, once it’s been built, we’ll wonder why it was ever so controversial.
@Peter. That case has NOT been dropped. Halving travel time to virtually any city north of Birmingham DOUBLES business hinterlands. The resulting economic growth means more jobs and thus more INCOME tax, VAT etc etc.
Capacity to Birmingham matters too – as without these 2 extra tracks 50% of people travelling to Birmingham in 2025 would have to stand all the way. You cannot work if you have no seat. And you’d end up paying a lot more too – as price is after all a factor of supply and demand. Demand growth at 4% to 5% per year means 50% growth by 2025.
All the alternatives to HS2 failed to offer enough capacity and also cost more than these 2 new tracks.
@jon – economic case. The problem with those statistics is that they were not allowed to look past 2037.
Who on earth thinks that this line is going to close only a few years after opening?
Who thinks that usage of it would not also grow past 2037.
This line will last 150 years – so the economic case for it really needs to include data after 2037.
Otherwise it is just some other political thing dreamt up by opponents. Oh yes – it was of course just that.
I expect you are one of those who believe the Institute of Economic Affairs. You know the report that included the entire cost of Crossrail TWO and also of trams in Sheffield to Meadowhall that are already open – and used those costs to somehow double the cost of HS2.
The M1 would never have been built if we’d asked for this sort of economic case.
Re: Simon Shaw 10th Nov ’15 – 10:00am
“Anyone doubting that the HS2 case was initially about speed should go back to the original business and economic case documents from 2010 on.”
Are you quite sure about that, John? Perhaps you could provide a link that shows that to be the case.
Actually the initial case for HS2 was simply based on the politic’s of Britain not having high-speed rail and hence needing to catch up and ‘look’ modern – remember all the “keeping up with the Jone’s” style of comments which were basically saying that country ‘x’ has got one (ie. a High-speed network) we must have one too. So in the documents prior to circa 2010 (now difficult to access as much has been archived) the emphasis is very much on the “me too” and “new shiny”. So in official documents you get statements like:
“The only new network we can expect to build in the twenty first century is for high speed rail. ”
[http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110130200755/http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/rail/pi/highspeedrail/hs2ltd/hs2report/pdf/chapter1.pdf ]
and an over emphasis on speed/time by listing this as the number one benefit:
“Journey time from London to Birmingham City Centre cut by over 30mins to 49 minutes.”
[http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/rail/pi/highspeedrail/lontobhm/pdf/leaflet.pdf] which once you made the journal start and end points the same, the notional time saving vanished.
Also up to circa 2010, HS2 was really only about a London-Birmingham shuttle service with airy handwaving to future expansion and interconnect. It is only post-2010 that expansion north of Birmingham was properly considered and the interconnect with HS1. It is interesting to note the HS2 Hybrid Bill wending its way through Parliament, focuses wholly on the London-Birmingham segment, which means there is no certainty that these will actually happen in any realistic timeframe.
It is only later (circa 2012) capacity became the major justification, although there was mention of capacity, but only peak time, but then those who bang this drum were either totally unaware of or chose to ignore a Network Rail report of the time which outlined a roadmap for the enhancement of the WCML that would enable it to satisfy projected capacity demands post-2034 [aside: apologies not got a URL to hand, only my summary of the key points made in the report with respect to capacity]…
I sometimes despair about the lack of joined-up thinking amongst members of the Lib Dem party. Someone has a ‘good’ idea, like high-speed rail and then people get so committed to it that they cannot see that a particular option (current HS2) has some advantages and some disadvantages. In this case, John Whitehouse has illustrated a disadvantage in the context of one tree, but HS2 will destroy areas of irreplaceable ancient woodland along its path.
If you realise how many homes will be lost in North London (mainly Camden) to build the line and the nearly total rebuilding of Euston station required, you might come to question whether the terminus should be at Euston at all. And after all that, if you want to travel from Birmingham to Paris or Brussels you still have to get off one high-speed train at Euston and walk or get a taxi along the Euston Road to St Pancras to get on another high-speed train.
So while accepting the principle that high-speed rail links between cities are a good way to reduce pollution, by reducing emissions from road vehicles and domestic flights, don’t let’s get hung up on one specific route. For example, there is a need for a high-speed link between Gatwick and Heathrow. If HS2 were to run from Birmingham Airport (as proposed) to Heathrow, then the spare capacity at Birmingham could remove the need for a third Heathrow runway. Extend it to Gatwick and it provides that fast inter-airport link. Extend it further to HS1 near Ashford and passengers from Birmingham and points north can get straight to France without having to change trains and stations at London. They can still get into Central London quickly from Heathrow by using the express rail link to Paddington.
Now this all needs joined-up thinking, which the French are good at, but which the British deprecate in favour of muddling through. It is time that we looked at how those across the Channel manage their transport policy and learnt from them.
More travelling form A to B is not moving in an environmentally or socially sustainable direction. What does it matter if people can get to Birmingham a bit more quickly? People can work on trains. We need to invest more in cancer research, hospitals, schools and care for the elderly. Also, in my view, all the HS2 project will really do is bring more commuters to London, putting additional strain on its creaking infrastructure. Save the tree!
HS2 is very likely to to simply move people to and from London more quickly, expand the size of the over-dominant London and South East region and do nothing to promote distinctive Liberal aims such as regionalism and the dispersion of wealth and power.
I say introduce Bonsai to the capital, its power and influence rather than to the tree!
@Laurence. St Pancras Cross would
a) save Camden from an 11 platform terminal, save £5 billion and also be the cheapest way to enable Eurostar trains to extend up to Manchester and Leeds (carrying mainly domestic passengers but with their front 4 carriages as international only). Platforms either side of the train at St Pancras Cross can keep domestic separate from international. By bag scanning in Manchester & Birmingham international, the security check at St Pancras Cross would be just a 30 second walk through carriages to check for PEOPLE before opening doors on the other side – ie a 7 minute stop.
b) It enables Eurostar to extend to Heathrow whilst retaining its central London stop (and thus existing market) so its the only way to get Eurostar to Heathrow and the only way to make the Heathrow spur VIABLE as an HS1 link – to be also used to access the GWR from HS1 via HS2 to West Ruislip. That enables lots of cross London regional trains. Every short haul flight freed up by Eurostar (which could take between 3 million and 5 million passengers/yr) means £100 extra APD per passenger (as the long haul flights that would replace them pay more tax). So Eurostar to Heathrow can earn between £300 million and £500 million PER YEAR – or up to £5 billion between 2023 and 2033.
St Pancras Cross would be faster to build – so that cross London link could open 3 years BEFORE HS2 to free Heathrow of 10% of its traffic.
c) You are quite right that the closest airport to Heathrow would then be BIRMINGHAM – only 30 minutes away – and BIRMINGHAM could take the rest of the short haul flights. In fact it has enough spare capacity to free Heathrow of 27 million passengers/yr or 40% of Heathrow’s flights. HS2 + the Heathrow spur is vital for that.
d) The cheapest and fastest way to link Heathrow and Gatwick would be to link that spur to the Richmond line and add a 5km tunnel between Twickenham and Barnes to 4 track the only 2 track part of the route to Clapham. Adding a curve at Clapham would enable 4 trains/hr to replace both the Gatwick Express and Heathrow express freeing platforms at Victoria and Paddington – with Clapham Junction being on Crossrail 2.
Those trains from Gatwick could run via Heathrow and Birmingham International to Manchester – connecting 4 airports with a 4 trains/hr service. Gatwick-Heathrow would take 45 mins. Heathrow-Birmingham about 30 mins and Birmingham-Manchester about 30 mins
Please ensure we have a modern, fast rail network on this large island. Build HS2.
Improve existing rail services before developing new ones – which few people can in reality afford. For example, around £90 single from Bath to London at peak times. Fares far too high on some lines.
I am surprised that a number of people here fail to recognise that on a rail line, properly managed,increased speed increases CAPACITY.
For goodness sake – Four Seasons care homes are about to implode (come on Norman Lamb – get stuck into this one) – thousands more will be using food banks next April – the junior doctors threatening to strike – NHS finances going to pot….. And the Tories want to spend billions on HS2 and Trident……..
In 2009/2010 the purpose of HS2 was both to add capacity and shorten journey time (ie speed)
An extract below from HM Government Command Paper March 2010
On the basis of this evidence, the Government’s assessment is:
1. That over the next 20 to 30 years the UK will require a step-change in
transport capacity between its largest and most productive conurbations,
both facilitating and responding to long-term economic growth;
2. That alongside such additional capacity, there are real benefits for the economy
and for passengers from improving journey times and hence the connectivity
of the UK;
3. That new capacity and improved connectivity must be delivered sustainably:
without unacceptable environmental impacts, and in line with the Government’s
strategy to promote a low carbon economy, including its statutory targets for
reducing emissions of greenhouse gases;
4. That high speed rail is the most effective way to achieve these goals, offering
a balance of capacity, connectivity and sustainability benefits unmatched by
any other option;
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/228887/7827.pdf
If the UK is really in such need of this project, instead of spending £billions of tax-payer’s money, could we not just ask our Chinese friends(using their glut of cheap steel for the tracks) to ‘stump-up’ the cash, get our French friends (using their expertise in TGV fast rail) to build it, and allow them both a guaranteed ‘high-cost’ rail fare for the forseeable future?
Just a thought?
@Judy. We are already spending £38 b in the current 5 year control period (2014-2019) improving existing rail services.
These 2 tracks are also the cheapest way to add capacity to our 3 north-south mainlines (WCML, ECML & Midland Mainline) and HS2 money is being spent AFTER we electrify the GWR and Midland Mainline. HS2 money is £2b /yr spread over 15 years (or £28b + contingency) – ie LESS than we are spending 2014-19 and spread over 3 times as long.
As for rail fares, the AVERAGE fare on these routes will be LOWERED by this extra capacity. Competing trains will still run on the old lines (just as Chiltern competes with the WCML). You will have the choice of speed v price.
Whilst It will be hard to prove what would have happened to fares without this added capacity, any economist can tell you that if supply remains constant whilst demand rises (and it is doing so at 5% most years) then prices will rise.
Only HS2 has the capacity to give us the seats we need to work on a train and keep prices lower at the same time.
On the “working on a train” arguement, if faster trains enable you to avoid peak hour prices or a hotel bill or to travel to Manchester in only an hour, have a meeting and be back in your office at 2pm instead of 4pm that’s valuable too.
@expats If UK PLC fails to get its act together, we risk having to ask others to do it for us.
In truth, we will collaborate with people who have the expertise in order to be part of later selling to the growing international market for high speed rail. UK designers are already designing new through high speed stations for example in Florence and all over the world.
Tata steel has been exporting UK steel to build the French high speed line to Bordeaux. But that is being completed now (in half the time and for about half the cost of HS2). The real question is whether we will still HAVE a steel industry by the time we get our act together on HS2 ?
We need to stop talking and start building this – and complete it at the SAME construction speed as anybody else.
Nobody else takes 15 years to build half the distance the French just built Tours-Bordeaux + Tours-Rennes in.
If you want to know why China is interested – it is because they’re LAUGHING at how slowly we planning to do this.
My old mate John Jefkins is spot on in every post. We need to stop debating the issue and get on with building the vital extra capacity for our rail network. Any minor problem that is thrown in the way is an opportunity for delay and obfuscation. Our Victorian forebears would be totally bemused by the head in the sand view expressed by opponents of HS2, HS3 and beyond. They just got on and built railways. We should be focussing on greatly speeding up the process, not finding opportunities to delay.
The UK has mixed-speed, mixed-traffic mainlines – six relatively long ones (five of them go to London: WCML, MML, ECML, GWML, GEML; plus the Cross-Country Main Line from Derby to Bristol). All of these carry a mixture of local passenger trains (which we call “commuter” trains when they’re near a city), freight trains and long-distance high-speed (LDHS) trains. Mixing different speeds and stopping patterns reduces the capacity of the line (ie you can run more trains if they all run at the same speed and all stop at the same stations – this is why London Underground can run a train every couple of minutes; they never have to overtake each other).
Almost all of those mainlines are running at or very near capacity in terms of the number of trains that can be fitted on. If you measure seats occupied, they don’t look too bad, but that’s because the trains run all day – if they’re full at peak times, but quiet in early mornings, in the middle of the day, and in the evening, then the average can look like they’re only 40-50% full, when they’re completely full at 8:30am and 5:30pm. There’s a certain amount the train companies can do with “yield management” – raising prices for busy trains, lowering for quiet ones, but when a Manchester-London single fare ranges from £164.50 to £15 depending on the train you choose, then that technique can’t really go much further. And demand for rail travel just keeps going up.
There’s plenty of demand for more trains – especially for longer-distance commuter services into London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds (trains from Milton Keynes or Northampton into London, from Marple or Knutsford to Manchester, to pick WCML examples). But those services are the ones that the existing mainlines are perfect for, so the best way to enable more of those services is to move something else off the main line. There’s also demand for some more LDHS services – not to the main cities (only Liverpool could really do with extra trains), but to many of the bigger towns and smaller cities, many of which have lost some or all of their LDHS service as trains have been sped up over the last couple of decades. I’m thinking of places like Stoke, Blackpool, Hull, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Bradford, Huddersfield, Milton Keynes, Northampton or Stafford.
So if you have too much traffic on a line, what can you do? You can widen it – but, unlike motorways, our railway lines generally have buildings right up against the tracks in urban areas, so widening tends to need a lot of demolition. Or you can build another line to carry some of the traffic away, which lets you select an alternative route and knock down many fewer people’s homes. Just over a hundred, rather than several thousand.
For some lines, you can move the short-distance commuter services off the mainline. For GWML and GEML, this is being done by the Crossrail tunnel – but that only really helps around one city; for those lines, none of the cities other than London has so much commuter traffic as to congest the line. On WCML, there is not just the bottleneck into Euston, but also the New Street lines in Birmingham and the Stockport Viaduct into Manchester – all of which are at the point that no more trains can be run at peak times. There are also problems outside London at Leeds (ECML) and at Trent Junction (MML) between Derby and Nottingham – and even the “London” problems on ECML are much father out than those on, say GEML (Stevenage, rather than Shenfield).
The alternative to moving the slowest trains off the line is to move the fastest trains off. And that’s what HS2 does. It moves the fastest trains – the expresses from London to Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Sheffield, Edinburgh and Glasgow – off the main lines and onto HS2. That means that instead of nine or ten express trains leaving Euston every hour, there will be four or five, and all of them will stop at Watford and Milton Keynes (which means that they fit in better with slower services). It will similarly approximately halve fast services into King’s Cross – the reduction at St Pancras will be smaller because Leicester is not covered by HS2. For every fast train removed, about one-and-a-half slower trains can be added, to places like Northampton, Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Bedford and Peterborough.
That’s the capacity reason for doing HS2 – it’s attacking the same basic problem as Crossrail, but from the other end of the spectrum of trains.
Then there’s the speed reason. If you’re building this new line, you need to make sure people use it in preference to the old one, or you don’t solve the congestion. Making it faster has other benefits; most people will prefer a faster journey, as we all generally have something better to do with our time than sitting on a train, however nice the train may be. If you want to compete with domestic flights, then the overall journey time needs to get under three hours, and preferably under two-and-a-half. The only rail journeys between major cities on HS2 currently longer than 2:30 are London-Newcastle and Birmingham-Newcastle, plus journeys from Glasgow or Edinburgh to any English city (bar Edinburgh-Newcastle). Both London-Newcastle and Birmingham-Newcastle will drop under 2:30 with HS2 as planned, but to get (e.g.) London-Glasgow down to that time would need high-speed rail all the way. The speed chosen is such that those two key journeys would be well under 2:30 with HSR all the way from London. Now, obviously, the line isn’t currently planned to go that far, but any eventual extension through Lancashire and Cumbria to join the Edinburgh-Glasgow HS line at the Border will need that speed, or else people will carry on flying, using up precious slots at Heathrow and creating high-altitude CO2 emissions. So that’s why 400 km/h was chosen – so that we can eventually wipe out flights between London and Edinburgh/Glasgow.
There are other reasons as well – the real case is that the combination of benefits is greater than the combination of costs, and individual people will emphasise different parts of the argument at different times. Naturally, that is going to sound a bit like people keep changing the argument – but there is more than one benefit, and each one takes time and needs explaining.
And sure, if the Tories cut rail subsidy to pay for HS2, then that’s a stupid decision. But it’s not a stupid decision because HS2 is stupid, it’s a stupid decision because the Tories are stupid for cutting things that don’t need cutting.
I haven’t spoken to John about my reasons for nominating the veteran pear tree, but I must say that, unlike some of those posting comments, he really gets it.
The whole point is that this one tree is serving as a symbol for all of the trees and woodlands, including South Cubbington Wood ancient woodland adjacent to where the pear tree stands, that will be damaged by HS2. The pear tree’s newly-conferred status as England’s Tree of the Year is intended as a signal to the government that it has got the development/conservation balance wrong in the case of HS2. Put simply, for a very small percentage increase in the base cost the harm that HS2 will inflict on our natural environment could be significantly reduced.
The capacity issue, which tends to be overstated by HS2 supporters generally and in the comments that have been posted here, is really concentrated on two mainline commuter stations, Milton Keynes and Northampton, neither of which will be served by HS2. This means that the substantial capacity increase that HS2 will offer is concentrated largely on the wrong stations, and any relief for the commuter corridor is indirect and inefficient. The dearth of stations on HS2 also means that the HS2 London-Birmingham service will be vastly overcapacity, based upon the current passenger demand.
Well said my old make Micheal Taylor. And well said Richard Gadsden too.
@Peter, Why do you think the conservation/development balance is wrong? These two tracks will carry the equivalent of 18 lanes of tarmac – THREE new motorways – on HS2 itself and on the 3 old lines freed up for extra commuter trains.
These 2 tracks are the width of most country lanes – with landscaping either side.
Of course the designers want to minimise the damage. They will also want to plant as many as possible too.
But when I worked as an Architect on the Channel Tunnel project, the wind that year blew down FAR more trees than we’d cut down (Sevenoaks became ONEoak). Farmers do FAR more damage to woodland than these 2 tracks will.
So – balance is indeed needed. But at the end of the day, opponents need to be balanced in what they say too.
Look at Kent. Look at HS1. Look at how people talked down the price of their own properties with unjustified fears and look at how those property prices rose again after the line opened and people wondered what the fuss was about.
Whilst you are about it, look also at all the new trees that were planted alongside the route (or by the terminal I worked on north of Folkestone). Hundreds of new trees.
And as for the capacity issue, HS2 does indeed add capacity to Watford, Milton Keynes, Northampton, Rugby and Coventry by taking long distance passengers off that route. Professor Andrew McNaughton showed illustrations at a lecture he gave to the Institute of Civil Engineers that showed how for every fast train moved off the WCML, Midland Mainline or ECML – FOUR new commuter or freight trains could take its place.
As for HS2 itself, it is NOT just about Birmingham.
Even phase 1 will take travellers to Manchester, Crewe, Liverpool, Preston, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Phase 2 adds the East Midlands, Sheffield, Leeds, York and Newcastle too – and an increased Scottish market.
I am arguing that St Pancras Cross would enable EVERY one of the 5 Eurostar trains/hr that will be running by 2025 to extend north to become the Manchester and Leeds trains – enabling 3 trains/hr from Manchester and 2 trains/hr from Leeds / York to be long distance trains stopping in central London (St Pancras Cross would have THROUGH platforms) en-route to Paris or Germany or Amsterdam via Brussels. That station would also enable cross-London regional trains from Kent, East London and Essex to the north (and to Bristol too if the Heathrow spur was added).
Birmingham is the centre of that Y. But trains will run off the northern ends and via HS1 too.
At the rail conference last week in Leeds, I got almost UNANIMOUS support from rail bosses for my ideas of connecting HS2 to HS1 – and that show of hands was shown not only to HS2 bosses but repeated to Claire Perry at the end of the day.
>”Why do you think the conservation/development balance is wrong?”
Simple in the original report HS2 presented to government on the proposed route, they explicitly stated that it failed to satisfy any of the environmental requirements specified by the government for the project! And very little has happened subsequently to address this fundamental failing in the chosen route.
>”At the rail conference last week in Leeds, I got almost UNANIMOUS support from rail bosses for my ideas of connecting HS2 to HS1″
But it has to be high-speed! Additionally once you connect the two, you no longer need a London terminus, in fact it simply adds unnecessary costs. So we effectively are back to what was originally envisaged for Kings Cross when HS1 was designed a through station…
The scheme is an appalling misallocation of resources even within the transport budget; let alone across the whole of Government programmes. Imagine it did not exist: imagine we have £40bn (we don’t) and ask yourself: ‘should we spend it this way?’
Honestly?
John Jefkins writes of St Pancras Cross’. Good. I have long thought that HS2 should be more related to HS1 if we are going to have it at all. What will it be like if it terminates a few miles short of Euston, which is the short term outcome? And do we rally want Manchester people to shoot down to Euston and then have to walk to St Pancras to proceed to the continent?
@Roland – Exactly. The 4 tracks of St Pancras (6 platforms to keep international passengers separate) would be INSTEAD OF an 11 platform terminus. They’d take about 10 % of the expensive central London land. Less housing lost (and new housing built to replace it).
The route across London is planned to be slower by the way (as trains are approaching stations).
We certainly don’t want anything terminating short of CENTRAL London.
Being smaller, St Pancras Cross would be faster to build and would disrupt Euston less.
We could have it (and the link to Heathrow) open BEFORE HS2 even opens to Birmingham.
Eurostar to Heathrow could be reducing the need of runway 3 by around 2023.
@David. and @David Raw. I so agree with you. @ Mick Taylor. Never mind what the Victorians did. They had money to burn much of it derived from global domination We live in an age of austerity we are told. We have to live within our means. Spending £60 billion on this rail project at the moment is myopic.
We need to invest in mental health services and care homes. For example, reports are already emerging of hospitals being overwhelmed by frail elderly people because care homes are going broke. The UK has worse cancer outcomes than many comparable countries in Europe.
Please let’s get real here. If our economy was booming maybe then go for a scheme like this, even though there should be improved environmental safeguards. But it’s time to break the mould and build locally sustainable economies
@Judy, The ONLY way we have the tax income to invest in future mental health services and care homes is with this investment in our transport infrastructure!
1) The cost is £28b + a contingency unspent by other new build projects like Crossrail. Please note that this is NOT an upgrade project likely to go overbudget as the GWR electrification did. We are not trying to work alongside and open railway and not trying to adapt Victorian structures with all the surprises that brings. New build in a new place costs less and causes less disruption.
2) High speed rail between a country’s top 3 cities (London-Birmingham-Manchester in our case) makes profits elsewhere (the WCML, Midland Mainline and ECML franchises already do and Paris-Lyon and Tokyo-Osaka do too.
They typically payback costs within 30 years. TGV France earnt 1 billion euros profit the other year.
But this line will not just earn franchise fees. It will earn rental fees too (HS1 is rented out for billions every 25 yrs).
But most of the HS2 income will come from extra income tax, VAT, and corporation tax from jobs created.
KPMG said it would earn £5 billion PER YEAR for its 150 yr life just from that tax income.
The LSE said that was an exaggeration and put the figure closer to £1 billion – but that’s still PER YEAR – ie even HS2 opponents agreed that this line will earn £150 BILLION over its long lifetime – at CURRENT PRICES (ie BEFORE allowing for inflation).
Tax income will increase with inflation over the next century whilst its £28b cost stays the same.
Our economy is actually doing rather better now – and we are actually paying for this between 2020 and 2033 – when the deficit is supposed to have been paid off. The £2 billion per year cost is actually the same as Crossrail per year.
And in the meantime in just the next 5 years (2014-2019) we are spending £38 billion upgrading existing lines to Cornwall and Bristol with electrification schemes, new stations and reopening old lines in Oxfordshire & Bristol.
So
So economists agree that this transport infrastructure will BOOST the economy to create extra jobs that will create the tax income to fund our future mental health and care services.
Those economists may disagree how MUCH tax per year will be earnt ( £1 billion or £5 billion per year).
But they do agree that this infrastructure will earn enough tax to not just payback costs but then pay tax PROFITS for OVER 100 YEARS.
HS2 is a massive vanity project for folk who never quite grew out of playing with their train sets. There are more cost effective ways to provide capacity and there are many other routes which are fit to burst.
HS2 also has the massive advantage of, for the most part, not being next to the live lines. Which makes it actually a less complex civil engineering project, for the most part.
WRT the HS1–HS2 link: I agree it should be built, although we could probably make some speed sacrifices through London.
@Alistair. This link between 8 of our top 10 cities (centred on Birmingham) will carry trains to Scotland and will free up train routes to 100 towns in-between – adding capacity to improve over 50 million journeys per year.
Those people won’t thank you for saying this improvement is just a “vanity” project. Neither will they vote for you.
And our party has to ask why we allowed the link to HS1 and the Heathrow spur to be delayed.
We were in government- and we let it happen.
HS2 Ltd don’t plan to run trains as fast on the London section.
The busiest section of this line could be from Ebbsfleet to West Ruislip – with trains from HS1 sharing the route across London to not just run up HS2 but also reach Heathrow and the GWR west to Bristol.
Every HS2 train sent down that spur to Heathrow, frees a path across London for two regional trains to be joined together – saving platforms at Paddington and Victoria or London Bridge or Liverpool St for more commuter trains.
The best way to free up Heathrow is to
a) Allow Eurostar access to it (to take 3 million to 6 million passengers per year (5% to 10% of its market).- to T5 rather than O Oak Common station miles away & WITH central London stop at St Pancras Cross through platforms.
b) connect it via HS2 to Birmingham International. Journey time only 30 mins. (changing terminal takes 20 mins).
Birmingham international has enough spare capacity to take 40% of Heathrow’s flights! (27m pass/yr spare).
HS2 also needs more “classic compatible” trains that can reach Liverpool or run through the middle of Derby.
But we DO NEED this better connection to Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and York via Birmingham and rising passenger demand probably means we need it constructed and open rather SOONER than currently planned.
It CAN payback its costs and it CAN bring in enough extra tax revenue to fund future schools & hospitals.
Better infrastructure does that.
Whilst we DO need to respect the environment, we have to understand that if it was not this tree, opponents would find another one or a newt or a bat. Wherever the route was designed, they would find something to avoid !
We need to plant more than the trees we remove, build MORE replacement houses than those we knock down.
We need to get on with this job – but do it properly.
What Alistair said: 11th Nov ’15 – 11:11pm
“HS2 is a massive vanity project for folk who never quite grew out of playing with their train sets. “
@David & Alistair
These 2 extra tracks address the needs of millions of people making 1.6 BILLION train journeys last year.
They are NOT playing with train sets. They are VOTERS. Ignore them at your peril.
Reading all the arguments rather reminds me of the arguments that were put forward for the m25 , it would improve journeys for people wanting to move around London we were all told, instead it has simply encouraged people to say oh look we can travel 20/30/40/50 miles to work, and I remember indeed that was true, until of course everyone wanted to do that, so it’s original purpose goes from being a through rote to just a slower and more environmentally damaging way of doing things. If you provide the ability to get into London in under three hours it will simply distort the already grossly distorted south east pull. Look at the figures of how journey times have increased over the last ten years.
I find it totally ironic that at the very point that the Internet is providing the sort of super highway that is really needed, together with a real debate about how that we could scope that to everyone’s advantage we seem to think the answer is to build more highways of any sort to rush more people around further distances. Time for a rethink.
John Whitehouse | Mon 9th November 2015
Roman roads were jagged, one straight section after another, built for Roman soldiers to march on with sufficient visibility to foresee potential ambushes.
HS2 needs to compete with air travel within the UK. It has been divided by the Pennines, so northwards extensions from Leeds and Manchester will need to be considered sometime, towards Edinburgh and Glasgow, but maybe stopping at the Scottish border. Further extension to Aberdeen would be expensive, but North Sea oil policies may have changed before HS2 reaches Leeds.
The M25 was built in stages without announcing a completion plan by the Cons under Mrs Thatcher. The “bypasses” merited consultation with the various county councils.
A rail route from Heathrow to Gatwick would be a good idea (a helicopter link was abandoned as too noisy). These two airports are in separate ownership because of Tory ideology.
As a Christmas present I bought my father a partridge and a pear tree.
He said “Those who plant pears plant for their heirs.” The pear-tree was grafted onto a famous rootstock. He planted it at 45 degrees to the vertical, in Wiltshire.
Data from the Forestry Commission shows that trees that take 100 years to mature in the north of Scotland will make equivalent size in 30 years in Wales and less on Exmoor in Devon. This difference also affects the price of land.
We already had a house nearer work, with a large mortgage.