Why did you claim "There are no HS2 works currently planned north of Golbourne or Church Fenton at the very least", if such works are required to run the planned service?
The Phase 2 Hybrid Bill would only work as far as Golbourne and Church Fenton. What Network Rail do elsewhere in junction with HS2, but not funded by the HS2 budget, is more-or-less up to them. For example, should HS2 Ltd be billed for upgrading the tracks around Carlisle so that express services don't have to crawl through? NR's WCML RUS shows that most of the speed pinch-points on the WCML north of Preston are around junctions, as they were on the southern WCML before the WCRM (e.g. how the journey time saving from 230km/h running was instead achieved by re-configuring Rugby station and junction). Those improvements can and very likely will be made in the next decade or so regardless of HS2.
Wigan has about three times the population of Preston, so if rail services were being planned rationally, Glasgow expresses would stop there. HS2 is a political project, not a transport one.
York has a smaller population than Doncaster but current East Coast expresses have it as their first stop out of King's Cross. Calling patterns are determined using a variety of factors and here there is a clear intention that Preston should have the only Scotland express stop rather than Wigan, at the behest of Network Rail and Virgin Trains West Coast
with absolutely zero regard for anything HS2 Ltd have to care about.
It means trains have to run at a homogeneous speed (not necessarily a slower one). There would be no effect on Milton Keynes commuter trains, if they ran at the homogeneous speed.
Not all trains to Milton Keynes are commuter ones. Homogeneous speeds means that the average speed of all trains on the track between point A and B (Euston and Rugby, most likely) would be the same. That can't be achieved when some of them are stopping unless those stopping services run faster, and even then it's not going to allow you to run a 20tph service. A 20tph service will require a literally identical stopping pattern, and if you have 180km/h London Midland trains as well, then not only would all Virgin expresses have to stop at every station but they would also have to be limited to 180km/h as well. Since you can't get this all to work, you're not going to have a homogeneous service, so your belief that the WCML can go up to 20tph is more than misguided. The GWML can and will be able to achieve this because the service pattern is significantly more rationalised from the very beginning - there are no regular Main line stops until Reading other than the grade-separated Heathrow Express services.
If the WCML maximum speed were reduced to 177 km/h, the effect on journey times would be minimal, and competitiveness with car and aeroplane virtually unchanged.
Fundamentally you can't start hacking away at the journey time decreases that have made rail so successful without making the service less useful.
But the requirement is for a homogeneous speed, not necessarily a slower one.
The only way of retaining stops, not being slower and having a homogeneous speed is to make stopping services run faster than the express ones. 'Slow' passenger services and freight fit together because a non-stop 75mph freight and a stopping 100mph passenger service have a similar average speed, while a 110mph stopping service is mathematically unable to have a similar average speed to a 110/125mph express one.
It's not necessary to build Phase 1 or 2, to run trains at a homogenous speed.
It is if you want to make these paths useful.
Birmingham might need zero to four WCML paths, depending on how much use were made of the Chiltern Line.
I'm sure Chiltern Railways, given that they have a 30 year franchise, were set up by a management buyout of the existing route, and run every aspect of services along it are completely and utterly mistaken when they say that they wholeheartedly support HS2 and reject claims that there is plenty of untapped capacity on their route which makes HS2 unnecessary. How many London-Birmingham paths are there an hour on the Chiltern route? How long are the trains able to be, given that they run into Marylebone? How long do services take?
There are 16 intercity paths on West Coast with the current signalling (potentially 20+ with new signalling).
Which is wonderful, but that's not enough for the next 30 years. Those paths have to serve the busiest population and transport corridor in the country.
The overall short-term capacity uplift available is 40%, without significant on-track intervention. With new signalling, platform lengthening, and new trains, the potential long term uplift is much larger. McNulty suggested that passenger numbers could double by 2030.
If you rebuilt the WCML for double-deck trains you could have a wonderful capacity uplift, but the business case of doing so would be abominable. Anything is possible if you have enough money to throw at it, but any government or private enterprise is going to invest their money as sensibly as possible to get the best possible return. Spending it on HS2 is a better overall investment for the amount of capacity you get plus the other effects of the scheme.
The effective capacity increase could be higher than 40%, for example, by reallocating the North Wales path to Liverpool.
When you start robbing Peter to pay Paul you know you're in deep trouble. So once you've removed services from Chester (given that Chester services are extended to North Wales in the way that Edinburgh East Coast services are extended to Aberdeen, Inverness and Glasgow) where do you get your second new path? That one Chester path can't serve Birmingham as well as Manchester or somewhere else, unless you want to make a service which isn't actually useful for the non-Birmingham passengers whatsoever.
The figures released in the High Court in 2012 suggested that, on average, a Virgin Train carried <250 passengers in the peak. So, with 4% compound growth, the arithmetic tends to support the adequacy of upgrade-based strategies in the short and long term.
And the reason why Virgin's peak time loadings are comparatively low is that their pricing structure forces people onto the shoulder peak. So, once you change this structure so that there is never an incentive to have empty seats, what do you do then?
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Ive not seen anything to suggest HS2 services onto the WCML (Wigan, Preston, Scotland) would be anything but 260m and would be using the classic compatible stock that was initially used for Manchester before phase 2.
No, the Phase 2 plans were for each Scotland path to be done as 2 200m classic-compatibles which would split at Carstairs to serve Edinburgh and Glasgow equally. However, that can and will change when the plans for serving Scotland are developed, so we can't take anything for granted right now.
