Could the Transpennine Route Upgrade have more quad track?

[lancastrian]

Moderator note: Split from https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...ation-updates-cp6.88054/page-236#post-6361730

I was just watching a YouTube video, that was referenced earlier in the thread. The driver who made it and downloaded it mentioned that the two viaducts between Neville Hill sidings and Leeds Station were being rebuilt.

My question is simply, will they be rebuilt "as is", that is to say as two track, or will they be widening them to four track?

It just seems to me that it would be wise to four track them while all the building work is happening to save all the disruption if they need to be widened later.

 

[JKF]

I was just watching a YouTube video, that was referenced earlier in the thread. The driver who made it and downloaded it mentioned that the two viaducts between Neville Hill sidings and Leeds Station were being rebuilt. My question is simply, will they be rebuilt "as is", that is to say as two track, or will they be widening them to four track? It just seems to me that it would be wise to four track them while all the building work is happening to save all the disruption if they need to be widened later.

I’ve not heard any serious proposals on this, I suspect the cost would be pretty high even if it only really needs one fairly mediocre office building to be demolished. The empty bits of land likely still belong to someone other than NR. Much of it would need to be sympathetic to the surroundings so likely traditional brick arch construction in places rather than concrete viaduct.

I’ve sometimes wondered that if they did HS2/NPR properly, they’d have put Leeds on a through line and just tunnelled out of the city towards the north, bypassing the bottleneck.

 

[snowball]

My impression is that @lancastrian was asking what the official proposal is. In my view that is not speculation, so I think the mods were a bit quick off the mark to move this discussion.

The few references we've seen to reconstruction of the two viaducts are one of the big current mysteries of TRU. I think it unlikely that widening is proposed. That would need a TWAO, for which there have not yet been any preliminary consultations, so probably five years minimum to any start of work.

But even without widening, reconstruction, in any normal sense of the word, of a viaduct carrying a busy main line in a built-up area is a huge and highly disruptive project, so I'll be fascinated to find out what's proposed.

 

[Halish Railway]

I’d say that if there were to be a City Center Railway Viaduct to be quad tracked it’d be that of the Castlefield Corridor.

 

[43074]

I’d say that if there were to be a City Center Railway Viaduct to be quad tracked it’d be that of the Castlefield Corridor.

The solution to that particular issue is the extra platforms at Piccadilly and rebuilding Oxford Road (retaining but extending the 4 platforms and dealing with the signalling issue), if you alternate which platform you use at both then there's no reason you wouldn't be able to run trains on a 3 min headway/equivalent to capacity for 20tph. Adding platforms is going to be costly but less so than building a whole new viaduct through Manchester, it would probably be cheaper to build a tunnel.