Many thanks for all your responses thus far. I see that some of you have picked up on my assumption that few people from places west of Reading would travel to Old Oak Communion to catch HS2 to Birmingham & beyond.
Oxford to Birmingham is 1 hour 10 minutes whilst to PAD it is 53 minutes.
Taunton to Birmingham is 2 hours whilst to PAD it is 1 hour 47 minutes.
Bristol to Birmingham is 1 hour 23 minutes whilst to PAD it is 1 hour 38 minutes.
Cardiff to Birmingham is 2 hours whilst to PAD it is 1 hour 55 minutes.
So, in all these examples, the current direct trains to Birmingham are not far off the the time it takes to get to Paddington. Why would people go east - in the wrong direction - to then change to very fast trains going north-west and have to pay a lot more money? Additionally, the trains to London Paddington from the west have enough to deal with the people who actually want to go to London and the south east without also being loaded with those going to Birmingham and the north.
One factor could be the frequency of service.
For example of there's a 45 minutes wait for the next northbound service, whilst there's an eastbound one in 5 minutes (with a reasonable change time at Old Oak Common) and you're going beyond Birmingham you may actually arrive sooner even though your time on a train is longer.
I'm not convinced that a HS2 service would be more expensive. As some costs would be quite a bit less but with more capacity.
Take for instance running 3tph with 11 coaches on a round trip (London to Manchester and back and read ready to run to Manchester) of 5 hours you need 165 coaches. With HS2 still 3tph but with 16 coaches and a round trip time of 3 hours the number of coaches reduced to 144 coaches.
Likewise with a round trip time you need fewer drivers to ruin the same frequency as rather than needing to dispatch 15 drivers before one is ready to start over you only need to dispatch 9.
Given rolling stock costs were historically listed as being 1/3 of a TOC's costs, whilst staff costs were another 1/3 a circa 13% reduction of rolling stock costs and a circa 40% reduction of driver/guard costs means that you've got quite a saving to go against other costs which may increase.
That's before you consider that if you've currently got 340 passengers (60% of a 390) each paying £100 you could afford to drop the average ticket price to £60 if you are carrying 600 people (60% of a HS2 train with 1,000 seats), even if your overall costs stay the same (which is unlikely given the above).
That's not too say that going north via HS2 from Bristol or the like would be cheaper, but it may not be all that much more.
www.bbc.co.uk
