All main political parties seem to support this £30bn (€35bn / US$46bn) project to construct a high speed rail line northwards from London towards Birmingham and, in phase 2, to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow; and to Leeds, York and Edinburgh.
Unfortunately, any reasonably direct route from London towards Birmingham passes through the Chilterns, an area of outstanding natural beauty and, more to the point, stuffed full of very rich people's country houses.
They all ask why £30bn is being spent to destroy their tranquility and to cut twenty minutes off the time of the London-Birmingham round trip (here's the proposed terminus in Birmingham, ironically one of the first railway terminii ever built and currently disused -- the Birmingham Curzon Street terminus):
Of course, they're misrepresenting the project which has two goals: firstly to relieve congestion on the west coast mainline which is, we are assured, nearing capacity. Secondly to form the first phase of HS2 -- and the real time savings are in the much longer journeys (London-Glasgow, for example).
This butters no parsnips with the posh people who will not benefit and, in good English style, they've started a campaign:
Transport Secretary Hammond is apparently going to announce on Monday that the HS2 route has been finalised, and it is indeed going to slice through the Chilterns.
This is all very sad in some ways: here's an image to remind ourselves of how far behind we are -- a TGV on test in France in the mid-1970s:
Although if you wanted to go back further in time we might argue we were ahead of the game. Here's the disused trackbed of the Great Central Railway, London via the East Midlands to the north, built with as few curves and gradients as possible, and to the massive Euro-gauge rather than the restricted British mainline gauge:
Unfortunately we dug most of it up in the 1960s, when we thought motorways were the brave new way forward (although we were thirty years late with those, too).
4 comments:
AAAH! I always wondered what that old building out on the wasteland near New St station was. Now I know!
I'd like to see how they plan to route the new line into their without it tripping up the WCML. Unless they plan to share a section of it leading up to the new station?
I think the plan was for it to come in on a viaduct (the costs for HS lines entering cities are wildly disproportionate to the distances -- think of the cost of Crossrail).
I suspect this plan will be "value engineered" and Curzon Street may not survive as the terminus.
What I don't understand is why it must have Euston as its terminus: a station already congested and with serious capacity problems on its approach roads. Meanwhile, Marylebone stands half-disused, and with (I'd have thought) ample track capacity northward. Would it not have been cheaper and no more environmentally unfriendly to reinstate the GCR route, significant sections of which still stand derelict?
(But I'm just an engineer, not a planner).
Marylebone has surprisingly limited capacity and, just as important, has very few onward travel options. The station itself is now heavily constrained by major buildings around it. And I suspect it doesn't have the space available for 400m platforms to be constructed before the lines get squeezed together to go into the cuttings and tunnels under Lords and St John's Wood. The original Euston proposals were for I think 10 HS platforms. Multiply that width by 400m plus additional concourse space in front to cope with very large passenger volumes, and the footprint available at Marylebone would be dwarfed.
Euston has stacks of onward journey options and also has proximity to St Pancras in its favour (there's a separate proposal to build a people mover of some sort between the two HS terminii).
But Euston is a useful terminus for a couple of other reasons than onward connections: firstly it is relatively easy to very substantially increase capacity at it with some (relatively uncontroversial) demolitions alongside the station. Secondly it is already overdue redevelopment, so you can do both at once. Thirdly and relatively trivially it is the "traditional" starting point for journeys to the north-west, and sometimes it's just easier to go with the grain of people's mental geography.
The GCR route is one of the great lost opportunities from over-pruning the railway network in the 1960s. The obsession at that time with removing "duplicate" routes meant all sorts of lines that, today, would be immensely helpful in easing congestion have been irrevocably destroyed. I suspect that so much of the trackbed has been built over at critical points that the costs of restoring it would be not dissimilar from building a brand-new HS route (which would not have any historical legacy issues to deal with so would likely provide better value).
But I have no evidence for that, only a suspicion.
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