HS2-HS1 Connection.
I disagree that budget airlines will make HS2 to continental travel market unviable. At the moment this would be the case but HS2 is going to be finished in 2025 and it will be a different world by then. Oil costs are only going north and I would expect to see budget airlines struggle to compete in the future, their business model may be outdated soon. Everywhere High Speed Rail has been implemented the attractiveness of the service (except eurostar in snow!) has encouraged people to switch.
DB is going to run services to St Pancras and a pan European network is being constructed. The rest of the UK really needs to be joined to the continent.
The original HS2 brief by Adonis did not ask for a HS2 to HS1 connection. But the report by Arups in Dec 2009 did include rough costs for various options, including:
- Option 1: a single track bi-directional link via the North London Line (NLL)
- to the portal north of St Pancras, £458mill
- Option 2: a double track link via the NLL to the portal north of St Pancras; £812milll
- Option 3: a double track fast link to a new grade-separated junction east of
- the St Pancras portal. £3.5 bill.
They have gone for option 1 lite by the seems of it. A bit of a dogs dinner in my opinion. Although I am glad a connecting line is included, this single tunnel idea seems a bit daft. It really throttles capacity and as its approx 3miles from Old Oak common to near Euston, why not run the tunnel all the way to St Pancras instead of using the N London line? It is not much further. For double the price you remove the pressure off the N London line, and add additional capacity into Euston if there is a spur added. What about future capacity on the N London line, is there likely to be congestion?
I really think it is short sited to only construct a single track tunnel. It should be double although I do accept that it should be lower speed due to the prohibitive cost of a high speed tunnel.
In addition if continental trains stop at Old Oak common (with passport control) then cross rail will service many destinations in the city, not all need to go to Euston. Thats why the Old Oak common station is such a great idea. Much better than the original Tory idea to run to heathrow at great expense. All this required joined up integrated transport planning which is what this country has always been rubbish at.
I would even suggest a spur from the Great Western line onto HS2. If the Great Western gets electrified, Bristol-Paris services?
Alignment
Generally, I think the route chosen for HS2 is bang on and first bit of well planned transport infrastructure in the UK since Victorian Times (and HS1!).
The original design docs from the 1st stab at the alignment mentioned that the cost of building the route alongside the M1 was prohibitive due to tunnelling costs getting out of London and tunnelling around Luton. Choosing Old Oak common and following the Chiltern route makes sense. Low tunnelling and demolition costs whilst retaining reasonable line speeds for getting out of London makes it a good decision.
The route between the M25 and Birmingham is determined by following the Chiltern line out of London. More green belt but cheaper construction costs.
Arranging HS2 so the through line speeds to the North at the Birmingham spur are maintained was a good choice. Running into Birmingham at 115mph is still better than the classic lines.
A spur into Birmingham and a station at Curzon street isnt ideal but it is the best compromise in the circumstances. A through line across Birmingham would have been exorbitant and constructing the station in new street is just as pricey. New Street is at capacity and its location low in the centre of Birmingham suggests that at HS station would have to be built underground as there is just no space to expand New Street. This is just too expensive.
I would like to see a connection to the existing midland lines at Curzon street. So in the future when the V arrangement is complete, cross country services from Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle and leeds can use HS3 and transfer onto the classic route down to Bristol (if it ever gets electrified).
I would be interested to see any concepts for HS3 and the V formation. I would suspect that it will mimic the WC and ECML arrangement with a spine route with various spurs off to cities and parkway stations, similar to the German Hannover-Wurzburg route. I would be very surprised if it runs directly to leeds and Manchester and terminates. I would expect that it will join the classic routes around Crewe and Wakefield using upgraded classic lines into cities, or slower lines built parallel plus the ability for onward trains going northward to join classic routes. Ultimately I would love one of the routes to be extended to Scotland, though it wont be in my lifetime.
HS2 Capacity
I also read the guardian article where the head of SNCF said we should consider 4 tracking HS2. SNCF are planning another line from Paris to Lyon due to capacity issues. Adonis wrote a very well informed article (a first for a transport secretary) in Modern Railways about his experiences and thoughts on High Speed Rail. He considered that HS2 would be built as a 2 track but that the corridor would be picked and acquired with future 4 tracking in mind including any tunnels into London
. Which leads onto the HS1, connecting tunnel, surely this should be double tracked so it can also be used for future capacity into Euston? Certainly if the Y shape gets completed it will involve a high frequency of trains running into London.
Adonis thought the Japanese and German high speed models were more suited to the UK rather than the French, due to our geography. I would agree. I have travelled on the Japanese Shinkansen and Japan is densely populated like us. The Tokaido shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka runs through conurbation nearly all the way. There are stations every 30miles or so and it is used to commute into Tokyo. So it shoots down the argument that it only works in larger countries.
On lesser intermediate stations the slower Kodama services pull off on fairly high speed turnouts (80mph at a guess) and into the station platforms at high speed. About 1min after the train pulls in, a fast Hikari service flies by on the through lines at 185mph. Even in-cab signalling must be running close to capacity in this case which I understand is the case. But how do you increase capacity without building an expensive new line that demolishes suburbs for 300miles or avoids the cities by running in tunnel the whole way? I am sure the Japanese in the 60s had no idea how popular it would become, we dont want to make the same mistake.
The last thing is Japanese service made me weep, I wish our services ran as efficiently. We got the train from Tokyo to Sapporo in Northern Japan, a journey of 650miles. It took 9 hours and 3 changes. The first 390miles are on shinkansen and it took 3 hrs. We had a 5min to transfer to the waiting connection to go through the Seikan tunnel to Hakodate. Another 5 min connection, then a slow stopper to Sapporo. The train was bang on time into Sapporo!
