Its not costing the British taxpayer though as EdF have to fund it out of their own resources then they get the investment back from the fixed price they sell the power albeit its indexed linked and currently at 129/MWhr. This still tops even gas fired generation whish is at an elevated £110/MWh from the Hormuz debacle so despite the delay they will recover their costs if it works as specified.
But what do you mean by full length units at full speed? Would full length trains fit in all platforms at the key stations? What about the mix between trains that day run non stop London to Crewe set against say, the London Midland Trent Valley semi fast, even dodging the slower services. Would all the relevant depots have room for full sized units?
And some of the 13 coach trains was either a buffet car and a brake van.
The plan was for the stops between Crewe and Lancaster to be worked by a portion from the back of the London-Liverpool service.
Full length units as in 11 coach Pendolinos, or units of a similar length (265m) - the use of 5 and 7 coach (and even 9 coach to an extent) units is a complete waste of capacity.
Is that still the plan though? It made sense when the Golborne Link bypassed Warrington but all that is gone now.
Unfortunately both the 9-car and 11-car sets are both programmed all day, seemingly regardless of demand as my regular Manchester services are quite random. The Liverpool service was in recent times cut back to 7-car 807s, and now apparently to suit the power supply that's being reduced further to 5-car bi-mode 805s. Bot maybe someone will be along soon to say the 5-car sets have more seats than the old 13-coach trains because of how closely the seats have been squeezed up ...
It would have formed part of the service from Phase 2A's completion onwards but god knows what the plan is now.
That is quite common on such large projects. The Contractors subcontracting to you (as is usually the case) will pass on every single requirement and document to you so that they can't be accused of withholding anything, and your poor guys pricing up your bit would have had to wade through the lot of it. I say your poor guys as I had experience of this doing standby diesel generating sets in the last century(!), so know how it feels.
This is a very good post, especially the observation about the fares strategy clashing with the almost turn-up-and-go timetable.
My take away from this post: We have/are spending £100b on a project whilst not getting the best out of the infrastructure we already have.
Not everyone is going to London.
Was that a plan, or what people on this forum came up with as a possibility?
also rememebr the *95`s will acceleraste faster than the 390`s
Oh I think you'd fill a lot of train seats even at 3am if they were free. People jump at cheap coach services and even the cheap Caledonian Sleeper seated section, and both of those are where they're paying for it and it's an inferior service. If you ran a high speed train from London to Birmingham at 3am for free, I think it would get quite busy.
Not sure I agree with this. HS2 proposed service patterns were easy to find. For example just searching for "proposed HS2 service pattern" finds this 2013 document that does exactly that: https://assets.publishing.service.g...on_of_the_service_patterns__January_2013_.pdf. It even has the service pattern changing as each phase is built. They did think about this stuff.
This was investigated before HS2 was started, see https://assets.publishing.service.g...59c6/hs2-review-of-strategic-alternatives.pdf
Also, given the inability to deliver HS2 on time or budget, what are the chances these WCML upgrades would be any different?
Interesting insight and doesn't surprise me in the slightest as that is lot of carry across from how RT/NR evolved post British Rail when consultants got involved in everything we did and magnified the amount of paperwork and approvals because it generated work for them. Then not to be outdone the client organisation ie RT/NR wanted to have a place at the table as well so we'd start double checking what consultants were doing and all too often that was appropriate. This led us to believe that we would be better off providing more oversight but RT/NR in that era preferred outsourcing model largely because the directors of the day had come from industries where that was how things were delivered.
Probably not very good based on the HS2 experience. The only saving grace maybe that individual projects are easier to keep on track than one major project and some of the HS2 issues would not be a (or as big a) problem, e.g. Planning, NIMBYism, large scale civil engineering, and the benefits would filter through in a more timely manner.
How long would it be reasonable to completely shut the WCML for whilst this work happened?
Is it though?
It's probably the most sensible decision suggested on HS2 in that time.
There's 4 overnight NX coach services from London to Glasgow tonight and the first one only has 4 seats left.
And even that is more than many have had, at least in the private sector. I'm up less than that despite having had a reasonably significant promotion.
