HS2 should stop at more stations in the Chilterns

[MatthewHutton]

There’s that, along with many very vocal campaigns when the route was being planned in various stages between the mid 60s and late 80s. There was even a documentary about the construction of the road in the Bicester and Banbury area where this was shown.

To be fair, it’s not just the folk of the Chilterns. It happens with most projects for building new infrastructure. Every new station I’ve been involved with has had local objections, considerably high numbers in some cases.

What does “considerably high” number of objections mean in terms of numbers?

And I’m not sure insisting on a curve through the Chiltern hills so the motorway doesn’t damage the hill line or avoiding a nature reserve/foggy Moorland are particularly outrageous things. The French had to make compromises to their high speed lines too - but still kept costs down.

EDIT: The M40 extension was also extremely good value compared to modern roads even with the “difficult” locals.

 

[Bald Rick]

What does “considerably high” number of objections mean in terms of numbers?

hundreds, sometimes thousands

EDIT: The M40 extension was also extremely good value compared to modern roads even with the “difficult” locals.

Yes. I know the person who was the resident engineer for it.

 

[MatthewHutton]

hundreds, sometimes thousands

200 objections could simply mean ~500 wealthy hard right BANANA pensioners object to the project depending on where it is.

And I doubt you get thousands of objections very often given the Oxfordshire rail plan got under 10,000 comments in total and Pete Brunskill was very pleased about that - presumably because he thinks, likely correctly, that the more comments you get that the more positive comments you will get.

 

[The Planner]

What does “considerably high” number of objections mean in terms of numbers?

And I’m not sure insisting on a curve through the Chiltern hills so the motorway doesn’t damage the hill line or avoiding a nature reserve/foggy Moorland are particularly outrageous things. The French had to make compromises to their high speed lines too - but still kept costs down.

EDIT: The M40 extension was also extremely good value compared to modern roads even with the “difficult” locals.

Even the M40 in the 70s was cost cut, the original plan was a tunnel. The bit from Junction 7 to the M42 was £293 million at the time, which at basic inflation is £800 million now, or around £14 million a mile. Likely more if you consider construction inflation.

 

[MatthewHutton]

Even the M40 in the 70s was cost cut, the original plan was a tunnel. The bit from Junction 7 to the M42 was £293 million at the time, which at basic inflation is £800 million now, or around £14 million a mile. Likely more if you consider construction inflation.

If we could build new motorways for £25m a mile I would be pretty happy to be honest. That would mean the black cat junction improvement would be ~£250m and not £1bn.

 

[Peter Sarf]

So the cost of a station in the chilterns (or anywhere else) in terms of construction is the literal cost of the station plus the points and passing track at the platforms or platform barriers. Also obviously any parking, road access etc.

There are the ongoing costs of running the station and the loss of line capacity.

Everything else has to be shouldered by the big cities because that’s why the line was built in the first place.

In terms of running costs it’s the same. It’s the cost of running the station, the marginal cost of slowing the stopping services down to stop, the points maintenance etc.

In terms of ridership it’s difficult to judge because I don’t have access to the modelling (and I’m not sure it’s very good) but given Haddenham and Thame Parkway gets 900k passengers a year then getting maybe 1.5 million would be a reasonable but conservative estimate. That compares pretty favourably with Birmingham Curzon Street even if it got 15 million passengers a year because Curzon Street has to shoulder a much larger percentage of the costs.

How do you get from 900k for Haddenham and Thame Parkway to almost double that for a station you do not actually mention the name of ?.

In terms of live railways if you take a weak station like Shin Fuji on the Tokaido Shinkansen it has around 1% of boardings and around 2% of passengers use it (and perhaps it produces 1% of revenue) But it probably cost 0.1-0.2% of the total cost of the line to build it.

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Only if they come from the north/west of the station which I am not convinced they do. From the south or east of the station you’d be as fast to get on at Warwick Parkway and wouldn’t have to change.

Plus it assumes no further running time speed up from electrification or newer trains.

And it would not be advisable to assume.

Really it’s only Dorridge/Solihull/Moor Street that benefit and only a tiny percentage of Chilterns passengers go from those places to London. Nor these days are there limited stop express services to places like that with most fast services on the Chiltern line calling at Haddenham and Thame and/or High Wycombe as well as Bicester North, Banbury, Leamington Spa and Warwick.

There is always going to be a case for adding an extra station or service anywhere in the UK BUT it has to be viewed as how a small change affects the bigger picture.

---

If HS2 was built with stations in the Chilterns then I suspect the planners might have gone back to improving the WCML with all its stations. Instead there was a strong desire to build a simple uncomplicated high speed line.

As for objections in the Chilterns - I got the impression the objections to HS2 came before locals considered whether there would be stations.
I mainly believe they did not need a train station so a railway line near them was irrelevant in terms of benefits. I got that impression early on when I was vising somewhere beyond High Wycombe.

It is well known for instance in France that towns fight to get a TGV route near enough for a station. In the UK going back decades I noticed the desire is NO railway irrespective of its potential benefits.

I remember the comments about HS1 when I lived in the Medway towns and to this day there is a (ex because I moved away) neighbour who believes the railway is noisy and cannot accept that the M2 motorway (which is alongside) is the noise. He moved in as the HS1 opened and the noise (continual hissing) is the same as it was when I moved there in the 1960s (long before the railway opened). I tried to point out the occasional drone when a 373 (old Eurostar) went past. He would not accept my argument that the continual noise was not the occasional train passing. Many in the UK like to be different (some would say blinkered) so there is a reluctance to embrace "progress" which is fine but try not to get confused by appeasements that might not work.

 

[Sorcerer]

Why do you think the people of the Chilterns wouldn’t want the rail line going through their area if there were actually benefits to the project rather than the current position with HS2 where it’s all pain and no gain?

Because they didn't want the line at all, and if a station built on the line to serve them ended up a fair distance away from the actual population area (which does happen on high-speed lines on the continent) then not only does it undermine the so-called benefit but it means the project will almost never recoup the costs of the station. The truth is, the people opposing the project in their area didn't want it in any way shape or form, so the argument is almost irrelevant.

Given stations in the countryside don’t really legitimately shoulder any of the main construction/running costs of the alignment - stations in rural areas on high speed lines are mostly extremely profitable, probably more so than those in the cities.

Sorry, you've lost me now. In what world are rural stations with a catchment in the thousands possibly more profitable or value for money than stations in urban centres with a catchment in the millions, especially when those urban centres in HS2's case were London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds?

 

[CW2]

@MatthewHutton gives a simple analysis of the "marginal" cost of adding an intermediate mid-Chiltern station, but underestimates the cost and complexity significantly.

The HS2 trains would be at full operating speed at this location (e.g. somewhere near Aylesbury). Assuming a simple 2-platform station with through non-stop lines, in order to minimise capacity consumption, you would need to have lengthy deceleration / acceleration lanes either side of the station. That would lengthen the 3 or 4-track footprint to somewhere around 4 - 5 kilometres. The civil engineering costs for such a station are not something that can be dismissed as negligible.

Building HS2 was about generating extra network capacity. Therefore each path has a value. With a planning headway of 3 minutes, and allowing for contingencies, the original "Y" network was based on a maximum service specification of 18 trains per hour, subsequently reduced to 17. Stopping a train at Mid-Chilterns Parkway (in the middle of the fastest section of the route) might cost 2 minutes in deceleration + 2 minutes for station duties + 2 minutes to accelerate back up to line speed. So the penalty is in the order of 6 minutes = 2 additional train paths. (*NB simplified guesstimates only).

There is an "opportunity cost" here: Every train you stop mid-Chilterns effectively prevents two other trains from running, as it consumes three paths instead of one. Network Capacity is a valuable asset, not a free gift.

Would the farebox revenue on HS2 to/from Mid-Chilterns Parkway stand any chance of paying the cost of three train paths instead of one? I doubt it. As a comparator, look how Eurostar services run through the Channel Tunnel at 140 kph now because that is the benchmark speed set by Le Shuttle, so each Eurostar only consumes on path. If they ran through at 160 kph (which is still technically possible) they would consume more paths, so the usage costs would increase.

Another issue is the commercial cost of Chilterns Commuters filling seats on HS2 services to the exclusion of longer-distance (= higher fare-paying) passengers. (That assumes a stronger Chilterns to London and v.v. flow
rather than Chilterns to Birmingham / the North).

In summary, it was considered at the time, but nobody could make the numbers stack up, and the Chiltern Folk really didn't want it.

I appreciate this is in the "Speculative Discussion" section, but the time for such speculation has long since passed.

 

[MatthewHutton]

There are the ongoing costs of running the station and the loss of line capacity.

Unless you do the full Y, which is probably undeliverable, then you have the capacity free that you can't use for anything more useful.

How do you get from 900k for Haddenham and Thame Parkway to almost double that for a station you do not actually mention the name of ?.

The least bad place for it to go would be where it crosses East West Rail. And you'd be able to build enough of the Buckinghamshire housing target there to have a similar close catchment as Haddenham and Thame Parkway.

As it stands Haddenham and Thame today has slower station-station times than driving to Birmingham, Manchester etc. This would be much faster. And it would also be much faster for people from Oxford, Bicester and Aylesbury. So the idea between all of that that you get an extra 600k passengers a year doesn't seem far fetched at all, especially as right now Oxford-Manchester alone has 60k passengers a year with a slow train that's not faster than driving station to station.

Sorry, you've lost me now. In what world are rural stations with a catchment in the thousands possibly more profitable or value for money than stations in urban centres with a catchment in the millions, especially when those urban centres in HS2's case were London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds?

OK if you build a high speed line and it has a running cost of say £1bn a year without any stops and say £1.002bn a year with a stop then the stop only has to cover the £2m marginal difference in order to be worthwhile. EDIT: If it’s bringing in say £50m a year then that’s a lot compared to the marginal extra costs.

The HS2 trains would be at full operating speed at this location (e.g. somewhere near Aylesbury). Assuming a simple 2-platform station with through non-stop lines, in order to minimise capacity consumption, you would need to have lengthy deceleration / acceleration lanes either side of the station. That would lengthen the 3 or 4-track footprint to somewhere around 4 - 5 kilometres. The civil engineering costs for such a station are not something that can be dismissed as negligible.

That's not remotely how it's done in France or Japan where they have passing tracks on a high speed line. Look at a satellite picture of e.g. Himeji station, or Odwara station or Le Creusot TGV.

Therefore each path has a value. With a planning headway of 3 minutes, and allowing for contingencies, the original "Y" network was based on a maximum service specification of 18 trains per hour, subsequently reduced to 17.

The original Y was also almost certainly entirely undeliverable as due to extensive sharing with high traffic legacy lines in many ways it was a more ambitious schedule than even the Tokaido Shinkansen - and without having the full Japanese dedication to service. And the full Y service also provided terrible service to pretty much every secondary destination there is.

EDIT: I took a look at the timetable and with an exemplary safety record Japan has Kodama services 3 minutes before a Nozomi on the Tokaido Shinkansen and 4 minutes before on the less busy Sanyo Shinkansen.

Another issue is the commercial cost of Chilterns Commuters filling seats on HS2 services to the exclusion of longer-distance (= higher fare-paying) passengers. (That assumes a stronger Chilterns to London and v.v. flow
rather than Chilterns to Birmingham / the North).

You can sell the seats in both directions...

Would the farebox revenue on HS2 to/from Mid-Chilterns Parkway stand any chance of paying the cost of three train paths instead of one? I doubt it.

Assuming you have hourly service from London to each intermediate you only have to pay the pathing penalty once an hour as the rest of the time you can use the pathing gap opened up by trains stopping further down the line.

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I remember the comments about HS1 when I lived in the Medway towns and to this day there is a (ex because I moved away) neighbour who believes the railway is noisy and cannot accept that the M2 motorway (which is alongside) is the noise. He moved in as the HS1 opened and the noise (continual hissing) is the same as it was when I moved there in the 1960s (long before the railway opened). I tried to point out the occasional drone when a 373 (old Eurostar) went past. He would not accept my argument that the continual noise was not the occasional train passing. Many in the UK like to be different (some would say blinkered) so there is a reluctance to embrace "progress" which is fine but try not to get confused by appeasements that might not work.

I am sure there are a handful of similarly insane people in France or Japan etc. They don't make up the majority of the population.

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Because they didn't want the line at all,

The BANANAs didn’t - and no one else was prepared to come forward and support due to the non existent benefits.

 

[Sorcerer]

OK if you build a high speed line and it has a running cost of say £1bn a year without any stops and say £1.002bn a year with a stop then the stop only has to cover the £2m marginal difference in order to be worthwhile. EDIT: If it’s bringing in say £50m a year then that’s a lot compared to the marginal extra costs.

I don't buy it to be honest. High-speed rail, especially when like HS2 is serving as a capacity relief line for the existing infrastructure, including one that actually serves the Chilterns, isn't supposed to stop in rural areas. It's about connecting big urban centres and major economic zones. A small rural station will add nothing of value relative to the cost of implementing it, namely the added infrastructure cost and capacity losses from slowing down trains. Rural stations do not turn a profit, because if they did, rural lines wouldn't be the first ones to get closed in any network cutbacks.

The BANANAs didn’t - and no one else was prepared to come forward and support due to the non existent benefits.

The NIMBYs didn't either, and in the case of HS2 there is no discernable difference; NIMBYism is literally defined as "not in my backyard" so you can't argue that they might support the project if they just get a station even though most people won't use it, because they simply don't want the line there at all. Those who wouldn't support building anything at all and those who would support it as long as it wasn't near them end up with the same result, that being no HS2 on their landscape.

 

[Peter Sarf]

Unless you do the full Y, which is probably undeliverable, then you have the capacity free that you can't use for anything more useful.

The least bad place for it to go would be where it crosses East West Rail. And you'd be able to build enough of the Buckinghamshire housing target there to have a similar close catchment as Haddenham and Thame Parkway.

As it stands Haddenham and Thame today has slower station-station times than driving to Birmingham, Manchester etc. This would be much faster. And it would also be much faster for people from Oxford, Bicester and Aylesbury. So the idea between all of that that you get an extra 600k passengers a year doesn't seem far fetched at all, especially as right now Oxford-Manchester alone has 60k passengers a year with a slow train that's not faster than driving station to station.

OK if you build a high speed line and it has a running cost of say £1bn a year without any stops and say £1.002bn a year with a stop then the stop only has to cover the £2m marginal difference in order to be worthwhile. EDIT: If it’s bringing in say £50m a year then that’s a lot compared to the marginal extra costs.

That's not remotely how it's done in France or Japan where they have passing tracks on a high speed line. Look at a satellite picture of e.g. Himeji station, or Odwara station or Le Creusot TGV.

The original Y was also almost certainly entirely undeliverable as due to extensive sharing with high traffic legacy lines in many ways it was a more ambitious schedule than even the Tokaido Shinkansen - and without having the full Japanese dedication to service. And the full Y service also provided terrible service to pretty much every secondary destination there is.

EDIT: I took a look at the timetable and with an exemplary safety record Japan has Kodama services 3 minutes before a Nozomi on the Tokaido Shinkansen and 4 minutes before on the less busy Sanyo Shinkansen.

You can sell the seats in both directions...

Assuming you have hourly service from London to each intermediate you only have to pay the pathing penalty once an hour as the rest of the time you can use the pathing gap opened up by trains stopping further down the line.

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I am sure there are a handful of similarly insane people in France or Japan etc. They don't make up the majority of the population.

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The BANANAs didn’t - and no one else was prepared to come forward and support due to the non existent benefits.

There will be a full Y one day and when that time comes the stopping services will have to go. Or the vast swathes of North Eastern England can go without forever - such a waste of potential.

For a stopping service to get back up to line speed and rejoin the fast lines there will need to be a gap in the service of about three trains. That is because the stopping service will be behind where it would have been if it had not stopped. Nothing is going to be able to use those paths unless another stopping service using up three paths slots in.

 

[JonathanH]

You can sell the seats in both directions..

With the best will in the world, in bound travel to Calvert is going to be limited without some development to create a reason to travel there.

 

[MatthewHutton]

With the best will in the world, in bound travel to Calvert is going to be limited without some development to create a reason to travel there.

Agree. But there’s a mandatory housing target for every county thats pretty ambitious.

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There will be a full Y one day and when that time comes the stopping services will have to go. Or the vast swathes of North Eastern England can go without forever - such a waste of potential.

Or the east of the country gets its own high speed line into Kings Cross. And that has the advantage that Derby, Hull, Sunderland, Bradford etc can get high speed service as well. Plus on the west it means you can give decent high speed service to existing secondary stops like Chester, Warrington, Stoke, Macclesfield, Oxenholme, Penrith and possibly Shrewsbury.

And you also potentially get significantly faster times from London to Edinburgh if you do enough on the east, and those times are pretty disappointing regardless of how much of HS2 you build on the west. You also don’t have to strictly start in the south - at least in terms of speeding up London-Edinburgh.

 

[CW2]

That's not remotely how it's done in France or Japan where they have passing tracks on a high speed line. Look at a satellite picture of e.g. Himeji station, or Odwara station or Le Creusot TGV.

The original Y was also almost certainly entirely undeliverable as due to extensive sharing with high traffic legacy lines in many ways it was a more ambitious schedule than even the Tokaido Shinkansen - and without having the full Japanese dedication to service. And the full Y service also provided terrible service to pretty much every secondary destination there is.

EDIT: I took a look at the timetable and with an exemplary safety record Japan has Kodama services 3 minutes before a Nozomi on the Tokaido Shinkansen and 4 minutes before on the less busy Sanyo Shinkansen.

You can sell the seats in both directions...

Assuming you have hourly service from London to each intermediate you only have to pay the pathing penalty once an hour as the rest of the time you can use the pathing gap opened up by trains stopping further down the line.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 21 Jun 2026 ==

Ah, Le Creusot TGV. I'm surprised you chose that one.
First look at the actual traffic density on the route. (About 4 - 5 trains per direction per hour).
Then look at the actual service provision. (One every couple of hours, if you are lucky).
So stopping a train at Le Creusot TGV doesn't usually cause much of a track capacity / timetabling issue. The relatively meagre service level merely serves to confirm that there was no real call for it to exist in the first place (other than among politicians).

As for Himeji station, that's more like Rugby on the WCML, where you have junctions either side, with flyovers, and through fast lines.

I'm not familiar with Odwara.

The reason HS2 isn't designed the same as France or Japan (or Spain or Germany or Italy) is because the HS2 designers did extensive research and consultation before the designs had even been sketched out, and consulted widely amongst those countries which already had high speed networks. There was a repeated message of "Learn from our mistakes, don't repeat them". Hence design for as high a speed as possible, slab track, and above all a design which ensures continued high capacity.

To explain a little further, you will have noticed that Old Oak Common HS2 station has six platforms, not two. That is to ensure that trains are not held up on the approach to the station, and there is always a platform available. Similarly, outside Birmingham you have a grade-separated Delta Junction to ensure train paths do not conflict. The philosophy is one of a high-speed high-capacity pipeline of trains. Think of it like a hosepipe, where the trains come spraying out of the nozzle at high speed heading towards a variety of destinations. Putting a Chiltern Parkway station on the core HS2 route is akin to standing on the hosepipe, then wondering why the water is only coming out in dribbles.

Your understanding of the timetabling / capacity issue is flawed. There are enough rigid timetabling points on HS2 already (Euston platforming capacity, Old Oak Common, Birmingham Delta Jn, Curzon Street platforming, Handsacre interface with WCML services) that you cannot timetable the entire network around generating a regular interval service for a Chiltern Parkway. There is a real cost in capacity for every train you stop. Since HS2 is all about capacity, that is the only thing it can sell (and I expect the price would be high). What you are proposing is akin to (say) timetabling the entire East Coast Main Line around the trains which call at Newark, then claiming that it is essentially a "free gift" and doesn't really cause any capacity issues.

My point on ticketing has already been answered by others.

 

[Peter Sarf]

Agree. But there’s a mandatory housing target for every county thats pretty ambitious.

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I do not think the original poster meant that. They meant there will need to be reason to travel there - primarily employment.

Or the east of the country gets its own high speed line into Kings Cross. And that has the advantage that Hull, Sunderland, Bradford etc can get high speed service as well. Plus on the west it means you can give decent high speed service to existing secondary stops like Chester, Warrington, Stoke, Macclesfield, Oxenholme, Penrith, Derby and possibly Shrewsbury.

And you also potentially get significantly faster times from London to Edinburgh if you do enough on the east, and those times are pretty disappointing regardless of how much of HS2 you build on the west. You also don’t have to strictly start in the south - at least in terms of speeding up London-Edinburgh.

No one is going to sanction spending / borrowing the money required on another high speed line through the home counties anytime soon. If the North Eastern services are kept off HS2 then it will be a very long time before money will be found to build a second High speed route to the North. Better to use the existing HS2 sooner (as planned) rather than wait a lot longer just because capacity on HS2 has been squandered on stopping services. Remember the HS in HS2 stands for high speed - it is so that places a lot further North than the Chilterns can be brought closer together thus driving economic activity. It was also a way of getting the fastest services off the West Coast Main Line so that they were not impeded by stopping services there - the very same type of service you propose cluttering the solution to that problem with !.

 

[MatthewHutton]

As for Himeji station, that's more like Rugby on the WCML, where you have junctions either side, with flyovers, and through fast lines.

I'm not familiar with Odwara.

There’s no junctions on the Sanyo/Tokaido Shinkansens.

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First look at the actual traffic density on the route. (About 4 - 5 trains per direction per hour)

LGV Sud Est definitely has significantly more traffic than that.

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No one is going to sanction spending / borrowing the money required on another high speed line through the home counties anytime soon.

Good news is that an east coast high speed line could start at Peterborough and go north from there and still add value.

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Putting a Chiltern Parkway station on the core HS2 route is akin to standing on the hosepipe, then wondering why the water is only coming out in dribbles.

We are talking cutting 1-2 services an hour that you have no realistic destinations to serve with that would get anywhere near the same traffic as a station in the Chilterns or other intermediate HS2 stops. Other places you could theoretically serve like Blackpool and wrexham have under 50k passengers a year to London as it stands.

 

[Peter Sarf]

There’s no junctions on the Sanyo/Tokaido Shinkansens.

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LGV Sud Est definitely has more traffic than that.

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Good news is that an east coast high speed line could start at Peterborough and go north from there and still add value.

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We are talking cutting 1-2 services an hour that you have no realistic destinations to serve with that would get anywhere near the same traffic as a station in the Chilterns. Other places you could serve like Blackpool and wrexham have under 50k passengers a year to London as it stands.

Still spending/borrowing money so that the Chilterns can have a station and hobble capacity on HS2.

Plus - where is the capacity South of Peterborough and all the way into and including Kings Cross ?.

Welwyn viaduct says hello (it is already a bottle neck).

 

[MatthewHutton]

Still spending/borrowing money so that the Chilterns can have a station and hobble capacity on HS2.

Plus - where is the capacity South of Peterborough and all the way into and including Kings Cross ?.

Welwyn viaduct says hello (it is already a bottle neck).

OK fair you’d have to sort Welwyn at a minimum to run more service.

And an east coast high speed line doesn’t just benefit the Chilterns. It provides much larger benefits to a bunch of northern secondary destinations that HS2 would never have helped.

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I do not think the original poster meant that. They meant there will need to be reason to travel there - primarily employment.

Im not sure in general there’s much reason to travel to Haddenham and Thame parkway unless you live there?

 

[Peter Sarf]

OK fair you’d have to sort Welwyn at a minimum to run more service.

Probably easier to build a whole new line. That was after all the conclusion arrived at when looking at relief for the West Coast Main Line.
Unlike a lot of the European cases we do not have spare capacity on mainlines near and right into London including termini.
Remember, just like Euston, extra platforms will be needed at Kings Cross.

And an east coast high speed line doesn’t just benefit the Chilterns. It provides much larger benefits to a bunch of northern secondary destinations that HS2 would never have helped.

Good luck with that. Have you noticed how hard it is getting one new line built ?.

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Im not sure in general there’s much reason to travel to Haddenham and Thame parkway unless you live there?

So I doubt there is much scope to "sell the seats in both directions" as you put it for Haddenham and Thame parkway or Calvert.
No inbound travel for either, certainly not for a housing estate at Calvert.

 

[CW2]

LGV Sud Est definitely has significantly more traffic than that.

Yes of course it has. In fact SNCF are having to upgrade the route to cope with the traffic.
My comment about "Lessons Learned" refers. It's a lot easier to design it right in the first place, rather than coming back later to install piecemeal fixes.

 

[Noddy]

Why do you think the people of the Chilterns wouldn’t want the rail line going through their area if there were actually benefits to the project rather than the current position with HS2 where it’s all pain and no gain?

The reality is, unlike in say France or Japan where local politicians would pursue having a local station, Buckinghamshire CC never seriously pursued this option. In fact as soon as it became a possibility, all the Buckinghamshire District Councils and Stop HS2 made it politically impossible for them to campaign for a local station.

For example:

District councils and anti-HS2 action groups have persuaded Buckinghamshire County Council to drop a request for a station on the London-West Midlands high-speed rail line near Aylesbury from a package of measures to mitigate the line’s impact on the county.

Although Buckinghamshire is leading local authority opposition to the Government’s high-speed rail plans, the council wanted to start discussions with HS2 Ltd about a new station.

Bucks removes HS2 station near Aylesbury from mitigation pla

District councils and anti-HS2 action groups have persuaded Buckinghamshire County Council to drop a request for a station on the London-West Midlands high-spee

www.transportxtra.com

'NAIVE' proposals for an HS2 station in Bucks have been withdrawn from a mitigation blueprint put forward by council chiefs.

A first draft of the blueprint - setting out what councillors are demanding to mitigate the worst aspects of the project if it goes ahead - at one stage included plans for a station near Aylesbury.

The blueprint was handed in to the government this week - but Chiltern District Council heard at the authority's full council meeting on Wednesday it does not include the station proposals, which have now been dropped.

Cllr Seb Berry said: "It was a naive and politically quite damaging proposal. How on earth did it emerge in the first place and ended as being talked up by the county council?"

Cllr Nick Rose said: "The station has been deleted - my understanding is it's been completely dropped."

Bucks HS2 station plans shelved

'NAIVE' proposals for an HS2 station in Bucks have been withdrawn from a mitigation blueprint put forward by council chiefs.

www.bucksfreepress.co.uk

 

[MatthewHutton]

Probably easier to build a whole new line. That was after all the conclusion arrived at when looking at relief for the West Coast Main Line.

And £100bn later here we are realising that that isn’t as easy as it sounds either!

Politically a tunnel under Welwyn might be fairly long - but it could have steep grades and politically would be pretty uncontroversial.

So I doubt there is much scope to "sell the seats in both directions" as you put it for Haddenham and Thame parkway or Calvert.

People from the south do travel to the north! And people from the north also travel to visit them.

Yes of course it has. In fact SNCF are having to upgrade the route to cope with the traffic.
My comment about "Lessons Learned" refers. It's a lot easier to design it right in the first place, rather than coming back later to install piecemeal fixes.

So why did you say LGV Sud Est only had 4-5 trains an hour?

The reality is, unlike in say France or Japan where local politicians would pursue having a local station, Buckinghamshire CC never seriously pursued this option. In fact as soon as it became a possibility, all the Buckinghamshire District Councils and Stop HS2 made it politically impossible for them to campaign for a local station.

Part of that also is the rail industry trying quite so hard not to offer one. Pushing for cancellation was perhaps the easier path given the cost escalations.

I mean people are still arguing today against intermediate stops when there is no realistic prospect of anything beyond maybe phase 2a.

 

[The Ham]

Wendover for example has 300k people within 15km. That’s not low density.

It is fairly low, Farnborough Main has well over 550,000 people within 15km (and that includes quite a lot of under developed land between it and Woking, Guildford, Bracknell, Basingstoke, etc. (note that's not to say there's not development in those gaps, for example Fleet, but that there's also lightly developed areas like around Eversley).

It's not "retrofitted" at all. HS2 was conceived from the very beginning as a WCML relief line.

It really wasn’t. It was conceived as a thrusting high speed line to be extra fast and extra speedy to get people between London and the north west much faster. The business case was predicated on the financial benefits to the north west and the West Midlands.

According to (note the source, so it's unlikely to have recently tempered with):

https://stophs2.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/20090213_letter_to_lord_adonis_re_objectives_for_hs2.pdf

Passenger capacity: this is the driving consideration, including capacity released on classic lines.
Speed: the new line should be sufficiently high speed to optimise journey time benefits balanced with operational energy costs and achievement of maximum capacity. It is likely to be designed to at least the maximum speed for HS1. It should also have the ability to maintain high average speed, which will mean avoiding any permanent speed restrictions (e.g. sharp bends) which
also impact on energy consumption and effective capacity, managing the approaches to cities (especially if shared with classic lines) and avoiding intermediate stops.

The driving consideration is capacity and whilst it goes on to talk about speed it also links back to capacity within that section.

It’s only now people are questioning the cost that suddenly it’s an essential relief line for the WCML. A relief line that won’t accept freight, won’t accept local passengers, and is designed at speeds 100km/h higher than they need to be.

As I highlighted, the document is stored on the Stop HS2 website with a likely upload date (if that's what the bit of the URL which says "uploads/2011/09") of September 2011.

However, even if it isn't, they are hosting evidence which counters the argument that the case has changed from speed to capacity (something they also argue), and so is unlikely to have been modified.

A relief line with a bespoke train fleet (since cancelled at great expense) that can’t run on other lines. And a relief line for a WCML which is so terribly overcrowded that, er, they’ve allowed an OA operator to start running 6-carriage trains into London in the peaks.

Err, HS2 trains can and were always designed to run on other lines, for example to Scotland and Liverpool.

Also, it's worth noting that putting 6 coach trains on a line in 2026 doesn't mean that those trains would still be being run as 6 coach trains rather than (say) 10 coach trains in 2046.

They tried to claim it was an essential relief line for the ECML too, at least until the bit to the north east was cancelled. Turns out it wasn’t that essential after all.

There's a big difference between what Government does when it comes to providing funding for and what's needed. Again, what isn't necessary essential 5 years ago doesn't mean that it's not going to ever be needed, or even that it's needed in 15 years from now.

As I said, a matter of public record. One hopes that their demand modelling is better than their cost estimation.

I can consider what HS2 present based on that track record, and assess accordingly. While I can apply the "like elbows, everyone has an opinion" (other, less family friendly, versions are available) view on posts, I prefer to give an otherwise unknown source the chance to provide a basis for their assertions on numbers.

You question their demand modeling, well given we have 2025 usage data let's compare, the table (excluding the 2025 estimation) is from here:

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201415/ldselect/ldeconaf/134/13407.htm

The 2025 predicated demand uses the growth rates. For example 15 years of 2.6% growth is 1.4696 which increases 7,000 to 10,287.

Zone-to-zone movements	2010 demand	2025 predicted demand	2036 demand	Average annual increase, %
Birmingham-Central London	7,000	10,287	13,700	2.6
Manchester-Central London	6,600	9,987	13,500	2.8
Leeds-Central London	4,200	6,449	8,800	2.9
Liverpool-Central London	2,600	3,711	4,800	2.4
Newcastle-Central London	2,300	3,235	4,200	2.3
Edinburgh-Central London	2,100	3,272	4,500	3.0
Glasgow-Central London	1,100	1,640	2,200	2.7

Whist there's going to be some variation vs individual cities there's regional rail passenger numbers these show that:

London to West Midlands growth would put 7,000 in 2010 to be 9,607 in 2025, so around -7% adrift.

London to North West, Manchester and Liverpool, was actually 8,677 and 3,418 so -14% and -8% adrift.

London to Scotland, Edinburgh and Glasgow, was actually 4,801 and 2,516 so +46% and +51%.

Overall that's a fairly mixed bag, however if you compare the 5 cities as a combined value the actual number is +4% and given that London Scotland is paying higher ticket prices and so the income might well be reasonable, even if there's lower anytime tickets being sold.

Overall, I'd suggest that's not too bad a result when estimating for 15 years in the future and including within that an unexpected pandemic which is still impacting rail use (although rail growth year on year is much higher than 3% and whist that's falling it's still likely to be higher 3% for a few more years yet).

 

[yoyothehobo]

Surely the problem is that HS2 is too short for any reasonable intermediate station. The 5-10 minute dwell penalty you would get (slowing, stopping, waiting for a gap to slot back into, speeding up) is too higher percentage based on the travel to and from Birmingham and London to make any sense, even if the services were cheaper like the Kodama services in Japan.

The Kodama services are significantly cheaper, but take significantly longer and you can be dwelling at stations for quite a while waiting for 3 or 4 lower frequency services to pass.

At the distance travelled the cheaper fares are worth the increase in travel times, i just dont see the pay off really being here vs just taking the normal WCML route.

 

[MatthewHutton]

Surely the problem is that HS2 is too short for any reasonable intermediate station.

Except other high speed lines do have intermediate stations after such a distance.

The 5-10 minute dwell penalty you would get (slowing, stopping, waiting for a gap to slot back into, speeding up)

It’s not even 10 minutes in France and they have 3 minute dwells and don’t use EMUs. 5-6 minutes is a reasonable range.

i just dont see the pay off really being here vs just taking the normal WCML route.

Because the line doesn’t follow the normal WCML route. The Japanese also have hikari services that call at most places at least every 2 hours that are pretty quick.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 22 Jun 2026 ==

The driving consideration is capacity and whilst it goes on to talk about speed it also links back to capacity within that section.

If the driving need was capacity why didn’t they keep the speed at 285-320km/h? Wouldn’t that have been more efficient?

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 22 Jun 2026 ==

It is fairly low

Not compared to rural france/spain it isn’t.

 

[Noddy]

Much of that also is the rail industry trying quite so hard not to offer one. Pushing for cancellation was perhaps the easier path given the cost escalations.

I mean people are still arguing today against intermediate stops when there is no realistic prospect of anything beyond maybe phase 2a.

Pushing for cancellation was all the Buckinghamshire District Councils (and councillors), and StopHS2 ever wanted. The clue is in the name. They were never interested in meeting the rail industry and creating reasonable mitigations. They just wanted to blow the whole project apart but all they succeeded in doing is creating the worst of all worlds.

 

[MatthewHutton]

Pushing for cancellation was all the Buckinghamshire District Councils (and councillors), and StopHS2 ever wanted. The clue is in the name. They were never interested in meeting the rail industry and creating reasonable mitigations. They just wanted to blow the whole project apart but all they succeeded in doing is creating the worst of all worlds.

You do have to win over the wider public. You don’t have to win over the people involved in StopHS2.

 

[Noddy]

You do have to win over the wider public. You don’t have to win over the people involved in StopHS2.

The District Councils wanted none of it.

 

[Sorcerer]

Except other high speed lines do have intermediate stations after such a distance.

Again, this isn't because it's practical, it's political pressures. The Tokaido Shinkansen might seem like the prime example of intermediate stops working well but in truth these intermediates have a much higher regional catchment than anything in the Chilterns would, and they aren't random rural stations, they are major centres like Kyoto and Nagoya. Even then the stopping patterns require careful timetable and affect capacity to the point we now have the Chuo Shinkansen in progress.

If the driving need was capacity why didn’t they keep the speed at 285-320km/h? Wouldn’t that have been more efficient?

It wouldn't have been that much cheaper and 360km/h would've future-proofed the line a lot better than 320km/h. As I understand it SNCF wished they had engineered the LGV Sud-Est with more futureproofing in mind so the 270-285km/h could be faster and better aligned for it.

 

[The Ham]

If the driving need was capacity why didn’t they keep the speed at 285-320km/h? Wouldn’t that have been more efficient?

Depends, as I've highlighted before, by having 1:08 Manchester London journey times you can run 16 coach trains with fewer coaches than is needed to run the current mix of 9 and 11 coach trains.

The maths:
Current round trip 5 hours with an mix of 9+9+11 (29 coaches per hour) × 5 hours = 145 coaches to run the services

Future round trip 3 hours with 16×3 coaches per hour = 144 coaches

However, it's not just the trains it's the staff. However, even ignoring the staff benefits with over 1,000 seats per train vs a maximum of 608 on the current 11 coach trains (an uplift of >60%) that's a lot of capacity without increasing the number of coaches.

That's before we look at the "alternative" to run 12 coach 390's, which would have required 165 coaches (14.5% extra coaches).

Not compared to rural france/spain it isn’t.

Maybe, but if somewhere like Farnborough Main can't add enough extra passengers to help justify Crossrail 2 (the up to 8tph which become available for outer suburban and longer distance services due to the metro services shifting to Crossrail2), when it doesn't need a new station and Crossrail 2 has a cost of less than £50bn and a population of nearly double within 15km and several other locations across the SWR network which could also increase passenger numbers with higher population numbers than 300,000 within 15km.