Then HS2 has to closely follow the West coast mainline which it doesn’t.
It would provide massively stronger service to the north west for Oxford, Bicester, Bedford and Cambridge - all of which are significant railway towns, and cars can drive on B roads to get there. It’s a trade off for sure.
HS2 serves the main WCML very well. There is nowhere south of Birmingham that is a regular driver of WCML traffic (with the possible exception of Milton Keynes)
London demand is more of a sure thing for sure.
But you also need to extrapolate how much of that traffic is driving to Milton Keynes and would actually prefer a station on the A43.
Manchester Victoria North and Leeds South are both areas in which the northwards extension of HS2 has been cancelled.
As both stations are merely near the airport, not at them, they will have their own car parks. These will be priced for HS2 use, solving your problem.
What if that assumption doesn’t pan out? Would reassigning hs2 income from paying off hs2 debt to funding underused stations affect the affordability of the whole thing?
This confuses me. Are you only thinking of parkway stations for the towns that have wcml stations, ignoring the French method of putting parkway stations where it suits the fast line?
Why even bother to go to the trouble of naming such HS2 stations, as there is going to be no HS2 services north of Birmingham in the same way there will be no bridge or tunnel across the Irish Sea.
It'd definitely improve access for Bicester and possibly for Oxford but given there are already direct trains to Manchester, significant shift to HS2 would almost definitely require HS2 to be built in full.
Point is London needs at least 1 Park and Ride station and Essex and Kent need a lot more than 1 bus an hour between them. The way both sides of the Thames out there are built up and increasingly built up and yet driving is the only real option between them. Seems like a policy failure to me!
Neither HS1 nor HS2 should be seen as the answer to short distance transit flows.
On that point, this is a post someone made in comments to a YouTube video showing HS2 construction in progress.
I tried not to ignore capacity! Speed is capacity, and intermediate stations reduce capacity by reducing speed.
I agree.
This is what has drawn me to a station on the A43. It meets the brief of "Parkway" station for the major cities. I do believe that there will need to be a large town somewhere there too which will bring about the "major cities" service too.
Maybe the border control issue is part of why no international operator is interested in restoring the Kent stations, but I wouldn't say they were the only reason, otherwise Lille would've been dropped as well. Granted Lille would still be kept open by SNCF since it is a major hub, but that's also why it works better because it's not just an intermediate station in a rural area, though I could maybe see an argument for Ashford being a kind of Kent parkway station.
Where do high-speed lines like the Shinkansen that have a large number of intermediate stops that are not "major hub stations" fit here? It's quite easy to find stations that aren't major hubs on HSR lines.
Reducing top speed also increases capacity, as the studies from when the signalling system and speed specification was done demonstrate.
While 320km/h would suffice compared to 360km/h, it's worth remembering that the track alignment and engineering can similarly be built for such speeds that might never be met. The Channel Tunnel can theoretically have trains run at 200km/h but is unlikely to ever actually see it.
I'm sure it could but the question is whether or not it'd be worth it. High-speed rail though isn't intended to serve intermediate stations in rural areas so the priority should be serving cities and hub points.
Sorry, I didn't mean to misinterpret your point.
I'd question whether high speed rail truly has a single "purpose".
The conversion from technical headway to operational headways was very generous in terms of including padding in the original HS2 estimates.
HS2's original plan for Euston was extremely generous in platform capacity. To the point that a train from Birmingham would spend more time waiting in the platforms at Euston than it would spend moving on the inbound.
Doing that required that the later phases all be completed in full. The project suffers almost total collapse in benefits if those projects are not all completed.
Obviously it doesn't strictly have a single purpose, in many cases like Tokaido Shinkansen, LGV Sud-Est and HS2 it serves as both a capacity relief and a way to encourage a modal shift from air and road to rail through released capacity on the classic network and faster journey times. High-speed rail works best when it fulfils those multiple purposes.
That analysis is the tail wagging the dog. The high speed network should stretch the country, therefore the first section has minimal stops. What made it look like they were scrabbling? We may be able to clear up a persistent misunderstanding.
The uplift is just as generous, if not more, on the classic railway when dealing with planning headways. The WCML south of Crewe operates around the 75 second mark. So reducing the block sections is still going to make little difference. What is the stopping distance for a train at 320km/h anyway, you don't really want it ending up in the next section.
The stopping distance for an HS2 train at 360km/h under normal braking is 12 km. 7.6km in emergency (plus 0.1km for every second of thinking time before the brakes are applied).
That is an interesting proposition, but would throw away all the benefits of OOC. No longer would huge swathes of the South West have access, but you would have also cut off Heathrow. The OOC cost to the fast trains is non-negligible, but is justified.
I'd expect to have cross overs between the fasts and the slows so that say 4tph from Aylesbury would go direct to Euston, and 4-8tph from the main HS2 line would terminate at OOC.
The cost of stopping at an intermediate station on a high-speed line is huge. From 360kph, it takes 220s to stop and 534s to get back up to line speed, by which time a non-stop train will be 35km further ahead of the stopping train. (OOC is not as bad as that, because trains are already slowing for Euston anyway, but it is still a large time penalty. And it means that the expensive tunnels from OOC to Euston will only ever carry 18tph and will only ever be half full).
What braking rate is that assuming?
