Yes imagine the main Piccadilly station without most of the Cross Country, West Coast and Transport Pennine. It suggests a reason why nothing else has been done re the Castlefield corridor. Add in longer trains limiting platforms at Oxford Road. You could almost see a tube style /Cross rail frequency there
So I think cross country will still run on the classic line so I am not sure that counts. But transpennine and west coast is what 5 trains an hour between them per direction?
Yet, I could see some form of Cross Country "HS2 line" service that offered a far faster service. I thought the objective for Trans Pennine was every 10 minutes..... But there wasn't room for them all, and some routed via Victoria (which can get quite busy). Indeed a tunnel under Manchester wouldn't be cheap. But would it sort out Manchester' s railway needs for the next 100 years, rather than constraining demand? Time will tell.
Using the two existing Liverpool - Manchester lines I think you are probably limited to a service every 15 minutes. But with a Piccadilly-Salford tunnel all of those could definitely serve Piccadilly.
I wonder how much of the lines out towards Guide Bridge could be enhanced , for TPE? At least they wouldn't have to go over the Piccadilly throat
Digging longer tunnels under the Chilterns to appease the NIMBYS and failing to properly estimate the cost have been major drivers, but those increases would have been the same regardless of the speed.
Other countries ‘operate’ at 300 or 320kph, but their lines are designed for faster. The French have been building LGVs at 350kph for some time. The Italians specified the Frecciarossa 1000 to be capable of 360kph back in the 2000s.
Paris to Rennes is how far?
AKA putting in inadequate numbers of intermediate stops.
Maybe some of that is because they thought a speed of 400km/h would only cost 9% more than 300 and they were wrong?
Yes but that is also the very limit of what you could even slightly plausibly do. And most likely it’s a Morpeth bypass and other small changes rather than a whole new line.
So the shortest limit of plausibility French route is about the same distance as London-Preston.
I doubt think the tunnels really have been major drivers. Boring has gone pretty well and they are fairly run of the mill in tunneling terms (even if they had odd ventilation and pressure suppression arrangements).
Rennes was itself an extension, it used to be even shorter, terminating for several decades at Le Mans. Le Mans is roughly the same distance as Birmingham, but with a fraction of the population. It is a branch from another line, but so too will be Birmingham.
A branch from another much longer line - and there’s the point. England is a small country- the strategic case for very high speed rail is weak.
The French do have the advantage that their rural population density is much much lower than Britains, they also had (and by British standards still have) oodles of capacity going into Paris, both of those allowed them to build high speed lines extremely cheaply.
I know we agree on this. But for others the fact that you started off with 95% of the population on the route opposed definitely makes this more expensive. Especially when with the 10km curve radius and 56km vertical curve radius it’s nigh on impossible to adjust the route over public concerns.
The much longer line in the British equivalent being the connection north. But it wasn't a much longer line when it opened, was it? It opened to Tours in 1990 and the extension to Bordeaux wasn't opened until 2017.
Former railway alignments, at least one of which (GCML) is barely in living memory at this point.
The case rested on the staged completion of a long line with branches (many at conventional speed, initially at least), with consequent time savings only realisable in a geographically large country.
With LGV Est which was built to 350km/h standards it is at least somewhat plausible that eventually the high speed line might be extended through to Budapest with Stuttgart, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna and Bratislava being intermediate stopping points along the route.
Building along the M40 which is already a noisy scar on the landscape would have definitely attracted less opposition than the current route.
The current proposal for the Aylesbury link (which includes a ludicrous amount of extras and gold plating) is £5bn.
You're probably right on that, but would it have been possible to follow the M40 with a 300/320km/h alignment?
CPRE believe that an M1 alignment plus four tracking the classic line into Birmingham and a Stafford bypass was possible for £15bn in 2019.
You'd be surprised. I suggest you look into the history of the M40, where the route had to be altered due to vehement opposition.
There may be a motorway there already, but that's no guarantee that residents will accept any further encroachment on the green spaces it runs through.
And to show a railway example, the betuweroute freight railway in the Netherlands faced fierce opposition despite almost entirely following the A15 motorway.
I have literally quoted the chief NIMBY organisation supporting an M1 alignment.
You mean Otmoor where they wanted to build it through a foggy nature reserve. Yes that was bonkers.
Given how fiercely motorway widening projects are opposed, I think it's guaranteed that residents will not accept any further expansion of the transport corridor.
Presumably because it didn’t serve passenger trains.
M1 doesn't run through the Oxfordshire chilterns though. Key point of the 'M' in NIMBY is that they're often quite happy for it to be in somebody else's backyard
Motorways are extremely noisy. Much more so than a rail line.
The CPRE is a national organisation.