18th November 2021
In the early 1990s, the comedian Jasper Carrott opened a charity shop on the High Street in Oxford.
Commenting on the (then) new M40 extension, he quipped to the Oxford worthies:
“I hear Birmingham is twenty minutes nearer now.
“You must be delighted”.
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The problem with with the public and policy discussion about High Speed 2 is that the emphasis is on speed.
Some of us may be happier that Birmingham would be a few minutes nearer, while others may be happier that it would be quicker to get away.
But the important thig is not about speed, but capacity.
Whomsoever badged the branding for this project as being about speed blundered badly.
It is really about the amount of stuff that can be sent by train.
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I have mixed feelings about High Speed 2.
As a Brummie and midlander, I welcome the increased capacity, as it would be a significant benefit.
But as an instinctive environmentalist, I dislike the effect on the countryside.
And so if it were only about speed, High Speed 2 would not be worth a single tree in Warwickshire.
But if it is about capacity – and thereby taking freight away from the lorries on the roads – then the environmental perspective is more complicated.
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It may be that you think that a cost-benefit analysis means that High Speed 2 should be dropped for the north of Birmingham.
But before one conducts any cost-benefit analysis one had to know what the costs and benefits actually are.
And the benefit of High Speed 2 is not speed – a few minutes here and there – but significantly increased capacity.
You may think that even if the benefit of High Speed 2 is correctly identified as increased capacity (and not speed) that the environmental and other costs more than offset the benefit.
You may be right or you may be wrong.
Views may differ.
But at least it would be a true cost-benefit analysis.
Rather than a comparison of an important thing with an unimportant thing.
The environment matters; increased freight capacity matters; but speed does not matter.
Even if it would be delightful that Birmingham is twenty minutes nearer.
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There are 2 important wayz in which speed DOES matter for HS2: 1 – that’s what makes it competitive with air between London and Scotland. Switching them to train saves masses of CO2; 2 – (for the now-mothballed Eastern leg) by being faster than the current trains between London and Sheffield / Leeds, it can take the express trains off the Midland and East Coast main lines, thus freeing space for much better inter-urban and local services.
Birmingham New Street is the hub of Britain’s inter-city rail network.
Not many people know that … one of whom being Sion Simon, a former Labour MP for Erdington, Birmingham, and Labour Party candidate for West Midlands.
By the early 1990s, it was clear that New Street, the hub of Britain’s inter-city network was becoming ever more of a bottleneck. British Rail considered something needed to be done to create additional capacity at track level at New Street.
As part of a rational exercise as to how to proceed ie not coming up with a solution and then casting around for grounds to justify it, Your Honour, BR undertook a traffic survey of passengers using the station. They discovered that most inter-city passengers did not start or end their journeys at New Street. When not passing through by train, they were changing trains. For them, an inter-change station outside of Birmingham city centre would be perfectly acceptable and might even prove more passenger friendly than the existing station.
Passengers travelling between London and Birmingham by inter-city were the exceptional group, but even they might not be inconvenienced by a service that whilst still stopping at New Street would also stop at a new station (in the Heartlands of East Birmingham).
Obviously, moving the bulk of the inter-city services out of New Street would create the opportunity to increase the number of regional and local services using the station.
There is a credible case for arguing that the iconic HS2 Birmingham terminus has not just been located in the wrong place, but has definitely not been integrated effectively into the inter-city, regional and local rail networks at the heart of which Birmingham sits.
“In 1976, BR commissioned a study which concluded that rail closures had a significant adverse effect on the quality of life of many former passengers. Only a third of people who had travelled beyond their line’s junction with the main line on a reasonably regular basis continued to do so and those without cars tended to abandon non-essential travel altogether.”
Last Trains: Dr Beeching and the death of rural England, Charles Loft.
There had prior to 1976, it seems, been an assumption that folk who travelled by a branch line to a junction and then took a train from there would continue to do so, if the branch line closed. They would travel to the junction by another form of transport and then catch a train from there. In reality, in such a scenario, most once they had got into their cars drove to their ultimate destination.
When the location of stations for HS2 was under consideration, did the planners take into account the reasonable assumption that maximising integration into the existing rail network would increase the return on the proposed investment by encouraging greater passenger travel across that existing network?
To put it in the language a Boris Johnson might understand, were they looking to get the biggest bang for our pound?
https://jodatu.wordpress.com/2021/06/04/birmingham-new-street-is-the-hub-of-britains-inter-city-network-not-many-people-know-that/
High Speed refers to the loading gauge. But yes, the naming from the start so a snazzy logo could be created was a huge error.
True, although speed and capacity are related. Since the track is a shared resource, if every journey uses it for less time, then more journeys can be made in a period.
That’s not really the case, as the whole point of HS2 is to stop track being a shared resource between express and stopping services. Making stopping services a bit faster doesn’t make much difference in capacity, but separating non-stop fast services and slower stopping services on different, non shared track means you can run far more of both services than you could before.
Correct: but that is already the case for much of the southern third of the West Coast Main Line. The lengths over which extra capacity would be useful are quite short. And in many cases, such as between Birmingham International and New Street, could much more easily be increased and bring other, urban travel, benefits, by building tram routes rather than very expensive high speed lines, and reducng the stopping train service which is a low-value use of the present resource. JM
No: a faster train needs a longer length of track clear ahead of it, so that it can brake from its higher speed. So while it passes a point in less time, it prevents other trains from using the track for the same time – or longer. Compare the Victoria Line. JM
I would add frequency to capacity as more significant factors than speed.
A speedy rail service every few hours is no consolation, if you have just missed the latest train.
Fewer, faster services on the London Underground or on over ground commuter routes would probably not meet with wide passenger approval.
I gather surveys have shown passengers will trade speed for frequency.
Moreover, I note the usual canard going around that services on some lines were faster in the past.
Quite often, it was a limited stop service once a day, every week day, in each direction, primarily for executives.
There being a reason why they were called expresses.
The other services on the line, invariably stopping at every station being a lot slower and of a lesser quality.
Add the journey times of those services to the express and the average journey times rarely compare well with 2021.
And, any way, steam (or diesel) locomotives are hardly environmentally friendly.
Capacity only became the main issue later. If it had been properly planned and proposed a 21st century rail network that served the `UK it might have stood a better chance.
The time saved argument was quickly rubbished. Many major cities and towns were left of or downgraded service. Parkway stations in the East Midlands encouraged additional car access, destruction of woodland and areas of outstanding natural beauty led to significant costs in tunnelling, the environmental and carbon arguments have never been properly calculated.
The proposals have been criticised for moving the goalposts many times it is hardly surprising that many consider it a white elephant and a job creation scheme for major contractors.
Is this the first of more cuts and will this mark the return of the red wall?
The Red Wall might like the Government not wasting their money on publicly funded capital investments that impact negatively on the value of the homes for which they have worked hard all their lives and lessen their aesthetic enjoyment of the same.
The older the voter, the more likely they were to vote Tory at the 2019 General Election.
And NIMBYism and BANANA are not, like some in our (il)liberal metropolitan elite media would like to think, solely Southern vices.
I gather they are to be found Oop North and in the Midlands, too.
Cuts?
I think our old friend, Hard Brexit, and especially the labour and skill shortages it has brought in its wake has put paid to levelling up, whatever that means this week, just about everywhere.
I thought Ben Houchen winning on Teesside was something he would come to regret.
I did think it would take longer than a few months before he was wishing he was Slartibartfast.
According to Lord Jim O’Neill, former Treasury minister, the project was given the go ahead on the grounds of capacity and the speed aspect was promoted by Lord Adonis, and he’s still making the same mistake. The fast lines mean intercity traffic can use them (in addition to freight) and leave existing lines for stopping trains for local traffic.
And I learned all this listening to radio 4 this morning.
Again, if the objective had at the start been capacity, not speed, a quite different scheme would have been planned. Instead, the alignment for 400km/h (to prove that the British could go faster than the French and not for any good economic reason) made the route very much more expensive to engineer, and put long distances into tunnel to make it very straight.
The capacity argument was only deployed after all that had been decided, when the weakness of the economic case for speed became clear – both its cost and the limited revenue increase. It is what might be called post hoc rationalisation. JM
Have you any documentation to back up your assertion? The dept. for Transport document published in 2013 states that capacity was the main issue.
I know how you like dogs who catch up with cars and wonder what to do next …
“The bane of those with funds to distribute (whether grants, loans or similar) or contracts that they wish people to deliver for them are those applicants who chase after every passing opportunity like a dog will often chase after passing cars.
Both are doing so to little useful purpose.”
https://jodatu.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/is-gbslep-and-its-partners-chasing-after-passing-cars/
“GBSLEP has now kindly offered to respond to my questions in detail so I have submitted them to GBSLEP today (Thursday 6th March) and I hope to publish their responses in due course.”
Reader, they never did …
https://jodatu.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/let-sleeping-dogs-lie-gbslep-and-the-hs2-training-college/
And, finally.
https://jodatu.wordpress.com/2014/02/27/is-the-site-birmingham-city-centres-proposed-hs2-station-the-best-option/
https://jodatu.wordpress.com/2014/03/16/613/
The problem in the UK is that major infra-structure projects whose construction timescale is measured in a decade, or more, become political football’s rather than settled policy. We need a much more mature approach to the cost / benefit analysis of such projects and a will to see them through. The UK has a short term approach to far too many issues.
Exactly. We live on a small island, blessed with an inheritance of Victorian infrastructure which has turned into a curse because (apart perhaps from the roads) we haven’t invested sufficiently in maintaining and updating it. Drains, trains, public parks, town halls, police stations, etc etc. What happened to the Victorian attitude of building for the future?
We should have had TGV/ICE/ETR/AVE lines from London to Edinburgh and Glasgow and Cardiff and Swansea and Birmingham and Manchester and Liverpool and Leeds and Newcastle decades ago. Yes, it involves building new rail lines across countryside. So be it. Like the Channel Tunnel, after it is done, we will wonder why it took us so long.
I imagine I will be sticking to Chiltern between London and Birmingham as someone who has used their service from the outset; likes a single class of rolling stock; the excellent passenger service; the human scale of Marylebone and as a Great Western Railway enthusiast.
“I use their services regularly because I find their service to be safe, reliable, welcoming and valuable for money. And that is why I am recommending it to you. Is it the best? I do not know, but it is proof of what a company founded by managers who used to work for British Rail could have done (and could do) in the public sector.”
https://jodatu.wordpress.com/2017/09/29/you-say-private-jeremycorbyn-says-public-i-say-public-or-private-our-railways-are-poorly-managed-run/
A good point, but it applies to passengers as well. It is surprising how much the lack of dignity, comfort and privacy rankles when, year after year, you are forced to travel on an overcrowded, unreliable line between two cities as vibrant and important as Leeds and Manchester. It’s rarely possible to work effectively in such conditions, and that alone suggests that the concept of the Northern Powerhouse is barely grasped by those in the Westminster bubble.
While upgrading works are in progress there will be neither speed nor capacity for there will be no trains running.
To create new lines might be hideously expensive but doing so would avoid decades of disruption. And, in the future, there would be an alternative way of getting from A to B by train when one line or other was down for maintenance.
The fewer cars, trucks and planes the better. The more trains the better. And if trains can carry more bicycles including electric bicycles that would be even better still.
The sad bit is that the mothballed Birmingham to Leeds branch of HS2 did deliver speed where it was needed as well as capacity. I’m very familiar with that route and it crawls at the moment! There’s a genuine opinion among railway buffs that the eastern branch of HS2 was the one bit that actually delivered something substantial to a part of England that’s been allowed to fall behind. Much better connections, freight and passenger, between Yorkshire, East Midlands and West Midlands would be a game changer. Sadly, the money ran out because the HS2 planners went west first. Regular travellers, like me, know that Manchester’s rail connections southwards are already really very good.
Agreed and the Manchester – Leeds link was also important. I have argued since about 2010 that HS2 was an irrelevance. The Northern and Midlands connections are the key and linked to commuter and bus networks so all are served.
If London Birmingham was to be built at all it should have connected to Heathrow and HS1 too.
You are quite correct in saying that increased capacity is the best justification for HS2, but it is more complicated, as other replies have explained. From an environmental perspective, speed matters a great deal. ”Normal” fast railways minimise curves, which impose speed limitations, and gradients, which do the same. Both are vastly more important for railways than roads, which is why conventional railways follow contours to minimise cuttings and embankments. A high speed railway line, aiming for much higher average speeds, is hugely more environmentally damaging, because it cannot deviate to avoid SSIs, ancient woodland etc, and must cut through contours with bigger cuttings and bigger embankments. Add the increased space occupied for safety, and the result is far more environmentally damaging, for a rather marginal time saving, on the relatively short distances involved in England.
The title of your post is absolutely correct, and that’s the big difference between HS2 and HS1. What we need is fit-for-purpose rail infrastructure, irrespective of what it’s called. And don’t let Crossrail’s project management team get involved…
Sadly HS2 as conceived and particularly the first stage, is unlikely to free up significant capacity. It is passenger only and intended to provide a premium service. The time is a sales point however the real problem in getting people back to the railways is cost and to an extent comfort compared to domestic flights. I doubt providing a premium passenger service between London and Birmingham is either going to increase use nor encourage freight back to rail from road. It certainly will do nothing for the North of England and Scotland in terms of journey speed, capacity or cost!
To my mind the real problem is a mean minded penny pinching attitude to infrastructure.
As I understand it the French approach to motorway and rail construction is for the technocrats to draw a line on the map and the politicians to sort out the wailing. This is usually done by paying decent compensation combined with ‘p&*s off’.
Our approach is to shilly shally around encouraging protest and whining and taking ages and ages to decide with £billions spent on quibbling. Then at the last knockings those on the ground get a measly payout with government lawyers doing their best to knock down the price. Small wonder no one wants infrastructure.
Is it all worth it – just ride the Shinkansen.
Interesting and informed discussion. Separating high-speed intercity from stopping services is obvious … now who was it that closed “duplicate” main lines? Bring back the Great Central! Meanwhile, those of us south west of Bristol (Parkway, not TM) still await electric trains of any kind. And an alternative to a single main line that gets washed away by the sea from time to time. So much for the north-south divide.
There’s nothing wrong with HS2 except what it costs. And what it costs is far too much for what it delivers, whatever it is you think it is for.
The government’s business case built on speed was laughable and everyone laughed at it. So if our confirmation bias is that we like it, we look for something else to satisfy our emotional need for a justification. So plenty of people instead put up this “it’s about the capacity, stupid” argument. But there is a reason the government didn’t run that one. It’s actually an even weaker argument.
Contrary to popular rumour, we have plenty of intercity spare capacity. Pre-pandemic, peak intercity services, when full fares apply, are mostly not full. It’s only around 10%-15% that were full at a few honeypot times like Friday evenings (outbound direction). Meanwhile, trains can be full at less favoured times, but only because the operators set the fares low to fill the trains. If you buy your ticket at the right moment, and take a less attractive time, you can pay very little indeed, as we all know. And many people fancy the journey and buy the ticket at this low price.
So are we expanding capacity because 10%-15% of peak intercity trains are full? Or because the trains which have been filled with cheap fare passengers are full? To expanding capacity at extremely high cost to relieve only a minor proportion of full peak trains, and to have a lot more space for a lot more low fare passengers, comes nowhere near justifying the very high cost of this railway. They probably don’t even come near adding up to justify building a much cheaper conventional speed railway. Because if it’s about the capacity, not speed, then why aren’t we building an adequate and much cheaper conventional railway to supply the capacity? And with lower carbon output? But no one argues for that, because it doesn’t add up.
Journeys such as London-Manchester already have a mode-share for rail as high as the TGV from Paris to Lyon, among the highest rail mode-share of all city pairs. So there isn’t much more mode share for rail to take on such a city pair as London-Manchester. So in that sense, it isn’t about the speed. So one of the main things that increasing line speed will do on a journey like that is to increase carbon output per journey.
But there are plenty of other city pairs where it is about the speed. Rail mode-share is low on many key city pairs in the north like Manchester-Leeds, Leeds-Sheffield, Liverpool-anywhere, etc, because it is so slow you’d be better off in your car. Birmingham-Manchester is a poor journey by either mode, and a major demand increase as well as shift would come from a large increase in rail performance on that route.
These are the reasons why increasing line-speeds between cities of the North, and also to selected Midlands cities, where these are currently slow, are the most worthwhile intercity rail investments we can make, much better than HS2.
HS2 would be easier to justify if we could build high speed railways at the costs they achieve on the continent. Macron recently released €15bn for new high speed railways, and expected to get over 1000km for it. Even if it has a 100% overrun, it will still be a fraction the cost per km of our railways.
Happy to credit that great railwayman Chris Stokes for his excellent analysis of these matters, that this considerably borrows.
In the UK the short distance over which it makes sense to run HS train is such that it makes sense to only a few places, where substitutes are a)slower trains, b)planes (including the interface to the airports) and c) car. In addition, the need for a decent piece of rail infrastructure across the pennines to Leeds Bradford and Sheffield from Manchester is obvious and should be basic remedial work for levelling of any kind, up or down.