On September 4th The Independent ran a story on the problems that have beset the HS2 railway project to connect ‘major cities’ in England. It reported that the figure for total cost of the project, was something like 67 billion pounds, one new station at Birmingham alone costing half a billion, an extraordinary figure even if one accepts that it is spread over 15 years.
But now let’s take another figure, another one of half a billion, the Restoring your Railways Fund which for the same amount as that new station at Birmingham would help to breathe new life into several new railway lines and dozens of new stations. The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has decided to scrap it. She won’t save 500 million – probably something more of the order of 100 million – but this money was designed to restore several small lines that were closed during the Beeching cuts sixty years ago. Compared to the cost of HS2, the savings are minimal, and it’s hard not to think that Reeves has just done it in order to demonstrate that she’s not going to repeat the over-spending of the previous government.
These railway lines were designed to connect not major cities but small towns across the country. Yet their importance should not be under-stated. I would recommend anyone who doesn’t feel that such lines can be important to look at the website of one that because it’s nearly finished has escaped the Reeves cuts, the Northumberland Line. Look at the stories of the construction work, the extra roads, bridges and pathways built, the meetings with local communities, schools and civic associations, the enthusiasm of local businesses for the opportunities provided and the sheer excitement at what is effectively only restoring a line still used for freight to passenger use, and you get a sense of how far communities have been invigorated by a sum of money which in the case of HS2 would do no more than pay to modify the platforms to fit the height of the new trains.
Another line, the Leamside Line in nearby County Durham, has fallen foul of the Reeves axe but would have brought Washington into the orbit of passenger services, connected up with the Tyne and Wear metro and provided a new line on the main route to the North-East, helping to ensure that mainline services from London were not disrupted. And all this for a sum that though not negligible is minuscule compared to the billions spent on ensuring that ‘major cities’, already only a couple of hours’ travelling time from the capital, have a half hour knocked off the journey time to London.
All these ‘small fry’ projects that have been axed would pay for themselves in the medium term through the benefits to local businesses. After all, they all started out by making a ‘business case’ that had to be accepted before they even got so far as being considered. And Labour, which must recognize their economic value, has also made much of the need to support construction projects and infrastructure. But they seem to be knocked back at every turn. The Plymouth Herald earlier this year considered the possibility of reopening the line between Plymouth and the town of Tavistock. It only needed five miles of track to be laid. Yet it reported that though the line could be built in six months, the bureaucracy involved in doing so would take five years to deal with!
While Angela Rayner talks of cutting out the bureaucracy involved in building new houses, she might consider that required for restoring railway lines.
Lib Dems may well be sympathetic towards Rachel Reeves’ determination to avoid the profligacy of her predecessors. But what is much less acceptable is the way in which both Conservatives and Labour seem to think in terms of big cities and the capital rather than the small towns and rural areas that are still where most people in the UK live. Labour metro mayors clamour for the HS2 not to leave out their big conurbations and call for billions more to be spent on extending it to their patches. Conservatives think only of how to pump people as quickly as possible into the capital. The result is a system that is all arteries and no veins, rushing as fast as possible between big cities with no sense of the network as a whole.
It would be wrong to consider the Lib Dems the party of rural areas and small towns – several of their 72 MPs represent inner city constituencies – but supporting the reinstatement of Restoring your Railways would be a worthy cause to devote time to. Without getting into the pros and cons of HS2, one could easily shift a little of the cost of that project, whatever it ends up looking like, onto supporting a more comprehensive approach that includes places that have spent decades without a connection to the railway network. They deserve it and helping them will only add to the economic opportunities flowing from a more integrated railway network.
* Mark Corner is a UK national, who teaches economic history and philosophy at the University of Leuven, is married to a Czech EU official and lives in Brussels. He has just published A Tale of Two Unions suggesting that Brexit may damage the British Union unless the UK becomes more positive about the way the European Union is structured.
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48 Comments
What an excellent and well researched article, Mark……. and my goodness it’s high time the Lib Dems started paying attention again to the North and North East of England as well as to focussing on the Blue Wall down in the deep South.
Great article, that gets to the heart of one of the many reasons I am a Lib Dem and not a member of the other parties, namely their propensity to make decisions only by looking tough.
Totally agree we need to get more railways built. I think though that before that can happen, we do need to seriously look at why railways cost so much to build (The complex planning process you mention is probably part of that, but certainly not the whole story). The massive cost of HS2 (which has already been seriously cut back because of rising costs) seems a perfect example of a much wider problem on the railways. As another example, the Northumberland Line will come in about £300 Million – and as you point out that’s not even to build a new line, it’s just to allow passenger trains to run for 10 miles on an existing freight line. And diesel trains at that – not even any electrification. With price tags like that it’s no wonder Governments will be reluctant to build much. 🙁
Ah, the Leamside line..A 21 mile length of track..How many people would use it and at what cost?
Where I live there IS a train service..Beccles to Oulton Broad..No parking at either end and, for a 10 min train journey fares start at £5.60…
I sometimes walk my dog the 7.5 miles along the river between these two points and return by train….BUT in any meaningful sense shopping, business, etc. using the route is not a sensible option..
For anything but freight short distance railways are a 19th century answer to a 20th century problem; and the 20th century is long gone….
HS2 was about increasing capacity on the West Coast Mainline between Manchester and Birmingham to allow for more freight capacity. It was never about speed (but ‘speed’ is sexy).
There are 2 questions to ask.
Why did the route start at London to Birmingham when the capacity issue was between Birmingham and Manchester?
The French started building the first TGV line in 1976. Services started in 1981 and the 254 mile line was completed in 1983. How are the French able to build things so much faster than the UK?
Next year is the 200th anniversary of the Stockton & Darlington Railway. The UK were pioneers and now we are also-rans.
“… seem to think in terms of big cities and the capital rather than the small towns and rural areas …” It’s not just politicians. I heard a news bulletin yesterday which referred to the man who received a 9-year sentence as a result of the recent riots, saying he was from “Swinton in Greater Manchester”. A scriptwriter didn’t recognise that there is another Swinton, in the borough of Rotherham, where the offence took place.
More on ridiculous costs on railways. It’s being reported that a planned footbridge at Par railway station (part of the Cornwall Metro Restoring Your Railways scheme) might now not be built because it’s gone over budget and will now cost £5 million. Yes, £5 million to build one single footbridge. Outside of the railways, you could probably build about 20 complete houses for people to live in for that much! Something is seriously wrong with how Network Rail builds stuff. We’ve got to fix that problem if we want to see more railways being restored.
(Link: https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/mid-cornwall-metro-rail-plan-9531058)
Same issue in Scotland with the Central Belt-focused SNP putting on the back burner or not even getting started on essential rail projects. The long-promised dualling of the mainline between Perth and Inverness (an essential with under-used potential tourism and freight route), the building of the Delmore loop west of Inverness (at relatively minimal cost which would unlock commuting and other opportunities along the single track Far North line), and the re-opening of the line to Peterhead and Fraserburgh (also key component towns in the Just Transition).
This is a great article by Mark Corner.
This article might also be of interest ( and the Mark referred to is myself).
Yes, there is a debate about the cost of rail links and infrastructure projects and whether costs can be reduced. Trams and light rail (including ultra light rail) should be part of the mix of a revival of rail links.
I would however suggest the bigger debate should be about the cost of proposed road building projects, especially the Lower Thames Crossing, which will cost at least £9 billon.
As a party we really do need to make decisions as to whether we really support sustainable transport or just assume that huge road building is always the answer.
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/campaign-for-better-transport-calls-for-restoring-your-railway-alternative-to-reopen-abandoned-railway-lines-23-08-2024/
“Trams and light rail (including ultra light rail) should be part of the mix of a revival of rail links.”
And what about trolleybuses which draw electric power from overhead wires but use conventional wheels and so don’t need tracks in the road (tracks which could be deathtraps for cyclists)?
Another vote of thanks to the author of this well-written article! And thanks also Mark for the mention of stage two of the inland alternative to the main line west of Exeter to the rest of Devon and the whole of Cornwall. The first stage, reinstating passenger services from Exeter to Okehampton, has been open for a couple of years and is performing very well. As the author mentioned, the next stage will be to reopen a line between Plymouth and Tavistock, a town of about 12000 residents which last had a rail service in 1968. This would also bring considerable benefits to a much wider rural area of West Devon and north and east Cornwall, as well as some of the most deprived parts of the city. Finally, stage three, linking Tavistock and Okehampton, would complete what once existed – the inland alternative to the coastal route which was devastated a decade ago at Dawlish!
For the record, I want more arteries as well as the veins. Reducing HS2 was so short-sighted, and I agree with Philip – the speed of HS2 was of less importance to the increased capacity, but people fixated on speed and seemed unaware of the capacity aspect.
Doing any civil engineering works near railways is always expensive. If it’s an existing and operating line, then any works require closing the railway, or doing works only when there are no trains, which means overnight working, and/or working on Christmas Day – which costs extra. The ability to close lines to do work is make harder because of our lack of nearby capacity. A lot will depend on the topography, but getting a new bridge (assuming it’s also for cyclists and got the required ramps for wheelchair users) for the same price as twenty houses seems reasonable to me when you consider the relative challenges of building each of them.
I’ve noticed that the costs of rail projects (and cycle paths) are always quoted by local papers as eye-watering. But we rarely see similar articles on the much greater costs of road building. Very often the figures associated with a new cycle path will include the costs of resurfacing the entire road, and a whole load of other upgrades that aren’t strictly about the cycle path. It is often the same when it’s a new station. It includes the costs of upgrading roads to the station and building a car-park.
New footbridges can include lifts, hence the cost. I know of several near me, at Leatherhead, Ewell West, Stoneleigh, Worcester Park and Motspur Park stations.
It always surprised me that the route and specification of HS2 were agreed with so little discussion by politicians and our MPs in the coalition Government must take their share of the blame for this. As I have said before both here and elsewhere, if you want fast trains to Scotland, it makes no sense to go up the WCML route; the Victorian railway builders knew that the quickest route was up the eastern side of the Pennines, paralleling the existing ECML. The alternative proposals to HS2, published by HSUK ( http://www.highspeeduk.co.uk/ ) recognised this and had the further advantage of making HS2 much easier to link to HS1 and allow direct trains from Europe to our regional cities and vice versa. If we are serious about reducing aviation emissions from domestic flights then high-speed rail is the only option. A speed of 200 mph (320 kmph) is entirely adequate for this; trying to push the technological limits by designing for 360 or 400 kmph only increases costs massively while offering minimal time saving.
I agree with Laurence Cox about HS2: which was simultaneous over and under ambitious. Over ambitious in being design for higher running speeds than necessary and under ambitious in failing to link with HS1 or reach Scotland.
Yes. There are only two reasons to build a continental loading guage railway in the UK. One is to link up with the continental railway network, the other is to use tried and tested off-the-shelf technology. Instead we are linking an unconnected station in Birmingham with a prison in West London and have quite literally tried to reinvent the wheel.
There is still time for the new government to change its plan for the journey beyond Wormwood Scrubs. Euston is a poorly connected station unless you are travelling to London to get a slow train back to Birmingham. It needs to go to Kings Cross / St Pancras to link up with HS1 and Thameslink.
There are certainly some issues with HS2 connectivity, but I don’t think it’s fair to describe Birmingham Curzon Street as unconnected: It’s literally right next to Moor Street station! Old Oak Common likewise will be well connected, interchanging with the Elizabeth line and GWR. Both sites were chosen because they are available to build on without either tunnelling or demolishing loads of other stuff and adding even more to HS2’s already huge cost. Euston isn’t that badly connected with several underground lines, although it’s regrettable that the Government scrapped the original HS2 plan to connect it directly to Euston Square tube. Crossrail2 will also go to Euston if/when that ever gets built. My understanding is that there just isn’t anywhere that it would be possible to build an HS2 terminus at Kings Cross.
The HSUK plans are interesting and look well thought out. Unfortunately they are also so ambitious as to be more like a plan for what we’d like the railways to look like in 50 year’s time: They aren’t something we could possibly build on a timescale of a few years.
“My understanding is that there just isn’t anywhere that it would be possible to build an HS2 terminus at Kings Cross.”
Why would you need an HS2 terminus at Kings Cross, or anywhere else? Build international stations at Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds etc and let people get on near where they live. If possible build the international stations connected to local airports to share customs facilities. Connect Heathrow to HS2 by qa spur and allow passengers disembarking there to trasnsfer to a train, perhaps a sleeper, instead to transferring to a connecting flights. If HS2 got to Newcastle or Glasgow run sleepeshould everything have to involve going to London?s to europe from there. Why does everything have to involve London?
“For the record, I want more arteries as well as the veins.”
Local ines or veins if you prefer have many advantages. They benefit more communities and would be cheaper and could be completed quicker.
In my adopted home county of leicestershire the Ivanhoe line is an existing freight line that could be improved to allow passenger trains creating 13 new stations and linkiing Leicester and Burton Upon Trent. In 2004 Leicester lost it’s direct service to Coventry, less than 30 miles away, because “improvements to the West Coast Mainline where deemed more important. reopening this link would restore service to many intermediate stations and create new links. If the money wasted on HS2 had been allocated to these services they could both have been opened 10 years ago. Hopefully creating demand on mainle services.
Much as I like Moor St station, it’s good for coming back in the direction you have come from but has few direct connections to the rest of the West Midlands.
I agree with Andrew that we need direct services from the Channel Tunnel to other destinations. Unfortunately given the apparent consensus that we should remain an island, these services cannot have any intermediate station stops. Terminus platforms at Birmingham International and Manchester airports specifically for international trains would work. Both have good onward connections and / or room for more.
We need a direct link between Old Oak and Stratford International. That would mean fewer trains into St Pancras freeing up slots for HS2 trains.
@Andrew, my point was that I want more arteries as well as more veins. Not more arteries instead of veins. There are very good arguments for investing in both, and I don’t think we should accept the notion that there has been inadequate investment in local services because of high speed rail, or vice versa.
I’m very much a fan of re-opening and expanding local freight lines to allow for passenger services, and I think that at the very least the land required for new future stations should be identifies, and protected from any other development that would make that tricky.
When we talk of investing in national infrastructure for a modern UK we need to think less of roads and more in terms of railways, active travel routes (including bridges over railways) and high speed broadband.
@Peter: There are plans to expand Moor Street and run lots more trains there, in part in order to take pressure off New Street – but that needs funding to build the Camp Hill chords first. New Street is also only a few minutes walk away, it just needs a much more pleasant dedicated walking route – which would be massively cheaper to build than trying to get HS2 trains directly to New Street.
@Andrew: The Ivanhoe line is definitely a good example of the kind of line we should be reopening to passenger services: An existing freight line through several towns that just needs upgrading. A big problem though is there’s no easy way to get the line into Leicester station – which rather knocks out one of the biggest likely commuting destinations/interchanges.
@Simon: Old Oak Common likewise will be well connected, interchanging with…GWR.
Wales and west passengers will have to endure six years of a much poorer service (for starters, a lot of trains will terminate at Reading).
For what?
The ability to get to Birmingham by trailing maybe 180 miles, through Bristol, eastwards to London, to then trail 130 miles diagonally back the other way.
When Bristol to Birmingham by train is about 100 miles.
@Simon R – “There are certainly some issues with HS2 connectivity”
That’s an understatement!
Firstly, with respect to HS1, the trackbed and its alignment and north London land purchases was designed for a through station and a northward extension. St.Pancras was a bit of an interim solution. The problems with HS2 were because HS2 was – a vanity project – with no thought of interconnection. When as a much delayed after thought, an interconnect was considered, it was so compromised that 400kmh trains would only be able to run at a maximum speed of 50kmh, as accidents on foreign high-speed lines demonstrated, this was not an operationally safe solution. But then HS1 was only 300kmh with a different trackbed and gauging restrictions…
We could go up HS2 and we can see that at every opportunity cheapness of route took precedence over connectivity. It was this bargain basement approach which resulted in the £9bn cost the politicians could band around, but the detailed report listed so many caveats, it was obvious it was going to go over budget, even before the decision was taken on making it 400kmh.
Hence why now 400kmh HS2 has been cancelled we are left trying to make something useful out of a disaster. Probably the best use is to build some new towns along its route and turn it into a commuter line, then interconnects like Old Oak start to make sense, however, we are still left with all the other interconnect issues of the HS2 route…
“A big problem though is there’s no easy way to get the line into Leicester station…”
That’s true. But if the reopening cost £271 million (https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/extending-the-ivanhoe-line-restoration-to-leicester-could-cost-additional-271m-09-11-2023/) then even if you had to compulsorily purchase the land to restore Knigton Junction it couldn’t add that much to the financial cost of the project. Although the disruption to the businesses on the industrial estate that would be affected has to be considered.
“@Andrew, my point was that I want more arteries as well as more veins.”
I take a jaundiced view of the “artery approach. When I moved to Hinckley 30 years ago it was served by 2 trains an hour in each directon. Birmingham to Leicester and Coventry to Nottingham. So decent service. Then in 2004 because of “improvements” to the West Coast Mainline the points allowing trains to transfer from the Coventry to Nuneaton branch to the Nuneaton to Leicester branch line were removed. This halved the trains serving Hinckley as well as meaning there is no direct Leicester to Coventry service, two towns only 30 miles apart. If you want to go from Hinckley to Coventry at present it takes an hour and 20 minutes, 58 minutes of which is waiting for the connection at Nuneaton. That is unless you change at Nuneaton and Rugby in which case it takes an hour and 6 minutes and costs £22 instead of £9.60p. There is one train in the morning which only takes 49 minutes with a mere 22 minute wait at Nuneaton.
You are fed up with the lack of investment in local services, and I agree with you. I’m also fed up with the lack of investment in high speed, longer distance routes. Both of these are a symptom of decades of underinvestment in the railways by people, and we should be aiming to reverse that, and ensure there is enough investment for both. We desperately need both. Neither will be truly effective without the other, and as a country we need both to support a 21st century economy and to meet our climate change goals.
It suits the fans of road building to let railways users bicker over where to invest the left-overs, but really we should spend much more time challenging the value of road building. And reversing the tax cut for air travel Sunak brought in. And finding a way to have VAT on aviation fuel to at least match that of trains etc.
Talking of ‘veins’ it’s just emerged that re-opening the Waterside line (Southampton/Totton to Hythe) is not now going to happen :-(. That was one of the most hopeful prospects from Restoring your Railway since it would connect a reasonable sized town along a significant commuter route, and required only upgrading an existing freight line. Details in this letter from the DfT to a local LibDem councillor: https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=906414451299698. From the letter it looks like this decision isn’t connected to the Govt ending Restoring your Railway but would’ve happened anyway. My own reading of the explanation is that it looks like another case of a scheme failing because Network Rail is incapable of doing anything for a reasonable cost.
@Simon R – That letter clearly indicates there needs to be follow up FoI for the Network Rail detailed assessment.
From this report: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg3mr7937peo
I suspect Labour are simply cutting anything that hasn’t been given the go ahead. What is notable is the axing of the railway projects only saves £85m out of the £2.9bn, so we really need to know what is in the remaining £2.8bn, which hasn’t been disclosed. Whether as you intimate Network Rail was already predisposed to cancelling, that will only be known once the Network Rail assessment is published under a FoI request.
Interestingly, I suspect if the will was there, the trackbed could be leased from Network Rail and a light railway/tram service could be operated.
@Fiona “You are fed up with the lack of investment in local services, and I agree with you.”
Only partly. In the case of the , now cancelled Coventry to Nottingham service there was no investment required beyond maintenance and replacing train sets occasionally. Unless you argue that failing to provided an alternative s, such as a tunnel . But I suggest that that goes beyond lack of investment and instead indicates disregard for lines not serving London.
Wich leads me on to what counts as an “artery”. I can see no reason why the Liverpool to Hull line shouldn’t be considered “arterial”. And that is only one example.
Then there is the cost implications. “Arterial” tend to be much more expensive. This means that when the inetivtable cost overruns occur it much easier to cancel a local “vein” completely to cover the increased cost.
Finally I think the “artery” approach over emphasises London. See my proposals in my post of 7.28am on the 11th.
@Expats -“For anything but freight short distance railways are a 19th century answer to a 20th century problem; and the 20th century is long gone….”
I understand the sentiment, however, where trackbeds are still (largely) intact (eg. St.Albans – Hatfield) and run through (expanding) urban areas suffering from high levels of congestion, “railways” can make a lot of sense. However, I suggest we do need to be more nuanced and create new subcategories to get away from the simplistic viewpoint of what a railway is and hence involves. there isn’t any reason why a short-distance “railway” isn’t constructed to different and thus cheaper standards to those currently used on a conventional branch-line railway, likewise for the rolling stock.
So I suggest the question is more of whether a fixed route mass transport system is more appropriate in a particular situation to a flexible route (bus et al) mass transport system.
@Andrew: It’s not lack of a couple of trainsets stopping Nottingham to Coventry services. The problem is such a service would have to cross the West Coast Main Line at Nuneaton – which is basically impossible because that line is now so busy. A more pragmatic approach would be to run much more frequent services Birmingham-Leicester, and Nuneaton-Coventry, thereby improving connections at Nuneaton. I think campaigning for that would be more likely to succeed.
More generally, while arteries and veins are both important, investing in arteries usually benefits far more people, which is why that investment tends to happen: Even if the absolute cost is much higher, the cost per passenger is likely to be lower. Also the arteries tend to be the bits of the railway that – because they carry so many people – are actually profitable – and those profits are vital in order to support the branch lines (which invariably run at significant losses).
@Simon
I think you’re making my case for me. But infact there are proposals for reconnecting the coventry to Nottingham service. https://www.midlandsconnect.uk/media/1777/coventry-leicester-nottingham-summary-report.pdf but no doubt this has been strangled by the incoming Labour Government.
Your comment oon arteries benefitting more people is interesting because it raises complex questions on Utility. improving the WCML benefits a lot of people by relatively small amounts but harmed a smaller number of people by depriving them of half their rail service. But this is not the thread to debate that point.
>” The problem is such a service would have to cross the West Coast Main Line at Nuneaton – which is basically impossible because that line is now so busy.”
“ In 2019 a report by Midlands Connect proposed reinstating direct services between Coventry and Leicester, for the first time since 2004, by reinstating a “dive under” under the West Coast Main Line at Nuneaton, connecting the Coventry-Nuneaton line to the Nuneaton-Leicester line. Currently this journey is only possible by changing at Nuneaton.”
I suspect this £120m plan is just another transport project looking for funding, which won’t happen anytime soon…
>”arteries and veins ”
Not a good metaphor, it’s more like arteries and capillaries, the arteries deliver blood to the capillaries that distribute the (oxygenated) blood to where it is needed. Capillaries and veins do the oppose – collect used blood and return it to be reinvigorated. The misunderstanding of the roll of branch lines (ie. capillaries) is at the heart of the mistakes Beeching made.
The issue is our railway network (like the economy) is too heavily oriented towards serving London, whilst ignoring modern realities and understanding of networks. If we are (and we do need to) reduce our emissions and fossil fuel dependency we need to start thinking: the one thing in common with many rail plans rejected by Westminster et al is they have arisen out of Kaizen thinking, and so are attempts at making stepwise improvement rather than dramatic change, so liked by politicians (prime exhibit HS2 and the properly costed rail schemes the Coalition government dropped in favour of vanity (*) ).
(*)Labour have shown they haven’t learnt anything about technology, since they pulled the London-Birmingham high-speed shuttle out of the hat in 2008, by categorising datacentres as “critical national infrastructure”.
@Roland. ” the one thing in common with many rail plans rejected by Westminster et al is they have arisen out of Kaizen thinking, and so are attempts at making stepwise improvement rather than dramatic change, so liked by politicians”
This doesn’t make it clear whether you approve or disapprove of Kaizen thinking?
But I think you’re certainly right about the railways being to londoncentric. As I said above there are too few cross country routes. Also HS2 should have gone to Glasgow and linked to the Channel Tunnel. (I reaise that would be very expensive even if running speed was reduced to 300kph.
@Andrew Tampion
I approve of kaizan / continuous improvement thinking since the 1980s – when I first had cause to look at quality control and Japanese manufacturing. Through this I’m aware many improvements aren’t worth shouting about. Although there are times when that is possible – for example the iPhone wasn’t all that revolutionary, it just brought all the quiet development together into something new and exciting, also just like Marconi and his radio.
We get similar with car tyres, the average person would not be aware of just how different a current A rated Michelin tyre is to a 1980s Michelin tyre (ie. Like for like, it also in general).
New rail (especially on new routes) was and is going to be expensive. One of my gripes with HS2, was the lack of honesty and confidence: the £9bn cost was a deliberate attempt to mislead to make it seem cheap and affordable so it would get the go ahead. I suspect if it had carried a £30bn price tag from the outset, more attention would have been given to the route, its interconnects etc. (the simple fact that HS2 passes Bicester, Brackley and other places of major housing development without having a station is pure madness, people were like Mr Toad mesmerised by the new and the idea of speed.)
Now I wonder if Labour will fund the completion of the Varsity line/east west rail (which really needs both Route E and Route D, given the amount of new development planned for this area).
HS2 doesn’t really go that near Bicester. But the fact that it doesn’t stop at places like that makes perfect sense when you remember that the main original purpose of HS2 before the Tories cut it back was to free up capacity on all three main lines out of London (the West Coast Main Line, the Midland Main Line, and the East Coast Main Line) by diverting the very fastest long distance trains out of Euston, St Pancras, and Kings Cross on to HS2 instead, thereby creating more space for slower trains on the other lines. If you start stopping these ‘fastest’ trains at small towns like Brackley then they are no longer the fastest trains.
Interesting discussion about arteries and capillaries and London. The problem here is a bit chicken-and-egg: London is the UK’s biggest city and therefore has the biggest commuter market. Together with an already well developed rail network that means you have millions of rail passengers and therefore rail improvements benefit a huge number of people (look at the Elizabeth line – already the most well used national rail line in the UK!), where spending the same amount of money somewhere else would produce fewer additional passengers. Hence apparently completely rational economic decisions mean that the London-centricity of the rail network grows.
I agree and suggest adding Middlewich station that was closed around the time of the Beecham cuts to the list. The line from Northwich to Crewe that it is on still runs occasional freight lines and is a diversion in case of disruption on the north west main line. We have also provided a business case. All these lines help to join up the network, taking hundreds of cars off our congested roads. It is a false saving to not reopen these lines and improve our infrastructure for limited costs.
@Simon R
“when you remember that the main original purpose of HS2 before the Tories cut it back was to free up capacity on all three main lines out of London”
Err no, it wasn’t; the clue is in the name “High Speed 2” not “High Capacity 2”.
As for the fzx argument about not stopping, I suggest you familiarise yourself with how the West Coast mainline and Japanese railways achieve a mix of high speed and fast services… BTW I worked on the resignalling of the Euston line in the 1980’s and so gained an intimate knowledge of the interconnection between signals, points and trains that permitted 125mph running.
@ Roland,
“Err no, it wasn’t; the clue is in the name “High Speed 2” not “High Capacity 2”.”
That is perhaps because the line is high speed, freeing up capacity on the pre-existing lines for more local and stopping services, plus new connections, i.e. greater capacity.
We tried upgrading the West Coast Main Line and spent a tidy sum (£9 billion or so, if I recall correctly) which bought time and not much of it.
It’s a pity that, when Andrew Adonis launched the HS2 project, he emphasised the speed element over the capacity element – the “boy’s toys” argument, if you will. And whilst rail experts tended to emphasise capacity, the speed element was felt to have more resonance with the public.
@Roland; The West Coast Main Line achieves its mix of faster and slower services largely by being a 4-track line from London to Stafford, allowing slower trains to run on the slow lines. North of there, there there aren’t that many trains and most tend to have similar stopping patterns.
HS2 is a 2-track railway, so no overtaking is possible and before the Tories cut it back, there were planned to be 18tph running each way South of Birmingham. With a train every 3 minutes, there’s no way you can stop some of them without those trains then blocking the trains behind. Obviously the Sunak-decimated version of HS2 now won’t have that many trains, at least until it hopefully gets extended in the future. But in any case it runs (by design) almost entirely through open countryside: There’s hardly anywhere else on it that it would be worth building a station.
@ Simon R,
“North of {Stafford}, there there aren’t that many trains and most tend to have similar stopping patterns.”
“North of Stafford” isn’t some far flung outpost of the British Empire! People do live here and we do need and use the railways!
Many stations on the WCML have been closed down or had platforms removed, not because they were economically unviable in their own right but simply to prevent local trains getting in the way of the express services to Scotland. This would never have been allowed to happen in the South of England.
North of Stafford. There are many services, hourly to Manchester, hourly to the Preston, Lancaster, Carlisle and Scotland, twice or thrice an hour an hour to Liverpool, hourly to Holyhead etc etc etc.
Also the line into Stafford is partly two tracks only from Colwich junction to Milford and then is four tracks up to Crewe where the divergence of services takes place and the West Coast line deviate from two to four tracks up to Preston.
The problem is not the the timetable, but due to staff difficulties since Virgin were deprived of the service by the Government there are cancellations and lateness by the score.
HS2 is required primarily to relieve the West Coast line from passenger growth to enable its freight services to operate with more frequency and speed.
I should have been clearer: By aren’t that many trains (North of Stafford) I simply meant big enough gaps between services that a train can stop without the one behind catching up: It’s not like the train-every-few-minutes that you find on the Southern WCML. So @theakes you are right that there are still frequent trains.
@Peter yes, that’s true. A sad example of what you’re saying is how the proposed (re)opening of Golborne station is getting nowhere, in part because, despite being prime commuter area, almost the only trains running on that bit of the WCML are fast long distance services to Scotland, which means that even if you built the station, there’s currently nothing that could reasonably stop at it. We could really do with 4-tracking that entire part of the WCML so you could run decent local/commuter services on it too.
@ Simon,
Yes that would work. I was also thinking that a combination of loop lines and better signalling might also work at lower cost.
Carnforth is an example of a station on the WCML which has lost its main line platforms but is still open. There is a local campaign to have them restored but I don’t expect it will succeed, and for the same reason you have mentioned.
Might Carnforth be hanging on because of some film history?
It ‘played’ Milford Junction in the film Brief Encounter.
Closing it might be regarded as sacriledge.
I don’t think it’s that. Carnforth after all DID lose it’s West Coast Mainline (WCML) platforms. The reason it still exists as a station is that it’s at the junction with the branch line to Barrow/Leeds, so when the WCML platforms closed, that still left the platforms on the branch line. Carnforth became and still is a branch line only station, despite the WCML running right alongside it.
It’s now very well used both for the station and the museum that now exists inside the station, and it’s certainly not in any danger of closing.