I find it very difficult to agree wholeheartedly with any of these statements supporting the introduction of a stop for all the Great Western long distance services at the future Old Oak Common station.
One has to go back a step. The main reason for the station at Old Oak Common was to avoid overloading the TfL services at Euston (Tube, sub-surface and bus) with the number of passengers expected to use HS2 by off-loading some of these passengers earlier at Old Oak Common and distributing them from there through central London by Crossrail. The Old Oak station also had the advantage of offering easy access to Heathrow as a replacement for the proposed Heathrow spur off HS2.
This is where the tail started to wag the dog. The 2012 document by Atkins
Demand and Appraisal Report for HS2, one of the documents supporting the HS2 case in its course through Parliament includes some numbers showing expected flows on HS2 to Greater London, Heathrow and 'not London'. Table 4.3 gives the breakdown:
| to/from Greater London | 125,500 |
| to/from Heathrow | 1,100 |
| to/from non-London | 21,400 |
| Total HS2 passengers using London Stations | 148,000 |
As a sanity check ORR figures for station entrances and exits show that Paddington has about 38 million per year, thats roughly 100,000 per day.
The document goes on to say, with respect to HS2 passengers:
In the context of the greatly reduced journey times to the West Midlands and points North made possible by HS2 an extra four minutes is probably acceptable. It is equally true however that stopping GWR trains at Old Oak Common will also extend
their journey time by four minutes bringing the Reading to London time back to what it was before the IET trains were introduced - there being no equivalent line speed increase on the GWR. It's not just Reading passengers who will be affected
but every long distance passenger on the Western going to and from London.
When the 802s were introduced in the west country in 2018 GWR made
great play of the reduction in the London to Penzance times by 'up to 14 minutes' with the introduction of the new timetables with smaller gains for places further east. Stopping these trains at Old Oak Common will now lose 4 minutes of these gains - to what purpose? The only extra connections possible - apart from Crossrail which can also be made at Paddington - are to the Overground lines to and from Richmond and Clapham Junction to the south and to Willesden Junction round to Stratford (E) which can anyway be reached more quickly by Crossrail! In total these routes are probably not a large market for passengers from Neath or Newton Abbot.
No mention has been made anywhere of any onward connections at Old Oak Common from the GW to Euston on HS2 for the British Library, St. Pancras and King's Cross so I assume these will not be possible. I also cannot see any long distance GWR passenger wanting to change at Old Oak to a Crossrail train as the connection at Paddington is very simple. It involves a short walk along the platforms - which has to be done anyway - a right turn at the end and an escalator down to the Crossrail platforms. Changing at Old Oak will involve two escalators - one up and then one down.
It is clear that the Atkins document is mainly concerned with the local traffic to west London as Figure 5.3 marks an area between the Greater London boundary and Tilehurst extending down to about Blackwater on the Guildford line - in other words essentially the five local authority areas from Slough down to Reading - showing where passenger benefits of between £10 million to £15 million in 2037 are expected to accrue. No benefits - pedantically this means the expected passenger benefits are expected to lie between plus and minus £5 million - are shown outside this area.
It's difficult to see on the scale of the Atkins map but it would appear that it also includes some four local authority areas in Hertfordshire, though curiously not South Bucks around Slough. These nine areas are the 'not London' areas and the 21,400 passengers have to be divided between them. Pro rata that's about 2,400 per local government area. If we assume that 2,400 passengers to and from Reading will use fast trains to and from Old Oak the rest of the passengers (some 9,600) will use Crossrail or the GWR outer- suburban trains west of Old Oak.
As I said, the tail is wagging the dog. The assumption ten years ago was that passengers off HS2 to Heathrow would use the HEx service which would call additionally at Old Oak. The traffic density on the Mains has now reached such a level that if the HExs stop, everything must also stop. And, as I see it the only additional passengers that would use the long distance trains are the 1,200 travelling to Reading and the 1,200 coming back (making the 2,400 flow). Averaged over an 18 hour day and some 10 trains per hour this equates to some 7 HS2 passengers per train.
Even if this number was 20 per train it means the other several hundred in each train will have a four minute longer journey.
This is, to my mind, a nonsense and I'm with irish-rail on this matter.
The simple answer is to let those HS2 passengers wanting to reach Heathrow use Crossrail and let the long distance trains run non-stop. This can't be any sort of imposition - after all, many people on this forum think that HEx will go away anyway when Crossrail starts running.
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