Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) - Latest plans & speculation

[HSTEd]

Can anyone see the obvious issue with that, assuming the door release handle isn't integrated with the signalling?

The signaller will know immediately that a train in the tunnel has or is coming to a halt.

Also you could put sensors on the doors in the cross passages etc.

 

[Camden]

Yes agreed, if you’re going to build a station, build it properly. I half agree with you about the “big IF” the project is built. It would not surprise me if NPR is built in a manner that HS1 was built, whereby the last leg in to London ran on existing infrastructure to Waterloo (although new platforms were built) with the remainder of HS1 built to St. Pancras at a later date.

If that were to happen, the latter part wouldn't. London has extreme political and financial clout that Liverpool doesn't. The only way this will get built at all is if the city's leaders manage to seize a small window of opportunity; those opportunities are fleeting, few and far between.

On the positive side, if the project was to go ahead there are more solid arguments to do it properly from the off than try to bodge it.

Firstly, that capacity issue won't be resolved without 400m platforms. There is no publicly palatable point doing any part of the project without resolving the capacity issue, and that aspect is key one. This is before you factor in that Liverpool HS2 trains will now also stop at Warrington.

Secondly, the cost implications of creating shorter or even limited longer platforms at Liverpool Lime Street will be large anyway, and simply lead to other issues if this is all that happens. Alternatively there are many direct and peripheral benefits to doing things properly (including dealing with Liverpool Central, which must be tackled soon regardless).

The Liverpool portion of this project has been burdened with a larger than its fair share of costs, due to the artificially extended distance of the line from the city (due to it being targeted only at Manchester, rather than both as the WCML is). Despite this, the project has always posted a healthy benefit to cost ratio in excess of the wider project. This being the case, lastly I would suggest that the wider more costly NPR projects are, or should be, contingent on it.

 

[Purple Orange]

If that were to happen, the latter part wouldn't. London has extreme political and financial clout that Liverpool doesn't. The only way this will get built at all is if the city's leaders manage to seize a small window of opportunity; those opportunities are fleeting, few and far between.

On the positive side, if the project was to go ahead there are more solid arguments to do it properly from the off than try to bodge it.

Firstly, that capacity issue won't be resolved without 400m platforms. There is no publicly palatable point doing any part of the project without resolving the capacity issue, and that aspect is key one. This is before you factor in that Liverpool HS2 trains will now also stop at Warrington.

Secondly, the cost implications of creating shorter or even limited longer platforms at Liverpool Lime Street will be large anyway, and simply lead to other issues if this is all that happens. Alternatively there are many direct and peripheral benefits to doing things properly (including dealing with Liverpool Central, which must be tackled soon regardless).

The Liverpool portion of this project has been burdened with a larger than its fair share of costs, due to the artificially extended distance of the line from the city (due to it being targeted only at Manchester, rather than both as the WCML is). Despite this, the project has always posted a healthy benefit to cost ratio in excess of the wider project. This being the case, lastly I would suggest that the wider more costly NPR projects are, or should be, contingent on it.

The geography of Liverpool & Manchester will always have that effect on each other. For example the route to London from Manchester could continue due south from the airport, but rather the line is dragged west because of Crewe & Liverpool, just like travelling south on the M6 means heading west to eventually go south east.

 

[Ianno87]

This is before you factor in that Liverpool HS2 trains will now also stop at Warrington.

But, presumably, not stop at Runcorn.

The Liverpool portion of this project has been burdened with a larger than its fair share of costs, due to the artificially extended distance of the line from the city (due to it being targeted only at Manchester, rather than both as the WCML is). Despite this, the project has always posted a healthy benefit to cost ratio in excess of the wider project. This being the case, lastly I would suggest that the wider more costly NPR projects are, or should be, contingent on it.

The main line of HS2 points at Wigan (i.e. half way-ish between Liverpool and Manchester), not Manchester.

 

[Camden]

The geography of Liverpool & Manchester will always have that effect on each other. For example the route to London from Manchester could continue due south from the airport, but rather the line is dragged west because of Crewe & Liverpool, just like travelling south on the M6 means heading west to eventually go south east.

My side point is rather that if HS2 had been designed properly in the first place to serve both, its alignment would have been west of Warrington per the WCML (and per the Liverpool regional response a number of years back). Instead it was purposefully aimed only at Manchester.

The main point being that, despite this, the Liverpool project still has a healthy value (and it's "real" value would be higher still).

 

[Ianno87]

My side point is rather that if HS2 had been designed properly in the first place to serve both, its alignment would have been west of Warrington per the WCML (and per the Liverpool regional response a number of years back). Instead it was purposefully aimed only at Manchester.

The main point being that, despite this, the Liverpool project still has a healthy value (and it's "real" value would be higher still).

The exact half way point between Liverpool City Centre and Manchester City Centre as the crow flies is pretty much on the M6 slightly south of its intersection with the Chat Moss line at Newton-le-Willows. In other words, naturally slightly east of Warrington, rather than West of Warrington.

Nothwithstanding the obvious engineering ease of passing HS2 through the gap in the developed area between Birchwood and Partington/Irlam slightly to the east of the mid-point, rather the need for extensive tunnelling under / demolition of Warrington (there being no obvious gap in the urban area west of Warrington until much more significantly far west to a point between Great Sankey and Widnes).

 

[Doctor Fegg]

The trackbed of this old LNW line has completely disappeared east of Sinderland Crossing. There would also be major conflict with Sustrans, as the route west of Sinderland Crossing is part of the Transpennine cycle route.

The Trans-Pennine Trail is unusual (unique, even) in the UK in that it's primarily the work of a consortium of local authorities, so the political pressures here may be different - especially if those local authorities are ones which stand to benefit from NPR.

In particular, you could perhaps create a high-quality alternative cycle route by resurfacing the Bridgewater Canal towpath. (There's a long-term project called the Bridgewater Way which aims to do exactly that.)

 

[Sir Felix Pole]

The Lymm line is far too north to reach the HS2 junction at Rostherne / High Legh, and was plagued by level-crossings (6 between Broadheath and Arpley). The formation at Broadheath has completely disappeared under the retail-park, and is also blocked at the second Thelwall Viaduct. The current cycle track is also a tight squeeze through Lymm itself. I can see the exit out of Arpley and over the Ship Canal being used, but then it would have to be a new line striking across country roughly parallel to the A50.

 

[MarkyT]

The Lymm line is far too north to reach the HS2 junction at Rostherne / High Legh, and was plagued by level-crossings (6 between Broadheath and Arpley). The formation at Broadheath has completely disappeared under the retail-park, and is also blocked at the second Thelwall Viaduct. The current cycle track is also a tight squeeze through Lymm itself. I can see the exit out of Arpley and over the Ship Canal being used, but then it would have to be a new line striking across country roughly parallel to the A50.

That has always been my assumption, passing south of Lymm and being a more direct route towards the airport loosely following the M56.

 

[Starmill]

The bottom line is there is a good existing railway between Liverpool and Manchester - the original intercity line via Chat Moss. The journey time could be reduced to 30 minutes non-stop by using electric trains and cutting out the intermediate stop. There is no need to spend vast sums of money on an alternative route.

So your proposal would be what? To withdraw both stoppers and close the stations left with no service? I don't see how else the proposed NPR services could be accommodated. You'd also need to withdraw trains on this route between Manchester and Chester btw.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 24 Nov 2020 ==

There is a need to improve and electrify the Standedge route, and that is what NPR should be focussing on, as it is affordable and deliverable within a reasonable timescale.

Arguably this is a reason why NPR should not focus on this. We'd want it to be delivered somewhat sooner than 2040.

 

[daodao]

So your proposal would be what? To withdraw both stoppers and close the stations left with no service? I don't see how else the proposed NPR services could be accommodated. You'd also need to withdraw trains on this route between Manchester and Chester btw.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 24 Nov 2020 ==


Arguably this is a reason why NPR should not focus on this. We'd want it to be delivered somewhat sooner than 2040.

There are already 2 tph fast trains between Liverpool and Manchester via Chat Moss; I would just lengthen them, use electric traction and cut out the intermediate stop. No extra train paths are required, so there should be no or minimal impact on other existing services.

 

[Ianno87]

Why is there such an obsession with serving Manchester Airport? In the future, it is likely that air travel will never again reach its 2019 peak. The need for long-distance travel with its adverse impact on global warming has been undermined by the efficiency of electronic communication. As an example, I attended a conference today via Zoom, which ran extremely smoothly; a similar conference exactly a year ago was held at a Manchester Airport hotel, with 100 delegates and speakers travelling from all over the UK, and with some speakers flying in from Europe.

But there *will* be a bounce back of air travel over time, even if not to the full 2019 level. And Liverpool will want to be connected to that (and jobs around the airport on various business parks etc).

That, and it's a convenient way of hooking onto the HS2 infrastructure already there anyway.

Why is Piccadilly clearly a preferred location for all fast services? Its current and potential access from the West and North is atrocious. A rail line from Liverpool to Manchester via Ringway Airport would follow an extremely roundabout route; the journey would probably take longer even at high speed than via the current direct Chat Moss route, and the line would cost a fortune to build. The proposal also seems to require a reversal at Piccadilly for a Liverpool-Leeds journey, which would add approximately a 5 minute delay to any through journey. 2 tph, each of 200m length, is perfectly adequate for a Liverpool to York express service via Chat Moss, Victoria (a decent main line railway station, unlike Oxford Road and Piccadilly platforms 13/14) and Standedge, with an additional 2 tph semi-fast service from Piccadilly (platforms 1-3) to Leeds and beyond. There is a need to improve and electrify the Standedge route, and that is what NPR should be focussing on, as it is affordable and deliverable within a reasonable timescale.

The two serious HS2 station proposal sites (i.e. sites big enough for an HS2 station with 400m platforms) were Piccadilly and Middlewood locks (just west of Salford Central).

Piccadilly wins hands down as closer to the city centre, with better existing onward connections all round.

 

[Starmill]

There are already 2 tph fast trains between Liverpool and Manchester via Chat Moss; I would just lengthen them, use electric traction and cut out the intermediate stop. No extra train paths are required, so there should be no or minimal impact on other existing services.

You'd cut Newton-le-Willows to Liverpool down to hourly? Really? And all stations too. Similarly for Lea Green to Manchester. I'm sure your proposal will be popular in Merseyside.

You'd be saving only 6 minutes too, and only delivering 2tph rather than the proposed 4 or more.

 

[edwin_m]

Why is there such an obsession with serving Manchester Airport? In the future, it is likely that air travel will never again reach its 2019 peak. The need for long-distance travel with its adverse impact on global warming has been undermined by the efficiency of electronic communication.

If air travel essentially collapses in the long term, then the same would probably happen to long-distance rail travel, in which case there's no point in building new railways.

If air travel collapses but rail survives then there's a good rail-served brownfield site ready for development.

If air travel reduces somewhat in the long term, then it's likely that the remaining flights will concentrate on a smaller number of airports, which would probably include Manchester as the principal airport for the North, with other airports having insufficient passengers to sustain flights. So it becomes more important to keep good access to Manchester Airport from the whole region.

Also as NPR passes the Airport it can be served by trains passing to/from other destinations, with less cost and capacity penalty than the arrangement (like today) when trains travel extra distance to get there.

Why is Piccadilly clearly a preferred location for all fast services? Its current and potential access from the West and North is atrocious.

If Castlefield Corridor worked then all routes would have good access to Piccadilly, so making Castlefield work is a pre-requisite. Replacing the current TPE services by a NPR service that doesn't use Castlefield is one way of making it work, although shorter-term solutions are needed too.

Even with Castlefield working, access from the south to Victoria would remain poor.

 

[daodao]

HS2 infrastructure already there anyway.

That is an assumption that HS2 phase 2b will actually be built; even if it is built, with a very expensive tunnel from the Airport to M/c city centre, this will be many years hence.

That is simply not true.

A high speed route will leave the Chat Moss in the dust, even with the slight detour to Manchester Airport.

A high speed service from Liverpool to Manchester, calling at Warrington and M/c Airport, will take at least 30 minutes.

Edwin_m stated: "Even with Castlefield working, access from the south to Victoria would remain poor."

That doesn't matter as there is Metrolink for local links and there would still be trains to Liverpool via the CLC line and to Leeds from Piccadilly.

 

[Ianno87]

That is simply not true.

A high speed route will leave the Chat Moss in the dust, even with the slight detour to Manchester Airport.

And people who live on the Chat Moss route can get more trains stopping at their local station as the whole timetable would no longer need to be designed around fast trains.

 

[HSTEd]

A high speed service from Liverpool to Manchester, calling at Warrington and M/c Airport, will take at least 30 minutes.

Doubtful.

It will only take seven minutes stop to stop to reach the Airport.
From there it is only 20km from the centre of Warrington, about nine minutes based on Shinkansen experience, even with only 260km/h top speed.

25km from Warrington Lime Street with a pretty nice end-on run onto the platforms for a nice fast approach to the station. About ten minutes again based on Shinkansen experience.

That is something like 26 minutes.
And that derived from Shinkansen experience circa 2010.

They've got even faster since then.

Current best via the Chat Moss is of the order of 35 minutes so far as I am aware.

 

[Ianno87]

Doubtful.

It will only take seven minutes stop to stop to reach the Airport.
From there it is only 20km from the centre of Warrington, about nine minutes based on Shinkansen experience, even with only 260km/h top speed.

25km from Warrington Lime Street with a pretty nice end-on run onto the platforms for a nice fast approach to the station. About ten minutes again based on Shinkansen experience.

That is something like 26 minutes.
And that derived from Shinkansen experience circa 2010.

They've got even faster since then.

Current best via the Chat Moss is of the order of 35 minutes so far as I am aware.

To be fair, you do need to add in the dwell times at Airport and Warrington too.

 

[Bletchleyite]

So your proposal would be what? To withdraw both stoppers and close the stations left with no service? I don't see how else the proposed NPR services could be accommodated. You'd also need to withdraw trains on this route between Manchester and Chester btw.

You probably could close Patricroft and Eccles without many people noticing, to be honest, particularly now Eccles has the tram that actually goes to the centre. But the Liverpool side of the WCML has lots of local stations that are very much needed.

 

[HSTEd]

To be fair, you do need to add in the dwell times at Airport and Warrington too.

Practice on Shinkansen timetables is that only a single time is included for each station, so dwell times are in those timings.
And in any case, given the short journey times, we are probably looking at seconds instead of minutes.

 

[Purple Orange]

I would respond directly to your response to my questions @daodao but @Ianno87 @edwin_m @HSTEd and @Starmill have given some very good responses already. Plus you didnt actually address any of the questions I posed to you.

Reading through your comments generally, I get the impression you’d rather not see any rail investment in Manchester at all. Would that be correct?

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 24 Nov 2020 ==

You probably could close Patricroft and Eccles without many people noticing, to be honest, particularly now Eccles has the tram that actually goes to the centre. But the Liverpool side of the WCML has lots of local stations that are very much needed.

But then what of all the stations west of Newton? If no new infrastructure is being proposed, 4 fast tph on that line would surely make all intermediate stations redundant.

 

[HSTEd]

Even with stops in Warrington and at the Airport? I wonder. If there isn't to be a genuine high-speed line from Liverpool to Manchester, non-stop, then maybe exploiting Chat Moss to the maximum, with no stoppers and some further upgrading, might be a half-decent substitute.

Fundamentally Chat Moss is problematic and prevents the line from ever competing with a newbuild alignment.

Also there is no point building a line directly nonstop from Manchester to Liverpool because there would never be enough passengers to fill it.

 

[edwin_m]

That is an assumption that HS2 phase 2b will actually be built; even if it is built, with a very expensive tunnel from the Airport to M/c city centre, this will be many years hence.

The Manchester route is getting priority over the rest of 2b. A route that is planned and designed to a reasonable level of detail can be delivered far quicker than starting from scratch and trying to devise a new one. To make a proper express route out of any of the existing ones will need that sort of new infrastructure.

That doesn't matter as there is Metrolink for local links and there would still be trains to Liverpool via the CLC line and to Leeds from Piccadilly.

A through train with one change within one station is better than two changes to get across the city by tram, especially for a journey like Birmingham to Bradford where the passengers making it don't necessarily know Manchester at all. And the clincher is that Piccadilly has a big space available for expanding the station, and even if the Arena was demolished there wouldn't be enough room at Victoria.

 

[Camden]

Regarding NPR into Liverpool and some of the above, it is worth noting that the project does not entail significant extra infrastructure in Manchester (assuming the underground station has been dropped), but merely Liverpool connecting to HS2 plus a few add-ons. It was remiss of HS2 to omit the city from the core network in the first place, and so any NPR line correcting that is just that: a correction.

It is also worth noting that the traffic between Liverpool and Manchester is twice that Leeds and Manchester (which has 5 or 6 reasonably fast trains per hour). Liverpool is generally under-served by rail regionally and nationally.

And lastly, regarding the lines that stand to be depopulated of express trains by this, it is also worth noting those living along the Chat Moss, classic CLC and Runcorn routes could be able to benefit from the introduction of Merseyrail (or Merseyrail-type) services. Nowhere else in the north matches Liverpool for local metropolitan rail use, so the prospects of this being successful are high.

There really are so many benefits on offer in so many areas, at comparably low cost, it ought to be a no-brainer.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I wouldn't call Victoria "a decent mainline station", it's a polluted, windswept dump with the central feature being an ugly stairway to an outdated, rubbish arena, a large set of badly designed ticket barriers (which make a big statement - "welcome to our station, we don't trust you to pay") and a set of platforms which are like Birmingham New St would be if everything was DMU operated. It's an embarrassment. Not welcoming, not pleasant, not even particularly functional. Oh, I forgot the cheap plastic roof which looks cheap and plastic.

Of course, with the sort of money we are looking to spend it could be made very, very good. But other than the listed bits, it (and the Arena) really need flattening and doing again.

OK, I agree Picc P13/14 are rubbish as well, though I reckon I'd put them and Vic on a par for inutility and general unpleasantness. Whereas the rest of Picc is a really nice station with excellent facilities.

 

[Ianno87]

NPR is going to be 140mph tops, isn't it? I agree that going above that is pretty pointless for a relatively short route like that. TBH, as I've said before, if it saved significant money I would support reducing HS2 proper to 140mph - the UK simply isn't that big a place as to need it.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 24 Nov 2020 ==

The marginal cost of increasing the HS2 alignment from 230kmh to 360kmh will be relatively low. It's quite impressive that an alignment has been found *in spite* of being designed to such a requirement.

If anything, slowing down HS2 risks adding costs - slower means more trains, plus bigger depots/sidings to house them all.

 

[Bald Rick]

But surely none of the tunnels mentioned here would be appropriate for the cross Pennine tunnel? These tunnels are around and over 10 miles in length, surely the Cross Pennines Tunnel would be much shorter than this?

I’d be surprised if much of it is above ground at all.

 

[Halifaxlad]

I've no idea what the latest proposal is but previously the plan for a central Bradford station was to have it underground beneath Bradford Interchange with west-east tracks. The current tracks out of the Interchange head southwards to Halifax and Eastwards to Leeds

I suspect your comments were based on that graphic image that was done purely for a report and is a poor representation of the likely route. So far they're is nothing in the public domain that suggest that it is going East to West unless you know otherwise.

 

[Railwaysceptic]

. . . . a large set of badly designed ticket barriers (which make a big statement - "welcome to our station, we don't trust you to pay")

In what way are those ticket barriers different from those at other stations?

 

[Ianno87]

In what way are those ticket barriers different from those at other stations?

If anything, it's a very wide barrier line. There's certainly far worse examples at major stations.