HSR in the UK

[Topological]

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...

I suspect that has long been the strategy of the various agencies. Certainly, Manchester Airport have seen it as an opportunity to become a true hub. You only need to see the plans for redevelopment the airport had. In light of the delays, and indeed seemingly a permanent delay, the expansion plans have been pared back, but the opportunity to build is still there.

Burnham is still going out there and advocating for a Manchester-centred development. Hopefully, he will be successful as without it too much focuses on London.

 

[Sad Sprinter]

I suspect that has long been the strategy of the various agencies. Certainly, Manchester Airport have seen it as an opportunity to become a true hub. You only need to see the plans for redevelopment the airport had. In light of the delays, and indeed seemingly a permanent delay, the expansion plans have been pared back, but the opportunity to build is still there.

Burnham is still going out there and advocating for a Manchester-centred development. Hopefully, he will be successful as without it too much focuses on London.

He still needs a more aggressive grand strategy to sitmulate demand for labour in Manchester. I'd favour aggressive corporation tax breaks for new firms relocating to Manchester etc, banning office parks and giving out grants for new city-centre office construction.

 

[may032]

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.

Admittedly I haven’t read the HSR M1 route study, but I fail to understand how a route going through/very near several major population areas can possibly be less disruptive and more cost effective. It’s completely counterintuitive given the higher land costs, public consultation, tunnelling, utilities need to be taken into account when building in urban areas.

 

[Topological]

He still needs a more aggressive grand strategy to sitmulate demand for labour in Manchester. I'd favour aggressive corporation tax breaks for new firms relocating to Manchester etc, banning office parks and giving out grants for new city-centre office construction.

The model needs cooperation with the national government.

I have concerns that the end of Osborne was the end of the real opportunity for Manchester. Though we now have a Labour government, I do not think that the national level focus will permit the necessary policies to promote development in Manchester.

In terms of a broader HS strategy, we should also be looking where similar "Manchester" centres exist. For me the answers are Birmingham, Bristol^, Newcastle* and Glasgow/Edinburgh**

^ This is being discussed elsewhere, because it involves Cardiff and has the challenge of requiring cooperation across multiple governments.
* Newcastle needs to be focused south of the Tyne
** A huge political headache far beyond getting Liverpool and Leeds to accept the value of a fast Manchester connection.

 

[Sad Sprinter]

The model needs cooperation with the national government.

I have concerns that the end of Osborne was the end of the real opportunity for Manchester. Though we now have a Labour government, I do not think that the national level focus will permit the necessary policies to promote development in Manchester.

In terms of a broader HS strategy, we should also be looking where similar "Manchester" centres exist. For me the answers are Birmingham, Bristol^, Newcastle* and Glasgow/Edinburgh**

^ This is being discussed elsewhere, because it involves Cardiff and has the challenge of requiring cooperation across multiple governments.
* Newcastle needs to be focused south of the Tyne
** A huge political headache far beyond getting Liverpool and Leeds to accept the value of a fast Manchester connection.

Possibly, but Osbourne was still fundamentally an economic liberal and grand economic strategies are an allergen to that wing of the Conservative Party - which sadly seems to be all of it. Bristol is promising, aside from the dire need for housing, an underground system and expanding the borders of the city itself to include the urban area within South Gloucestershire, some kind of barrage in the Severn needs to be built; tidal, floating airport/seaport or both to reduce the connection to South Wales. I think Some kind of Cardiff/Newport to Bristol rapid transit system would be pretty amazing.

 

[SynthD]

Admittedly I haven’t read the HSR M1 route study, but I fail to understand how a route going through/very near several major population areas can possibly be less disruptive and more cost effective. It’s completely counterintuitive given the higher land costs, public consultation, tunnelling, utilities need to be taken into account when building in urban areas.

Yes, the transport corridor theory has never made sense to me either. A high speed route can't be within a mile of a motorway, to accommodate curves and junctions while being mostly on the surface. But even 100m away from some motorways is housing, which dictates tunnelling where you may not want to because of ground levels nearby. HS2 does thread the needle with a big station car park at the M42/M6 Coleshill Interchange, but only enabled by expensive junction rebuilds and viaducts.

 

[LYuen]

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?

Shinkansen always attempts to cut through metropolitan centres first. Only when this is difficult would they consider alternatives.
This allowed Shinkansen to absolutely bully other means of transport. Consider the UK is pretty 'small', going from city centre to city centre is key for us too.
However, they are moving in favour of park and ride model in the newer lines. (where car ownership is less restricted, another topic there)
And they absolutely hate turn back stations.

Chinese HSR is fine with stations at city outskirt because the travelling distance is typically long.

I suspect that has long been the strategy of the various agencies. Certainly, Manchester Airport have seen it as an opportunity to become a true hub. You only need to see the plans for redevelopment the airport had. In light of the delays, and indeed seemingly a permanent delay, the expansion plans have been pared back, but the opportunity to build is still there.

Burnham is still going out there and advocating for a Manchester-centred development. Hopefully, he will be successful as without it too much focuses on London.

Manchester Airport station deserve to have PAYG ticketing to city centre.
Just install integrate into the Metrolink fare zones. I don't mind a £2-3 extra on top of the Metrolink fare for using the rail, like how TfL does with Elizabeth line v.s. Piccadilly Line.

 

[DanNCL]

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.

The Shinkansen element of HS2 is at the London end. If it were to an LGV design at the London end, it would be merging onto the classic network somewhere in Zone 5 or Zone 6. Having a completely dedicated and operationally isolated line to new build platforms at a city centre terminal is very much the Shinkansen model. In the case of HS2, Euston being equivalent to Tokyo and Old Oak Common equivalent to Shinagawa or Ueno.

You could argue that the London end of HS1 is Shinkansen-esque too. Though beyond Dagenham it’s very much an LGV.

 

[Sad Sprinter]

The Shinkansen element of HS2 is at the London end. If it were to an LGV design at the London end, it would be merging onto the classic network somewhere in Zone 5 or Zone 6. Having a completely dedicated and operationally isolated line to new build platforms at a city centre terminal is very much the Shinkansen model. In the case of HS2, Euston being equivalent to Tokyo and Old Oak Common equivalent to Shinagawa or Ueno.

You could argue that the London end of HS1 is Shinkansen-esque too. Though beyond Dagenham it’s very much an LGV.

I think HS1 is a completely new-kind of British model HSR. Building a new "main line" with freight and local traffic, into an existing and repurposed Victorian station.

If we were doing the same with HS2, maybe we'd route it into Paddington, and have commuter services to Oxford/Milton Keynes. Maybe it would be four-track as well - and don't forget freight.

 

[Uncle Buck]

Shinkansen always attempts to cut through metropolitan centres first. Only when this is difficult would they consider alternatives.
This allowed Shinkansen to absolutely bully other means of transport. Consider the UK is pretty 'small', going from city centre to city centre is key for us too.
However, they are moving in favour of park and ride model in the newer lines. (where car ownership is less restricted, another topic there)
And they absolutely hate turn back stations.

This proposal would serve the same number of centres as the actual proposal- in both cases the line would run from London to Lancashire via Birmingham with branches to Liverpool and Manchester and hopefully Sheffield/Leeds. It would just take a slightly different route to get more connections, which, yes, would have a marginally detrimental impact on speeds.

 

[snowball]

A high speed route can't be within a mile of a motorway, to accommodate curves and junctions while being mostly on the surface.

The eastern arm of HS2 was proposed to run for much of its length within about 100m (less on some stretches) of the M42, A42, M1 and (after the abandonment of the Meadowhall route) M18.

 

[Shrop]

Yes, the transport corridor theory has never made sense to me either. A high speed route can't be within a mile of a motorway, to accommodate curves and junctions while being mostly on the surface. But even 100m away from some motorways is housing, which dictates tunnelling where you may not want to because of ground levels nearby. HS2 does thread the needle with a big station car park at the M42/M6 Coleshill Interchange, but only enabled by expensive junction rebuilds and viaducts.

A high speed route can't be within a mile of a motorway? Have you never even been on the Eurostar to Paris and seen the bits close to motorways on BOTH sides of the tunnel? The plan was to run close to the M1 where practical, and diverge or tunnel as necessary where it can't ...

 

[Bald Rick]

A high speed route can't be within a mile of a motorway? Have you never even been on the Eurostar to Paris and seen the bits close to motorways on BOTH sides of the tunnel? The plan was to run close to the M1 where practical, and diverge or tunnel as necessary where it can't ...

There’s an awful lot of buildings alongside the M1. Which is not the case for the M20 in Kent or A1 in northern France.

There was a *lot* of work done on the routing of HS2 by teams of professionals who studied all aspects of the implications of the route. I’m sure they will be delighted to hear that their years of study and work can be easily dismissed by an archair expert with a map and a pencil.

 

[Shrop]

There’s an awful lot of buildings alongside the M1. Which is not the case for the M20 in Kent or A1 in northern France.

There was a *lot* of work done on the routing of HS2 by teams of professionals who studied all aspects of the implications of the route. I’m sure they will be delighted to hear that their years of study and work can be easily dismissed by an archair expert with a map and a pencil.

I don't doubt that a *lot* of work was done on the routing of HS2, my comment was simply to say that it is possible for HSR to be built within a mile of a motorway. But since you mention easily dismissing the route choice, it would be very interesting to analyse the "years of study and work", however at this point it wouldn't really achieve much.

As for being an armchair expert, it can be quite informative to observe things as a product user (such as a rail customer). If one then has the opportunity to recount actual experiences to senior rail management, their reactions of disbelief can be quite amusing! I don't doubt that being a fly on the wall of many of the HS2 design meetings could also have been very informative, but then armchair experts don't usually get such privilege.

 

[HSTEd]

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.

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.

The thing is that these SCMaglev trains can accelerate so fast that I am not convinced that anything other than an all stops stopping pattern is worth it.
Skip stopping will reduce capacity unless overtaking places are put in - which then runs into the "maglev tracks can't switch fast enough" issue, the same as regular stopping patterns.

If we assume that the four intermediate stations between Tokyo and Nagoya are at equal spacings for the sake of simplicity, that leaves us with 286km and five "jumps" - so a stop spacing of ~57km.

Since the power conversion system is built into the track, SCMaglev is limited in acceleration only by passenger comfort. So let's just set it to a tube like 1.1m/s/s (information I have found suggest the real value is higher than this).
The train will accelerate from a standing start to 505kph (140m/s) in approximately 127 seconds. Call it 130 to account for reduced 'jerk'.
The train will have traversed ~8900m in that time.

8900x2 is ~17.8km in 260 seconds, leaving ~49.2km to be traversed at maximum speed. That maximum speed segment would be around 350 seconds, giving us ~610 seconds or so.

Make it up to 11 minutes for the dwell time, which won't be that long on such a short journey, and you would reach Nagoya in ~54-55 minutes.

This is substantially longer than the claimed ~40 minutes, but still utterly crushes the best the Nozomi can do.
The Nozomi seems to take around ~85-90 minutes today. A single seat ride might be attractive, but is it half an hour longer attractive, given that a Chuo Shinkansen operated in such a manner would be capable of a turn-up-and-go frequency?

 

[eldomtom2]

A single seat ride might be attractive, but is it half an hour longer attractive, given that a Chuo Shinkansen operated in such a manner would be capable of a turn-up-and-go frequency?

Japan in general seems to place a fairly low priority on one-seat rides - see the Nishi Kyushu Shinkansen, which was considered worth building even though its connection to the rest of the Shinkansen network has not been built (and possibly never will), meaning passengers have to change at least twice to get to a station on the regular Shinkansen network.

 

[MarkyT]

Japan in general seems to place a fairly low priority on one-seat rides - see the Nishi Kyushu Shinkansen, which was considered worth building even though its connection to the rest of the Shinkansen network has not been built (and possibly never will), meaning passengers have to change at least twice to get to a station on the regular Shinkansen network.

Yet to offer a one seat ride to Tokyo, JR East operates two mini Shinkansen routes extending from the trunk Tohoku line over converted former narrow gauge routes. Techniques of mixed gauge and converting local services to standard gauge are employed. The HS trains are specially constructed to fit within the smaller loading gauge of the classic infrastructure and run at typical narrow gauge speeds on those sections while being fully capable of keeping up with the regular 'captive' trains on the HS trunk, indeed on the Akita Shinkansen, the E6 units used routinely couple up with full-size E5 units at Morioka to form full-length trains for the sprint to Tokyo.

Glacial progress on Nishi Kyushu is more political/budgetary than otherwise. Unlike the already built and operating section through mountains out of Nagasaki, the remaining eastern part of the Shinkansen between the current railhead at Takeo Onsen and Fukuoka is not technically challenging, traversing fairly flat, though well-populated terrain. After abortive plans to use gauge-changing trains, maybe gauge conversion of the existing infrastructure or using mixed gauge might be considered again for linking the isolated section of new line. The current line is of low quality however, with many small stations, level crossings and some single line sections. Progressive improvements might be made, removing single lines and level crossings, splicing in new fast sections and platforms on slows/loops to speed up expresses, but that would all be expensive and disruptive, no doubt.

Saga Prefecture has objected to all new construction options tabled to date but has suggested following the expressway to the north of the historic town. This probably reduces costs and scale of downtown demolition but removes the possibility of a central station in the town. It seems funding conventions for Shinkansens involve prefectures financing route sections within their jurisdictions and Saga objects to the amount being demanded compared to how much Nagasaki has or will contribute. I expect a compromise will eventually be reached.

 

[LYuen]

Japan in general seems to place a fairly low priority on one-seat rides - see the Nishi Kyushu Shinkansen, which was considered worth building even though its connection to the rest of the Shinkansen network has not been built (and possibly never will), meaning passengers have to change at least twice to get to a station on the regular Shinkansen network.

They get away with extremely convenient local rail connections. Like the station cluster concept in train tickets in the UK, standard Shinkansen tickets include local train connections at both ends. (Let say up to zone 3 of the tube).
As commuter trains in Japan run to a metro standard of frequency and punctuality, connecting trains are no harder than changing Tube lines.

In the business sense, Shinkansen keeps passengers in the JR loop - commuter trains brings passengers to Shinkansen, and Shinkansen also feeds passengers to local lines. One cannot live without the other.

 

[eldomtom2]

In the business sense, Shinkansen keeps passengers in the JR loop - commuter trains brings passengers to Shinkansen, and Shinkansen also feeds passengers to local lines. One cannot live without the other.

Sort of. Outside the major urban areas, when newly built Shinkansen lines parallel existing conventional lines the conventional lines have often been divested from JR and given to "third sector" companies owned and funded by local governments.