HS2 - the case for a review

[tbtc]

It isn't at all clear why it would be possible to vastly increase capacity of existing lines south of the Thames by upgrading, but not possible on 80-odd miles of track out of Euston

The old Southern Region is seeing an increase in passenger capacity by (a) increasing services to the maximum that the infrastructure can cope with (i.e. 12x20m)...

...and...

...(b) taking out dozens of seats, which isn't really an option on London to Manchester services.

The problem south of the Thames is what you do when 12x20m isn't enough - there's no easy longer term solution if population/ demand keep on increasing.

Timetable re-casts, higher capacity rolling stock, re-signalling, grade separation, longer platforms, and use of alternative existing routes, are all perfectly viable options, which have been used elsewhere to increase capacity.

The familiar list of "perfectly viable options"...

Do you not think that 3+2 seated 350s, operating in up to twelve coach formations are probably the limit?

390s are over 250m long already (longer than the longest Southern Region services) - do you want them to be 3+2 seated too?

And, to echo najaB's point earlier - do you not think that the experts have considered this? What spaces in the timetable have you found that the rest of us haven't noticed? In between ten 125mph services per hour plus the 110mph LM services?

HS2 isn't perfect, but it's an option that would give thousands of extra seats and allow dozens of additional services. As things stand, you're offering no alternative.

Either come up with genuine suggestions for how to recast the congested timetable, name the stations that you'd put longer platforms at, give examples of trains that could be lengthened... or accept that we need more radical surgery than tinkering with the number of toilets on trains to cram a few extra seats in.

 

[Voglitz]

Southern region has significantly more track to use to generate these services, with rather fewer constraints on stopping patterns and the like.
Waterloo to Clapham Junction is what, eight tracks? Plus however many more out of Victoria.

SR was limited by power supplies more than anything else.
Euston is very heavily operated already and has far fewer tracks to work with.

If massive increases in capacity into London from the south, west, and east can be delivered without building a new line, why Euston should be any different, is by no means clear.

As opposed to around six hundred with these 'inefficient' Pendolinos.
That is not that big an uplift really.

It seems to be a big enough uplift to meet foreseeable demand, by itself. But it's just one of several ways to increase capacity.

And making a 25m tilting carriage fit in the loading gauge is really going to be fun.
You would likely have to revert to 110mph operations, at which point your journey time projections go out the window.

The effects on journey times, for most destinations, from 110mph-non-tilt-running probably wouldn't be very large.

There's no particular reason

* why sections of the West Coast route couldn't have a non-tilt linespeed of 125mph, or

* why tilt trains could not be retained for destinations north of Weaver Junction.

 

[Agent_c]

Euston expansion is only required for the HS2 scheme. Any train with 25-metre carriages, such as the IEP, would seat around 700 passengers with the existing platform lengths.

But you just said Platform extention was the solution!

An extra 100 pax or so in some trains isn't the solution to the problem.

 

[Voglitz]

But you just said Platform extention was the solution!

No, I did not.

I wrote, "Timetable re-casts, higher capacity rolling stock, re-signalling, grade separation, longer platforms, and use of alternative existing routes, are all perfectly viable options, which have been used elsewhere to increase capacity".

High speeds don't need more energy - cruise requies a comparatively small amount of energy. What needs more energy is more accelleration and deceleration.

You are (utterly) mistaken. See Table 2 of 'Factors affecting carbon impacts of HSR'.

An extra 100 pax or so in some trains isn't the solution to the problem.

It may well be that an extra 100 seats or so in some trains is 'the solution to the problem', as far as intercity travel is concerned, for the foreseeable future.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Austria and Switzerland don't have bank holidays as such.

Switzerland certainly does have public holidays, which are essentially the same thing, however it tends not to operate different railway timetables on different days so there is little operational impact.
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Fast running into platforms for instance. How about that at Crewe, Preston, Carlisle etc?

What you might term "positive braking", as practiced in Europe, is not really in with the UK's safety culture. I remember approaching the bay at Salzburg Hbf (head out of the window) at full linespeed near enough right to the end of the platform, and the driver pulling up, with full service brake all the way, at exactly the right location. But I bet it goes spectacularly wrong once in a while.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---

We are doing this more and more on the motorways now with fixed taper points at gantries - means longer sections of lane closure at night, but means the site staff are able to spend more time doing the required work rather than waiting around for traffic management to be deployed

Though one thing that surprises me is that Smart Motorways-imposed speed limits are not used for roadworks (other than slowing on approach to them) - fixed signs are always deployed and even separate camera setups.

 

[NotATrainspott]

Voglitz = beleben?

 

[The Ham]

It may well be that an extra 100 seats or so in some trains is 'the solution to the problem', as far as intercity travel is concerned, for the foreseeable future.

Let's take 20 years from now and a train which currently has 450 passengers (75% full), if you have 2.5% growth over those 20 years you'll end up with demand for 737 passengers!

Hardly coping for the foreseeable future, as that is only just after HS2 is set to open. Yes, we don't know that growth will continue, however it doesn't take many years at 4% growth (13 years) before passenger numbers overtake that point.

We have a problem any new line will take time to build, so if we delay until it is needed then we'll stagnate growth, yet if we build too soon there won't be the passengers to use it. However, HS2 isn't helping some quiet branch line, it's helping the WCML which is already fairly busy with little or no chance for significant capacity improvements beyond 20 years time (and not that many from now to then). If HS2 is built too early then it will just mean that it won't be as busy as it could be, yet if it I is built too late the whole network could grind to a halt.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Let's take 20 years from now and a train which currently has 450 passengers (75% full), if you have 2.5% growth over those 20 years you'll end up with demand for 737 passengers!

But will we? The need to travel may well reduce with technological improvement. My work pattern (in IT) has already shifted to primarily home-working, for example, when it was primarily commuting 10 years ago.

 

[najaB]

But will we? The need to travel may well reduce with technological improvement. My work pattern (in IT) has already shifted to primarily home-working, for example, when it was primarily commuting 10 years ago.

However you may well be an exception rather than the rule. There's been a promise of home working in a lot of sectors for a long time, but it's yet to materialise.

For example, my employer no longer actively promotes home working for a lot of jobs since the experience has been that productivity is demonstrably lower due to people working in silos. Not to mention that some people have a worse work/life balance since it is so easy for 'just another 30 minutes' to turn into many hours.

These days we promote working in offices, though most of the work that previously was done in central London offices has been moved been moved to locations outside the M25.

Not to mention that there are still a lot of jobs for which home working isn't even an option - those that require a physical presence.

 

[PR1Berske]

To be fair I've heard this prediction of WCML "grinding to a halt" every year since HS2 was first conceived. The awkward truth is, it has yet to do so. Do we keep getting warned about this until HS2 is built, or is the truth actually that capacity is not even close to being hit?

 

[The Ham]

But will we? The need to travel may well reduce with technological improvement. My work pattern (in IT) has already shifted to primarily home-working, for example, when it was primarily commuting 10 years ago.

However the population is growing and so even if some jobs reduce demand there will be other jobs which then take their place in needing to travel. Then there is the leisure market which would appear to doing very well in the railways, in fact I would suggest that off peak that this could (at least on some services) be a larger market than business travel.

 

[najaB]

To be fair I've heard this prediction of WCML "grinding to a halt" every year since HS2 was first conceived. The awkward truth is, it has yet to do so.

So don't buy a new horse until your current one is dead?

 

[The Ham]

To be fair I've heard this prediction of WCML "grinding to a halt" every year since HS2 was first conceived. The awkward truth is, it has yet to do so. Do we keep getting warned about this until HS2 is built, or is the truth actually that capacity is not even close to being hit?

I didn't say that it would grind to a halt now, or even any time in the short term. Rather if we delay building HS2 and rail growth carries on (even at a rate much lower than currently is happening) then there is a risk that the WCML couldn't cope.

For all the talk that HS2 won't be needed as rail demand will go down, since it was announced 7 years ago rail growth has remained stubbornly high with no sign of slowing any time soon.

One final point, the HS2 model assumes that once HS2 phase 1 opens that rail growth will continue at 2.5% year on year, yet given that there would be more services for people to travel on with more seats, it is likely that over the first few years there could well be an uplift in growth beyond what is happening around it. As such, even if growth on the whole network was at zero, chances are HS2 opening would generate growth.

You also have to remember that HS2 will also provide some capacity realise on the ECML and the MML (to a lesser extent).

Even if we only assume abound 6 years of growth at 4% and then flat growth until HS2 opens (as a note the bidders for the ICWC franchise had assumed that they could achieve 5% year on year as part of their bids) and that HS2 takes 80% of all the passengers off the existing services then there would be about 50% of the number of passengers on the WCML than there was in 2004. That would still be enough to justify the same service pattern as they had then but with 5 coach trains rather than 9 coach trains.

 

[Ships]

Actually, the quote button generated no quoted text, because of the way your post was framed.

I don't think there's much evidence that the JLE is markedly less expensive to maintain than the much older ex-Bakerloo section, or that the M40 costs less to fix than the M1, or that HS1 is less expensive to maintain, overall, than legacy infrastructure.

I'm not talking about the underground or a motorway. Apples and oranges. I've given plenty of reasons why it will be cheaper but you keep refuting this without evidence.

 

[quantinghome]

I don't think there's much evidence that the JLE is markedly less expensive to maintain than the much older ex-Bakerloo section.

You think wrong.

An assessment programme was undertaken a few years ago for all the tunnels on the Underground to see what condition the tunnels were in, and identify any major problems. The total cost for just three lines was around £10m and took about 7 years to complete.

The first phase of the project was finding out what tunnel assets were actually there - records of 100 years old tunnels aren't as good as new tunnels. This alone took about a year. We didn't need to do this for the JLE as the construction records were all available.

Next we had to undertake a massive exercise to assess the margin of safety of the tunnel structures, as the tunnels had been constructed decades before the distribution of forces in tunnel linings was properly understood (apart from the JLE of course). As well as being a huge exercise in technical calculation, this also required a considerable amount of site work to obtain samples of tunnel lining to see how much they had corroded and have them strength tested in specialist labs. Of course, we didn't have to do this for the JLE because we had the engineering calculations available and undertaken to modern quality assurance standards.

Following this, a number of tunnels sections were identified as being defective, for a variety of reasons. Taking one example, an older section of the Jubilee line (not JLE) needed to have 200m of tunnel lining replaced at a cost of £30m. Sections which had no visible signs of failure but which did not meet modern margin of safety requirements needed to have an enhanced inspection regime.

I've gone rather off-topic from HS2 here, but it's a useful illustration of just what needs to be done with old assets in comparison to new. Ultimately, engineering assets deteriorate over time and the older they are, the more work they need to keep them running.

 

[The Ham]

It isn't at all clear why it would be possible to vastly increase capacity of existing lines south of the Thames by upgrading, but not possible on 80-odd miles of track out of Euston. Timetable re-casts, higher capacity rolling stock, re-signalling, grade separation, longer platforms, and use of alternative existing routes, are all perfectly viable options, which have been used elsewhere to increase capacity.

...other than Waterloo (which is south of the river) where the scheme to increase capacity in the same sort of timeframe as HS2 is to build a new line (Crossrail 2). Funny that few are saying that we shouldn't build that because passenger growth may not continue to rise!

 

[quantinghome]

Timetable re-casts, higher capacity rolling stock, re-signalling, grade separation, longer platforms, and use of alternative existing routes, are all perfectly viable options, which have been used elsewhere to increase capacity.

All true. However, there's one point you've missed - these have been done already! West Coast Route Modernisation, Pendolinos, extra carriages for Pendolinos, Euston throat remodelling, Nuneaton North Chord, Norton Bridge, Trent valley 4-tracking, the 'VHF' timetable, Chiltern service to Birmingham etc etc.

I concede there may be a few more things that could be done to eek out a bit more capacity. Ultimately however, you reach a point where everything has been 4-tracked, all worthwhile grade separation has been done and the platforms and trains are as long as they can be without having to completely rebuild every station (and the surrounding area). The fact that the higher frequency intercity service has been achieved on WCML and Chiltern only at the expense of local and regional services would seem to indicate that we have pretty much reached the limit of what is achievable on the existing infrastructure.

 

[HSTEd]

If massive increases in capacity into London from the south, west, and east can be delivered without building a new line, why Euston should be any different, is by no means clear.

Because the lines out of Euston have never been constrained by third rail and are nowhere near as packed with infrastructure as those south of the river.

Good luck fitting eight tracks a significant distance out of Euston without ludicrous demolitions works.

It seems to be a big enough uplift to meet foreseeable demand, by itself. But it's just one of several ways to increase capacity.

At current growth rates then we will be back where we started in something less than a decade, and it will be chocka before HS2 is due to open.

The effects on journey times, for most destinations, from 110mph-non-tilt-running probably wouldn't be very large.

It would be significant however. The journeys aren't that long so a few minutes can make a big difference psychologically.

There's no particular reason
* why sections of the West Coast route couldn't have a non-tilt linespeed of 125mph, or

Look at the West Coast route on Google Maps, those sections are going to be rather short. Unless you have a horizontal alignment like the GWML or ECML (either massive radius sweeping curves or straight lines) you aren't going to get very much 125mph running.

* why tilt trains could not be retained for destinations north of Weaver Junction.

Because destinations north of Weaver junction is more than half the service - thus further reducing your 'capacity uplift' effect.

 

[6Gman]

To be fair I've heard this prediction of WCML "grinding to a halt" every year since HS2 was first conceived. The awkward truth is, it has yet to do so. Do we keep getting warned about this until HS2 is built, or is the truth actually that capacity is not even close to being hit?

It's not a question of it "grinding to a halt", because the professionals (contrary to popular belief the railways are run by professionals, not incompetents drafted off the street) will ensure it never gets to that point.

BUT there will come a point where demand will (probably) exceed supply. Indeed in "train" terms (rather than "seat" terms) that point has arguably already been reached.

If you're based in Preston you will probably be aware that Blackpool would like direct trains to London, and that Proud Preston would like a second fast service per hour to London BUT THERE'S NO TRACK CAPACITY TO ALLOW SUCH TRAINS TO RUN!

 

[miami]

It's not a question of it "grinding to a halt", because the professionals (contrary to popular belief the railways are run by professionals, not incompetents drafted off the street) will ensure it never gets to that point.

BUT there will come a point where demand will (probably) exceed supply. Indeed in "train" terms (rather than "seat" terms) that point has arguably already been reached.

If you're based in Preston you will probably be aware that Blackpool would like direct trains to London, and that Proud Preston would like a second fast service per hour to London BUT THERE'S NO TRACK CAPACITY TO ALLOW SUCH TRAINS TO RUN!

I thought they were starting in 2018?

 

[PR1Berske]

I thought they were starting in 2018?

They are.

 

[The Planner]

I assume we mean the Alliance trains, which arent trains yet as they havent ordered any and are only two hourly? Believe me, you are not fitting much in after that on the southern WCML.

 

[najaB]

They are.

Well to Queen's Park which, I suppose, is in London but it's still a bit of a trek to Central London.

 

[miami]

Well to Queen's Park which, I suppose, is in London but it's still a bit of a trek to Central London.

I agree not as good as Old Oak Common would be. I'd personally like to see the train go down to shepherds bush, then perhaps reverse at Olympia - if only OHEL had extended to Olympia.

 

[Ianno87]

I agree not as good as Old Oak Common would be. I'd personally like to see the train go down to shepherds bush, then perhaps reverse at Olympia - if only OHEL had extended to Olympia.

I suppose one could terminate at Shepherd's Bush and then run the train onto the through line at Kenny O to reverse - assuming no freight path wanted to use it at the same time.

However you'd end up further from Central London than Quuens Park (but arguably better onward transport choices), but the path could then not "simply" be extended to Euston if capacity became available.

 

[Voglitz]

Let's take 20 years from now and a train which currently has 450 passengers (75% full), if you have 2.5% growth over those 20 years you'll end up with demand for 737 passengers!

That's what 2.5% compound growth would give, based on a starting point of 450 passengers on every peak train, with all paths used. But there aren't 450 passengers on every peak train, etc. It's a GIGO assumption.

All true. However, there's one point you've missed - these have been done already! West Coast Route Modernisation, Pendolinos, extra carriages for Pendolinos, Euston throat remodelling, Nuneaton North Chord, Norton Bridge, Trent valley 4-tracking, the 'VHF' timetable, Chiltern service to Birmingham etc etc.

What is called "West Coast route modernisation" is actually one of series of modernisations that has been carried out over more than a hundred years. There is nothing in the nature of throat remodelling, resignalling, train lengthening, or whatever, which make them non-repeatable events.

BUT there will come a point where demand will (probably) exceed supply. Indeed in "train" terms (rather than "seat" terms) that point has arguably already been reached.

Demand on the West Coast Main Line has not been too different from the wider railway. One could argue, 'there will come a point where demand will (probably) exceed supply between Inverness and Thurso, and between Ryde and Shanklin', etc.

If you're based in Preston you will probably be aware that Blackpool would like direct trains to London, and that Proud Preston would like a second fast service per hour to London BUT THERE'S NO TRACK CAPACITY TO ALLOW SUCH TRAINS TO RUN!

I don't think anthropomorphistic statements like "Blackpool would like direct trains to London" are very instructive. Truth is, on a per capita basis, people in the north of England make very few journeys to London.

 

[Hadders]

That's what 2.5% compound growth would give, based on a starting point of 450 passengers on every peak train, with all paths used. But there aren't 450 passengers on every peak train, etc. It's a GIGO assumption.

What trains are you looking at. In my experience peak trains on the WCML are very full.

 

[Voglitz]

What trains are you looking at. In my experience peak trains on the WCML are very full.

In Autumn 2014, on weekday PM peak intercity trains leaving Euston, 7 people in every thousand were standing. On Fridays, standing rose to 24 per thousand. In neither case were all paths used, or all trains running to full platform length.

 

[Hadders]

In Autumn 2014, on weekday PM peak intercity trains leaving Euston, 7 people in every thousand were standing. On Fridays, standing rose to 24 per thousand. In neither case were all paths used, or all trains running to full platform length.

Source?

And what about the London Midland trains that use the WCML in the peaks? Remember HS2 releases capacity so more of these trains can run.

 

[The Planner]

Is that derived from PIXC figures?