HSR in the UK

[HSTEd]

I personally don’t think there was much wrong with the conception of HS2. An interesting mix of Shinkansen and LGV-esque design to maximise the unique circumstances of the UK network and the outcomes it was trying to achieve. Few intermediate stops and long-distance traffic were key to achieving both the release of capacity and bringing the major urban areas together, and attempting to reshape the economy. The idea was excellent, the delivery and political leadership was poor!

Personally, I'm not sure I see any real part of Shinkansen experience adopted by HS2.
It's more or less just an LGV, transplanted wholecloth to the UK. In that sense it is even "purer" than HS1, it has a far lower density of through stations after all.

Curzon Street is a new station, but new stations are not unheard of in France. Euston and the like are primarily rebuilds, and stations like Toton and the originally planned Sheffield meadowhall are fairly typical out of town intermediates from the LGV system.

An LGV approach might work in France, but it falls apart when you move away from a railway with very clear delineations between long distance and short distance services.
And of course, the UK's distances are far too short for such delineations to actually exist.

You can't just remove long distance trains from a timetable whole, because there are very few, if any, truly long distance trains in the UK. Almost all long distance trains carry substantial quantities of intermixed medium distance traffic. A shinkansen solution could have catered to all of that and delivered a cheaper to operate, more capable railway that was more attractive to passengers.

 

[may032]

I can't see any meaningful portion of Shinkansen experience adopted by HS2.
It's more or less just an LGV, transplanted wholecloth to the UK. In that sense it is even "purer" than HS1, it has a far lower density of through stations after all.

An LGV approach might work in France, but it falls apart when you move away from a railway with very clear delineations between long distance and short distance services.
And of course, the UK's distances are far too short for such delineations to actually exist.

You can't just remove long distance trains from a timetable whole, because there are very few, if any, truly long distance trains in the UK. Almost all long distance trains carry substantial quantities of intermixed medium distance traffic. A shinkansen solution could have catered to all of that and delivered a cheaper to operate, more capable railway that was more attractive to passengers.

The original design of very high frequencies and city centre stations on dedicated lines are Shinkansen-esque. I’d say HS2 is Shinkansen in the south, and LGV in the north.

Without Euston in full, it’ll be an (almost) useless shuttle.

Even if we don’t have truly long distance-only services, we have a lot of fast trains using up valuable capacity for slower ones. HS2 (in-full!) solves this and makes those short and medium distance services better.

 

[eldomtom2]

The original design of very high frequencies and city centre stations on dedicated lines are Shinkansen-esque. I’d say HS2 is Shinkansen in the south, and LGV in the north.

But what it lacks compared to the Shinkansen is the frequent stop spacing. A West Coast Shinkansen would follow the WCML far more closely to serve settlements between London and Birmingham.

 

[Nottingham59]

But what it lacks compared to the Shinkansen is the frequent stop spacing. A West Coast Shinkansen would follow the WCML far more closely to serve settlements between London and Birmingham.

But isn't that the role that the WCML fast lines will have?

When HS2 is open, then I'd expect the WCML fasts to carry something like 4tph with all trains calling at Rugby, MKC, Bletchley, Hemel Hempstead, Watford Junction, Euston. With perhaps 8tph in the morning and evening peaks.

Say 2tph from Wolverhampton, New St, Coventry. 2tph fast down the Trent Valley from Stafford. With stoppers and many more freight paths on the slows.

 

[HSTEd]

But isn't that the role that the WCML fast lines will have?

When HS2 is open, then I'd expect the WCML fasts to carry something like 4tph with all trains calling at Rugby, MKC, Bletchley, Hemel Hempstead, Watford Junction, Euston. With perhaps 8tph in the morning and evening peaks.

Say 2tph from Wolverhampton, New St, Coventry. 2tph fast down the Trent Valley from Stafford. With stoppers and many more freight paths on the slows.

If a Shinkansen had been built then both the fasts and slows would be almost empty (certainly north of Wolverton, where you'd probably extend some Tring terminators to).

Indeed at that point some significant parts of the classic infrastructure start to look outright superfluous because there simply would be no traffic to use them.
As it is some of those 4tph trains are going to be superimposed with HS2 services because MKC and the like will want connections to Manchester and the like.

Also I'm not sure you'd bother with Watford Junction.

 

[Nottingham59]

MKC and the like will want connections to Manchester and the like.

Sure, but demand north from MKC will be small. The vast majority of traffic from MKC is towards London. So those trains will have to pick up from other stations to justify themselves.

I'd send one of my 2tph Trent Valley fasts to Manchester via Stoke, and the other to Glasgow via Crewe. Assuming HS2 phase 2 gets built of course.

 

[JonathanH]

When HS2 is open, then I'd expect the WCML fasts to carry something like 4tph with all trains calling at Rugby, MKC, Bletchley, Hemel Hempstead, Watford Junction, Euston. With perhaps 8tph in the morning and evening peaks.

The problem is that Coventry ends up with a much worse service than now if all the trains have to stop at Bletchley and Hemel Hempstead. Indeed, Northampton and Milton Keynes do as well, so you still end up with trains running non stop from Watford to Milton Keynes on the fast lines, even though a new line has been built to remove fast trains.

 

[MarkyT]

Personally, I'm not sure I see any real part of Shinkansen experience adopted by HS2.
It's more or less just an LGV, transplanted wholecloth to the UK. In that sense it is even "purer" than HS1, it has a far lower density of through stations after all.

Curzon Street is a new station, but new stations are not unheard of in France. Euston and the like are primarily rebuilds, and stations like Toton and the originally planned Sheffield meadowhall are fairly typical out of town intermediates from the LGV system.

An LGV approach might work in France, but it falls apart when you move away from a railway with very clear delineations between long distance and short distance services.
And of course, the UK's distances are far too short for such delineations to actually exist.

You can't just remove long distance trains from a timetable whole, because there are very few, if any, truly long distance trains in the UK. Almost all long distance trains carry substantial quantities of intermixed medium distance traffic. A shinkansen solution could have catered to all of that and delivered a cheaper to operate, more capable railway that was more attractive to passengers.

Having a second peripheral high speed terminal in London at OOC is very much a Shinkansen technique, applied in Tokyo at Shinagawa and Ueno stations, ~6 and ~3km from Tokyo's central terminus respectively on the Tokaido and Tohoku lines, each with multiple connections to various parts of the vast polycentric city region and surrounding areas, including airports. The Tokaido also has its 'Reading' where all tiers of service stop, at Yokahama, a bit closer to its capital at 25km than the Thames Valley town.

The first Shinkansen route had little choice but to follow a narrow coastal strip loosely paralleling the old main line alignment through or near dense fairly continuous settlement. A secondary regional service on the HS line thus made sense, and was accommodated using platform loops at each local station with a two-tier service. Originally, Kodama all stations locals and Hikari limited expresses provided equal service frequency, but since then, Hikaris gradually increased as Kodamas decreased.

Nozomi was introduced later with even fewer intermediate calls and has become the most popular and frequent service tier on the route today, with difficulty pathing them among the other traffic, leading to the idea of the new Chuo route, an inland bypass for the fastest Tokaido expresses. The discarded rail option for this envisaged all Nozomi, including those for west of Osaka, being diverted to the new route, leaving the Tokaido exclusively to Hikari which would have intermediate stations added to their calling patterns in a skip-stop technique, with no overtaking planned at all normally, although still possible in out of course events. Contrast this to a high peak recently where a slow Kodama was planned to be overtaken 16 times by Nozomi en route from Tokyo to Kyoto. Japanese operators work to slightly tighter margins than Europe for overtakes but a local call is still costly in journey time if an express is timed to pass. However even with all this extra time, the older classic services on the parallel narrow gauge were so slow comparatively that the new Shinkansens still had the edge, at least on medium to longer-distance journeys.

Meanwhile the Maglev Chuo service envisages a two-tier operation with trains either calling at all stations or running non-stop to Nagoya in the first phase. That doesn't seem feasible with the maglev switching time for platform loops at the intermediate stations, one each provided 'politically' in each prefecture the line passes through, but not necessarily anywhere that's of much use from a transport perspective. I think on the Tokaido at least, management would rather there weren't quite so many intermediate stations today and that engineers had built larger radius curves sixty years ago. I think the Japanese approach today is not to do exactly what they did back in the 1960s!

I found this excellent article while researching:

The Chuo Shinkansen Project: High Speed Rail in Japan - Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus

[…]

apjjf.org

Abstract

This article assesses the necessity, and provides a technical evaluation of options for a new railway line in the Tokyo – Osaka corridor. It discusses the introduction of SCMaglev technology for the Chuo Shinkansen project and the logic of decisions for its implementation. I examine problems in scheduling an effective timetable for the first phase of a new line between Tokyo and Nagoya. A capacity comparison is provided between the new line, using SCMaglev technology, and the Tokaido Shinkansen, using wheel-on-rail, technology.

Keywords: Timetable scheduling, railway technology, counterbalance of criteria, behavioural patterns in Japanese culture.

 

[TheGuy77]

HOME

There has been this alternative to HS2 saying that it's £20b cheaper than HS2, but it does look too good to be true for how much it costs.

 

[HSTEd]

Nozomi was introduced later with even fewer intermediate calls and has become the most popular and frequent service tier on the route today, with difficulty pathing them among the other traffic, leading to the idea of the new Chuo route, an inland bypass for the fastest Tokaido expresses. The discarded rail option for this envisaged all Nozomi, including those for west of Osaka, being diverted to the new route, leaving the Tokaido exclusively to Hikari which would have intermediate stations added to their calling patterns in a skip-stop technique, with no overtaking planned at all normally, although still possible in out of course events. Contrast this to a high peak recently where a slow Kodama was planned to be overtaken 16 times by Nozomi en route from Tokyo to Kyoto. Japanese operators work to slightly tighter margins than Europe for overtakes but a local call is still costly in journey time if an express is timed to pass. However even with all this extra time, the older classic services on the parallel narrow gauge were so slow comparatively that the new Shinkansens still had the edge, at least on medium to longer-distance journeys.

To draw this discussion back to the UK, the classic UK railway is pretty far from fast.
If, for sake of argument, we had a Shinkansen that ran Euston-Luton-MKC-Northampton-Rugby-Coventry-Birmingham-Wolverhampton-Stafford-Stoke-Manchester-Huddersfield-Leeds-York. That would have a stop spacing comparable to a Shinkansen, and even if all trains ran all stops the train would be expected to manage York in something like 2hr15. It beats the classic railway for essentially all journey combinations other than York-London, and even then doesn't lose by that much considering its likely higher frequency capability.

It'd have been interesting to see what would have happened if you just stacked a line full of 18+ (at 300kph higher than 18tph would probably be achievable) 400m all stop trains per hour. Sure you wouldn't get the very fast selected journeys of the HS2 solution, but you'd still be fast enough to beat the classic railway and you'd have convenience that the normal railway could never dream of.

At the end of the day, York via that tortuous route is still only ~390km away, which puts it at around Nagoya on the Tokaido Shinkansen.

Meanwhile the Maglev Chuo service envisages a two-tier operation with trains either calling at all stations or running non-stop to Nagoya in the first phase. That doesn't seem feasible with the maglev switching time for platform loops at the intermediate stations, one each provided 'politically' in each prefecture the line passes through, but not necessarily anywhere that's of much use from a transport perspective. I think on the Tokaido at least, management would rather there weren't quite so many intermediate stations today and that engineers had built larger radius curves sixty years ago. I think the Japanese approach today is not to do exactly what they did back in the 1960s!

Whilst the Tokaido Shinkansen/JR Central is moving in that direction, most of the rest of JR seems to be sticking to the traditional Shinkansen approach with many intermediate stations (see the recent or under construction Shinkansen in Hokkaido, Kyushu and with the Hokuriku Shinkasen).
Seems it is only the ludicrous traffic density that JR Central has to deal with that has forced this decision, and I don't think the UK would truly approach those levels for a very long time - certainly not over the ~515km of the Tokaido Shinkansen.

I found this excellent article while researching:

The Chuo Shinkansen Project: High Speed Rail in Japan - Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus

[…]

apjjf.org

It's a good paper, I read this a while back, one of the few treatments of timetabling on SCMaglev that I am aware of, at least in English.
It does beg a question about whether or not it would be better to simply leverage the huge acceleration potential of Maglev (limited only by passenger comfort) and just run all services on one stopping pattern on a continuous loop of guideway - removing any pointwork restrictions.

 

[MarkyT]

To draw this discussion back to the UK, the classic UK railway is pretty far from fast.

Still a lot faster than the Japanese narrow gauge, but they've introduced a lot of limited stop expresses too.

If, for sake of argument, we had a Shinkansen that ran Euston-Luton-MKC-Northampton-Rugby-Coventry-Birmingham-Wolverhampton-Stafford-Stoke-Manchester-Huddersfield-Leeds-York. That would have a stop spacing comparable to a Shinkansen, and even if all trains ran all stops the train would be expected to manage York in something like 2hr15. It beats the classic railway for essentially all journey combinations other than York-London, and even then doesn't lose by that much considering its likely higher frequency capability.

Much construction through or near areas of high population density, which HS2 avoids. Even then the new HS station might be on peripheries of existing settlements that are difficult to travel to by other transport apart from car. Business might be abstracted to an extent that classic routings and convenient central stations lose some service, leading to more local traffic driving to the new parkway and some no longer being able to use rail at all.

It'd have been interesting to see what would have happened if you just stacked a line full of 18+ (at 300kph higher than 18tph would probably be achievable) 400m all stop trains per hour. Sure you wouldn't get the very fast selected journeys of the HS2 solution, but you'd still be fast enough to beat the classic railway and you'd have convenience that the normal railway could never dream of.

A lot of additional stopping for all trains, with the energy costs involved and the longer round trips mean poorer stock and crew utilisation.

Whilst the Tokaido Shinkansen/JR Central is moving in that direction, most of the rest of JR seems to be sticking to the traditional Shinkansen approach with many intermediate stations (see the recent or under construction Shinkansen in Hokkaido, Kyushu and with the Hokuriku Shinkasen).
Seems it is only the ludicrous traffic density that JR Central has to deal with that has forced this decision, and I don't think the UK would truly approach those levels for a very long time - certainly not over the ~515km of the Tokaido Shinkansen.

The paper stated the decision to go maglev was solely that of the then 79 year old head of JR Central. The alternative rail proposal was far more practical in that switching time for overtakes at the intermediate stations would be much reduced and that longer-distance trains beyond Osaka could still run through at fastest possible (for rail) journey times. As it stands with maglev some Nozomi or equivalent are still going to have to be accommodated on the old line to maintain through services from the far west otherwise the disbenefits of enforced interchange risks losing market share to air from from far west just as the last stages of conventional Shinkansen construction there are starting to come to fruition.

It's a good paper, I read this a while back, one of the few treatments of timetabling on SCMaglev that I am aware of, at least in English.
It does beg a question about whether or not it would be better to simply leverage the huge acceleration potential of Maglev (limited only by passenger comfort) and just run all services on one stopping pattern on a continuous loop of guideway - removing any pointwork restrictions.

With the maglev tech not as efficient as at first envisaged, the last thing they really want to do is to be running trains around solely carrying only fresh air which an all stations tier may be at quieter times. A skip-stop approach might be the better solution to an extent, but regions served are likely to want to build intermediate traffic between them as well as to the major city extremities.

I still think a reversion to conventional could make sense. The gradients are within rail's capabilities, and the major time savings will be from the new route not the technology switch. Slightly smaller trains might be necessary I think, but JR East has built smaller profile stock for mini-shinkansen routes.

 

[eldomtom2]

Whilst the Tokaido Shinkansen/JR Central is moving in that direction, most of the rest of JR seems to be sticking to the traditional Shinkansen approach with many intermediate stations (see the recent or under construction Shinkansen in Hokkaido, Kyushu and with the Hokuriku Shinkasen).

For reference, here's the average distance between stations on each of the Shinkansen lines:

• Tokaido: 32.2 km
• Sanyo: 30.7 km
• Tohoku: 30.6 km
• Joetsu: 27.7 km
• Hokuriku: 22.9 km
• Kyushu: 23.3 km
• Hokkaido: 49.6 km
• Nishi Kyushu: 16.2 km

 

[JamesT]

HOME

There has been this alternative to HS2 saying that it's £20b cheaper than HS2, but it does look too good to be true for how much it costs.

It's a slightly better grade of crayon that some of the proposals on the forum, but that doesn't make it realistic.
As we've seen from the various major upgrade programs over recent decades that have gone massively overbudget, upgrading existing lines is not a panacea. Although HS2 have made many mistakes, I don't think it's necessarily a given that the massive cost inflation that project has seen wouldn't also affect anything else trying to do a similar job.

 

[GRALISTAIR]

HS2 has primarily been cut back due to ballooning costs and they are less problematic in China as labour costs are lower and less environmental considerations mean they get to save a bit of money by laying track through a forest rather than tunnelling under it. I suppose we are less capable at building railways as a sacrifice for better quality of life and being more environmentally responsible

It is no coincidence that China has the money to build fast railways. So long as we keep importing its goods then they have money to spend on infrastructure, and it costs less to build there as well.

These points exactly. The USA spends huge amounts on Chinese goods. All this enables them to build their infrastructure (and military!).
Labour and environmental costs and others (no TWAOs for example needed or other laws and NIMBYs) mean they can continue to build High Speed Railways.

 

[Shrop]

Having a second peripheral high speed terminal in London at OOC is very much a Shinkansen technique, applied in Tokyo at Shinagawa and Ueno stations, ~6 and ~3km from Tokyo's central terminus respectively on the Tokaido and Tohoku lines, each with multiple connections to various parts of the vast polycentric city region and surrounding areas, including airports. The Tokaido also has its 'Reading' where all tiers of service stop, at Yokahama, a bit closer to its capital at 25km than the Thames Valley town.

The first Shinkansen route had little choice but to follow a narrow coastal strip loosely paralleling the old main line alignment through or near dense fairly continuous settlement. A secondary regional service on the HS line thus made sense, and was accommodated using platform loops at each local station with a two-tier service. Originally, Kodama all stations locals and Hikari limited expresses provided equal service frequency, but since then, Hikaris gradually increased as Kodamas decreased.

Nozomi was introduced later with even fewer intermediate calls and has become the most popular and frequent service tier on the route today, with difficulty pathing them among the other traffic, leading to the idea of the new Chuo route, an inland bypass for the fastest Tokaido expresses. The discarded rail option for this envisaged all Nozomi, including those for west of Osaka, being diverted to the new route, leaving the Tokaido exclusively to Hikari which would have intermediate stations added to their calling patterns in a skip-stop technique, with no overtaking planned at all normally, although still possible in out of course events. Contrast this to a high peak recently where a slow Kodama was planned to be overtaken 16 times by Nozomi en route from Tokyo to Kyoto. Japanese operators work to slightly tighter margins than Europe for overtakes but a local call is still costly in journey time if an express is timed to pass. However even with all this extra time, the older classic services on the parallel narrow gauge were so slow comparatively that the new Shinkansens still had the edge, at least on medium to longer-distance journeys.

Meanwhile the Maglev Chuo service envisages a two-tier operation with trains either calling at all stations or running non-stop to Nagoya in the first phase. That doesn't seem feasible with the maglev switching time for platform loops at the intermediate stations, one each provided 'politically' in each prefecture the line passes through, but not necessarily anywhere that's of much use from a transport perspective. I think on the Tokaido at least, management would rather there weren't quite so many intermediate stations today and that engineers had built larger radius curves sixty years ago. I think the Japanese approach today is not to do exactly what they did back in the 1960s!

I found this excellent article while researching:

The Chuo Shinkansen Project: High Speed Rail in Japan - Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus

[…]

apjjf.org

To draw this discussion back to the UK, the classic UK railway is pretty far from fast.
If, for sake of argument, we had a Shinkansen that ran Euston-Luton-MKC-Northampton-Rugby-Coventry-Birmingham-Wolverhampton-Stafford-Stoke-Manchester-Huddersfield-Leeds-York. That would have a stop spacing comparable to a Shinkansen, and even if all trains ran all stops the train would be expected to manage York in something like 2hr15. It beats the classic railway for essentially all journey combinations other than York-London, and even then doesn't lose by that much considering its likely higher frequency capability.

It'd have been interesting to see what would have happened if you just stacked a line full of 18+ (at 300kph higher than 18tph would probably be achievable) 400m all stop trains per hour. Sure you wouldn't get the very fast selected journeys of the HS2 solution, but you'd still be fast enough to beat the classic railway and you'd have convenience that the normal railway could never dream of.

At the end of the day, York via that tortuous route is still only ~390km away, which puts it at around Nagoya on the Tokaido Shinkansen.

Whilst the Tokaido Shinkansen/JR Central is moving in that direction, most of the rest of JR seems to be sticking to the traditional Shinkansen approach with many intermediate stations (see the recent or under construction Shinkansen in Hokkaido, Kyushu and with the Hokuriku Shinkasen).
Seems it is only the ludicrous traffic density that JR Central has to deal with that has forced this decision, and I don't think the UK would truly approach those levels for a very long time - certainly not over the ~515km of the Tokaido Shinkansen.

It's a good paper, I read this a while back, one of the few treatments of timetabling on SCMaglev that I am aware of, at least in English.
It does beg a question about whether or not it would be better to simply leverage the huge acceleration potential of Maglev (limited only by passenger comfort) and just run all services on one stopping pattern on a continuous loop of guideway - removing any pointwork restrictions.

Interesting discussion about Shinkansen, and thanks for the link to that article by Sven Andersen, also very interesting and indeed inspiring, but there is a fundamental point here. The Japanese have shown excellent capability at running frequent trains with tight headways, all whilst running them at much higher speeds than we have in the UK, but is there any chance that we could ever achieve anything like this? In the UK we only have to have a slight hiccup and schedules are thrown out all over the place, with operators quick to find excuses and apportion blame elsewhere, and delays quickly magnifying.

In the UK, even when trains are late you can often see train staff not hurrying, passengers left to fend for themselves when connections are missed, little or no helpful information etc. In Japan if a train is even just a few seconds late, you see staff scurrying around desperately trying to catch up time as if their lives depended on it. Of course some rail staff in the UK do their level best to be helpful and to keep delays to a minimum, but it's nothing like the enthusiastic and committed manner in which both front-line staff and behind the scenes operators behave in Japan.

This all begs the question, is there any point in aspiring to the Japanese model when we simply don't have the in-built will of all rail staff to serve their customers with such dedication to duty? I wish I was wrong in casting these doubts on UK rail staff, and I repeat that many really are dedicated, but sadly a great many rail journeys have led to a firm belief that we have a long way to go to in may ways, to match our foreign counterparts.

 

[SynthD]

so you still end up with trains running non stop from Watford to Milton Keynes on the fast lines, even though a new line has been built to remove fast trains.

There will always be the fastest, least stopping services on any track.

There must be a reason why the fewer stops of LGV was chosen over the more stops Shinkansen style, but I doubt they spelled it out that way. The fact that there is inter-city demand for few-stop services seems to be controversial for no solid reason.

The HS2 criticism about not planning for short term minded leaders is misplaced. It’s not their duty to be political, and if they were, they’d see all-party support. There is no way around the lack of future sight that you may wish they had. Criticise the politician and note what needs to be undone later to return to the agreed upon plan that passed into law.

 

[Tester]

Also I'm not sure you'd bother with Watford Junction.

What is your reasoning for this?

 

[HSTEd]

What is your reasoning for this?

It's already going to be first or second stop out of Euston on the current Tring terminators (whether they extend to Wolverton or not).
I don't think a Shinkansen could offer a particularly compelling journey time advantage given that those trains probably have to run either way.

If you are going to have a stop between MKC and London I think Luton is a better choice

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 14 Aug 2024 ==

The HS2 criticism about not planning for short term minded leaders is misplaced. It’s not their duty to be political, and if they were, they’d see all-party support. There is no way around the lack of future sight that you may wish they had. Criticise the politician and note what needs to be undone later to return to the agreed upon plan that passed into law.

The politicians in the UK backed HS2 through multiple elections with cross party support. They backed it for fifteen years before they finally pulled the plug.

It dont think the project was killed because of "short termist" politicians, I think it was killed because the project was failing badly.

Massive cost growth, schedule delays and the various other problems reported in the press. Given how badly Phase 1 has gone I don't think it is all surprising that the political consensus around it crumbled eventually.

Every infrastructure project that uses multiple phases should plan for the possibility that the project will be curtailed. To do otherwise is to essentially demand a blank cheque.

HS2 planned for all or nothing and Phase 1 was not designed to function independently. This was a catastrophic error that we will pay for for a long time to come.

 

[may032]

It's already going to be first or second stop out of Euston on the current Tring terminators (whether they extend to Wolverton or not).
I don't think a Shinkansen could offer a particularly compelling journey time advantage given that those trains probably have to run either way.

If you are going to have a stop between MKC and London I think Luton is a better choice

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 14 Aug 2024 ==



The politicians in the UK backed HS2 through multiple elections with cross party support. They backed it for fifteen years before they finally pulled the plug.

It dont think the project was killed because of "short termist" politicians, I think it was killed because the project was failing badly.

Massive cost growth, schedule delays and the various other problems reported in the press. Given how badly Phase 1 has gone I don't think it is all surprising that the political consensus around it crumbled eventually.

Every infrastructure project that uses multiple phases should plan for the possibility that the project will be curtailed. To do otherwise is to essentially demand a blank cheque.

HS2 planned for all or nothing and Phase 1 was not designed to function independently. This was a catastrophic error that we will pay for for a long time to come.

Despite the cost concerns, there was still broad political support across parties for HS2 up until Sunak canned it. The criticism from Labour and one-nation Tories alike was severe, practically in disbelief.

Handsacre shows Phase 1 was designed to function independently, it just doesn’t function independently at all without Euston.

 

[The Planner]

It's already going to be first or second stop out of Euston on the current Tring terminators (whether they extend to Wolverton or not).
I don't think a Shinkansen could offer a particularly compelling journey time advantage given that those trains probably have to run either way.

If you are going to have a stop between MKC and London I think Luton is a better choice

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 14 Aug 2024 ==



The politicians in the UK backed HS2 through multiple elections with cross party support. They backed it for fifteen years before they finally pulled the plug.

It dont think the project was killed because of "short termist" politicians, I think it was killed because the project was failing badly.

Massive cost growth, schedule delays and the various other problems reported in the press. Given how badly Phase 1 has gone I don't think it is all surprising that the political consensus around it crumbled eventually.

Every infrastructure project that uses multiple phases should plan for the possibility that the project will be curtailed. To do otherwise is to essentially demand a blank cheque.

HS2 planned for all or nothing and Phase 1 was not designed to function independently. This was a catastrophic error that we will pay for for a long time to come.

Why Wolverton? You can't turn back there.

 

[SynthD]

HS2 planned for all or nothing and Phase 1 was not designed to function independently. This was a catastrophic error that we will pay for for a long time to come.

It wasn’t all or nothing as phase one was passed into law and started before the rest of it. Was the idea of delaying Euston, creating yet another sub-phase, an idea from a politician or from the industry?

 

[Shrop]

Every infrastructure project that uses multiple phases should plan for the possibility that the project will be curtailed. To do otherwise is to essentially demand a blank cheque.

Exactly, but the phasing was fundamentally flawed. Many reservations were expressed long before HS2 was formally approved, about it being yet another London-centric scheme. If this was ever about levelling up the North, which was claimed early on, then Phase 1 should have been Leeds to Birmingham.

Okay, people will quickly retort that the southern section of the WCML was in desperate need of capacity upgrading. However, there were some obvious counter-reasons here, including that Leeds to Birmingham is the same distance as Birmingham to London, but the cost of HSR on this northern section was less than half of the cost of Birmingham to London. Then, for this fraction of the cost it would have provided a journey time saving of 70 minutes, ie more than twice that of the southern section. It would also have served two additional locations, namely East Midlands and Sheffield, whereas Phase 1 benefits nowhere between London and Birmingham.

There is more that could be said here about the route, suffice to say that the much greater affordability of the Northern section, coupled with the greater benefits as above, would have made the scheme far more presentable to the public in the event of curtailment, than the present debacle. At best the existing Phase 1 offers a small journey time saving for another London-centric scheme, and even in rail circles, it offers a bit of capacity relief to WCML southern section and very little else.

In other words curtailing London to Birmingham wouldn’t have been a great disaster in the public eye, because Birmingham to Leeds would still be offering a great deal for a relatively small outlay. Whereas curtailing Birmingham to Leeds (and of course Manchester) has been an unmitigated disaster in the public eye, and what remains is worth very little.

If only this was all hindsight, but many people were pushing for a very different programme right from the outset.

 

[LYuen]

For reference, here's the average distance between stations on each of the Shinkansen lines:

• Tokaido: 32.2 km
• Sanyo: 30.7 km
• Tohoku: 30.6 km
• Joetsu: 27.7 km
• Hokuriku: 22.9 km
• Kyushu: 23.3 km
• Hokkaido: 49.6 km
• Nishi Kyushu: 16.2 km

To add, the majority of Shinkansen services skip most of the stops
Similar to the UK, all stoppers tends to be covering shorter distances and longer distance services stops less frequently.
Despite mostly only dual track, the express services needle through the stoppers and quite usually stay at top speed for 100-200 miles
For example, for the fastest and usually the most common service

• Tohoku Shinkansen: Omiya to Sendai, 295km, Sendia to Morioka, 170km. The fastest time between these 2 stations are 68 minutes and 42 minutes. The train is at the top speed (320km/h) all the time.
• Tokaido Shinkansen: Shin-Yokohama to Nagoya
• Sanyo Shinkansen averaging 150-200km between stations

And to be fair, we don't have as much traffic between cities as in Japan. Instead of referring to the Tokaido Shinkansen, I think the Tohoku Shinkansen is more similar to our need.
The all stopper services go as far as Koriyama (200km from Tokyo). This is equivalent to Milton Keynes or Northampton. This acts as a commuter service.
The semi-fast skips stop up to Koriyama, then stop at every station from Fukushima. It either terminal at Sendai or Morioka. This somewhat similar to the LNWR fast service to Crewe.
The express service is non-stop from Omiya (last stop in Tokyo) and Sendai, then non-stop again from Sendai to Morioka. It overtakes multiple stoppers and semi-fast services in passing loops, without having to slow down.
The 3 patterns are basically 2tph each, and additional services during peak hours.

Oh and also, there are through services to classic line, by coupling classic line compatible rolling stocks with the semi-fast and express service.
The coupling/decoupling occurs at Fukushima and Morioka stations respectively and continues towards cities such as Yamagata and Akita.

As a side note, between Tokyo and Omiya Tohoku Shinkansen share tracks with Joetsu-Hokuriku Shinkansen, totalling up to 16tph, with just 4 platforms at Tokyo.
With Euston HS2 station in doubt, we should really look at how tracks and platforms are utilised in Japan (hard-coded platform usage accurate to the seconds and extremely fast turn back)
Or use the Chinese approach which most service terminates at OOC but a few services will continue to Euston on the classic line.

 

[eldomtom2]

The semi-fast skips stop up to Koriyama, then stop at every station from Fukushima. It either terminal at Sendai or Morioka. This somewhat similar to the LNWR fast service to Crewe.

Looking at the Japanese Wikipedia, the precise stopping patterns for the Yamabiko are bit more complicated (I'm using semi-fast here to mean "does not stop at all stops, but stops at more stops than the express"; in this case it normally means skipping all stops except Utsunomiya between Omiya and Koriyama):

• 1tph semi-fast to Koriyama, then all-stops to Sendai
• 1tph all-stops to Fukushima, then non-stop to Sendai
• 1tph semi-fast to Sendai, then all-stops to Morioka
• 1tph semi-fast to Sendai

 

[Topological]

People have a misconception about the control that the Chinese Government have over their people. When I was over there I learned the obvious that if the Government want a project for the good of the country, then yes, they don't have the NIMBY situation that hampers UK projects, because people aren't really permitted to object to Government projects. However, I also learned that if you have property which they require, the Government will pay 20% over the market value of the property for its purchase. The sad thing is that rumour-mongers in the UK will only tell you the part that the public cannot object, they don't tell you about any compensation.

Imagine telling people in the UK they had to accept value +20% for the part of their land that was required. There were no opportunities for objections, and land immediately outside of what was required would see no compensation... I did hear rumours they only "require" the land the pillar of the viaduct sits on, but I do not have proof on that one.

It would be great for getting things built and a viaduct HS2 would be much easier to build.

 

[HSTEd]

Why Wolverton? You can't turn back there.

In the alternate universe where a Shinkansen got built that stops at MKC, Northampton, Rugby etc., Wolverton is left in a somewhat awkward position.;

It's probably too lightly used and too close to Milton Keynes to get a Shinkansen stop, but north of there there probably isn't going to be much passenger traffic on the classic line. It probably depends on what precisely happens to the Trent Valley stations, but if they are served by trains leaving the Shinkansen at Rugby or Coventry, then Wolverton gets left rather on the outside.

The solution I thought about was just extending the Tring/MKC trains to Wolverton and having that be the northern end of the passenger service on the southern section of the classic WCML. It's far from ideal but it is ~22km to Northampton and that seems a little far when its a comparatively small flow (~22,000 per year). Nearly 80% of all traffic from Wolverton is to Euston or MKC after all.

The other alternative would be to run the Tring terminators to MKC and then have a separate Milton Keynes to Rugby via Northampton service, that would pick up the calls at Wolverton and Long Buckby.

But in any case, its moot, because we don't live in that alternate universe!

 

[Gostav]

Imagine telling people in the UK they had to accept value +20% for the part of their land that was required.

Another factor was that at that time China countryside was (and still on many parts) a very... developing country, living "in the countryside" often means many houses without bathrooms or even toilets; There were no heating (and insulation material!); limited time supply for running water - pumping house shunt down after dinner time until morning; very limited service facilities. Most single-family houses also had poor layout and quality. In those case, most of the people were relocated do not resist moving to the new town which as a huge improvement in quality of life for them, and the demolition work was encountered little resistance.

This is also the reason why they placed the HSR stations far away from the city central. If the line deep into the city, the demolition costs and resistance would increase exponentially.


Typical countryside housing in north China in 2013

 

[Uncle Buck]

I don’t know anything about the Shinkansen, and although I’ve been on some TGVs I don’t know much about them either…but what some of the comments seem to be hinting at is that HSR should if anything be most like Crossrail- a sort of collector/distributor train, hitting the conventional network at its best-connected interchanges to allow maximum high-speed connectivity between lines, just as Crossrail does for the tube and suburban networks in London (I’m aware that this isn’t the main reason for Crossrail but this is a large part of what it does).

So should HS2 really have followed the line suggested above, London-Luton-MK-Northampton-Coventry-Birmingham-Stoke-Crewe-Wigan with appropriate branches, thereby linking major interchanges?

 

[Shrop]

So should HS2 really have followed the line suggested above, London-Luton-MK-Northampton-Coventry-Birmingham-Stoke-Crewe-Wigan with appropriate branches, thereby linking major interchanges?

The southern section yes, but essentially it should have followed the M1 corridor throughout to Leeds. This is where the population centres are, and being a transport corridor already it is then far less disruptive than the Chiltern route. A half-hearted study was done to investigate this, but since a fundamental requirement of the chosen route was to benefit Heathrow, the M1 route was dismissed. The expense of tunnels to serve the M1 corridor was cited as part of dismissing it, and yet look how much tunnelling has been done for the Chiltern route! Birmingham and Manchester would have been served by branches off the main route, which would have involved no more total route mileage than the Y-shaped HS2 route that was originally approved, but it would have been a far more efficient way of benefitting the population.

 

[Sad Sprinter]

The southern section yes, but essentially it should have followed the M1 corridor throughout to Leeds. This is where the population centres are, and being a transport corridor already it is then far less disruptive than the Chiltern route. A half-hearted study was done to investigate this, but since a fundamental requirement of the chosen route was to benefit Heathrow, the M1 route was dismissed. The expense of tunnels to serve the M1 corridor was cited as part of dismissing it, and yet look how much tunnelling has been done for the Chiltern route! Birmingham and Manchester would have been served by branches off the main route, which would have involved no more total route mileage than the Y-shaped HS2 route that was originally approved, but it would have been a far more efficient way of benefitting the population.

Yes I was indulging my mild motorway obsession the other day and wondered whether an M1 HSL would have been the best route, but then again, it would be the most London-centric, considering you wouldn't be able to easily get Birmingham to Manchester/Liverpool/Preston services like you can get with HS2.

For what it's worth, I'd want HSR in the UK to be part of a greater integrated transport system comprising of rapid transit in cities and HSLs to move in-between the newly traversable metropolitan areas to truly spread growth around the country. Otherwise you'd be connecting labour supply with the existing sources of labour demand (London), without giving the chance to stimulate new centres of Labour demand. Of course, the best way to stimulate demand for Labour outside the South East is a true industrial strategy but that's another story.

I don't think HS2 needs to be a Shinkansen. The West Coast Main Line doesn't need completely replacing. But what I would have liked is a London-Birmingham-Manchester line via Heathrow. Well, Hayes and Harlington. The reason is not because to serve Heathrow itself, but it is a fairly close point to the Surrey, Hampshire, Dorset hinterland, which I think would be an extra source of traffic for the HS trains. You could have either a Heathrow Southern Link type service funnelling trains off the South Western region to a Heathrow Hub to connect with trains northwards.

An integrated Birmingham through station, although seemingly impossible as a recent thread argued, would at least allow XC passengers from Bristol, the West Country and South Wales, to cut the journey time off journeys to Manchester or Scotland by joining a train from London which would empty of somewhat at Birmingham. Thus benefiting the entire region.

I'd have also had a grand strategy to turn Manchester into a competing hub airport to Heathrow. With HS trains coming in from Birmingham, Liverpool, Yorkshire and of course from Scotland, Manchester would connect most of the UK population. If it had been desired, Manchester could have acted as the true air hub for most of the northern half of Britain peeling demand away from Amsterdam - thus attracting more long-distance flights and priming the airport as a smaller hub for Northern Europe/Ireland.

Now where's my work laptop...