HS2

[lmsforever]

No I don't blame HS2 for the current situation that is the fault of useless planners with heads in the sand ,but I expect it will be busier when construction starts but I hope it will not to bad.  We have approximately three maybe four years and we can go to MK  by train so that is a bright star in the future.

[298]

54 minutes ago, lmsforever said:

So there are to be road movements further smashing our badly maintained roads to pieces  okay when you report a bad pothole it is repaired but they seem to collapse fairly quickly .The new link road from the A418 to Butlers Cross  is about the only good thing to come out of HS2 for Aylesbury  as I have said before we are collapsing under more and more traffic from new estates and through traffic that should not be there.There seems to be a great deal of interest in the new service to MK  which bodes well for the future ,but we will have to suffer ,a station at Calvert would seem to be a must ifHS2 is to help curb car use.

 

How would you feel about a commuter station on HS2 somewhere in the Vale of Aylesbury...? Assuming somehow spare capacity has been found on the route, you'd end up with a massive hub with thousands of car park spaces, new connecting road schemes and a whole new town with people moving onto the area. Not exactly the kind of thing that would gain alot of local support...

[Grovenor]

Quote

,a station at Calvert would seem to be a must ifHS2 is to help curb car use.

The HS2 designers do seem to have a major aversion to intermediate stations, citing line capacity etc.

It is noteworthy that the Tokaido Shinkansen has quite a lot of intermediate stations and a mix of all stations, limited stop and express services, around 365 services per day. But the stations do need long platform loops so add a lot of cost. Would the likely traffic from Aylesbury be worth it?

[Joseph_Pestell]

1 hour ago, melmerby said:

You shouldn't be burning wet wood on a log burner anyway. It's the cheap rubbish sold by corner shops, markets stalls etc.

It's far from ideal.

The chap next door has a log burner and he gets all my wood offcuts, most is constructional timber which is kiln dried.

Most of the time his chimney doesn't put out much smoke.

Great if you have a free supply of kiln dried timber. But most of us would rely on seasoned timber which, apparently, won't be allowed.

[Trog]

17 minutes ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

Great if you have a free supply of kiln dried timber. But most of us would rely on seasoned timber which, apparently, won't be allowed.

 

it is the sale of wet UN-seasoned timber that is to be banned. Seasoned timber that has dried naturally must be better than kiln dried timber, as you are saving the fuel used to heat the kiln.

[Fat Controller]

15 minutes ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

Great if you have a free supply of kiln dried timber. But most of us would rely on seasoned timber which, apparently, won't be allowed.

My reading is that it is 'wet wood' ( ie freshly-cut, or which hasn't been seasoned for a year.) My supplier assures me that the loads I get from him have seasoned in a barn for at least a year. I find they burn cleanly, and not too quickly, which suggests to me that he is telling the truth.  We buy two lots a year, so any spare gets extra seasoning over the summer.

A far cry from our old open fire, our sole source of heat and hot-water when we lived in the north-east; during the miners' strike, we ran on a mixture of 'green' black poplar and 'sea-coal'. Neither provided much in the way of heat.

[melmerby]

26 minutes ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

Great if you have a free supply of kiln dried timber. But most of us would rely on seasoned timber which, apparently, won't be allowed.

Yes it will. Only wet wood is banned

[Mike Storey]

Interesting stuff guys, but what on earth does it have to do with HS2????

[Zomboid]

2 hours ago, Grovenor said:

The HS2 designers do seem to have a major aversion to intermediate stations, citing line capacity etc.

It is noteworthy that the Tokaido Shinkansen has quite a lot of intermediate stations and a mix of all stations, limited stop and express services, around 365 services per day. But the stations do need long platform loops so add a lot of cost. Would the likely traffic from Aylesbury be worth it?

It works on the Tokaido because it's an end to end line. The service I remember from last Easter (and according to Google it's the same for tomorrow) is a regular pattern of 10 trains per hour (6 fast, 2 semi fast, 2 slow).

HS2 is ultimately a 3 branch system, so once you've got the fast trains on each branch there's not a lot of space for anything else. So an intermediate station between London and Birmingham would either need to be like Shin-Yokohama where everything stops, have a really long 4 track section (and 200mph pointwork), or would have a serious impact upon line capacity.

 

It's actually more like the Tohoku/ Joetsu/ Hokuriku Shinkansen, which is a 3 branch system, and where the 3 routes share tracks all trains call at all stations (Tokyo, Ueno & Omiya). Services on each branch are noticeably less frequent than on the Tokaido too, the total of all three seems to be about 12tph including portion worked trains on the Akita and Yamagata lines.

 

Would a station at Aylesbury justify every single train calling there? Because it would probably need to.

Edited February 23, 2020 by Zomboid

[black and decker boy]

As 298 says, be careful what you wish for.

 

Aylesbury Garden Town will bring over 16000 new houses, mainly on a southern arc from Bierton past Aston Clinton to Weston Turville & Stoke Mandeville.

 

A Station on HS2 at Calvert combined with EW rail and the Ox-Can expressway is likely to generate a new town of 30000 or 50000 new houses, stretching Aylesbury far to the north and changing the Vale forever.

[Mike Storey]

1 hour ago, black and decker boy said:

As 298 says, be careful what you wish for.

 

Aylesbury Garden Town will bring over 16000 new houses, mainly on a southern arc from Bierton past Aston Clinton to Weston Turville & Stoke Mandeville.

 

A Station on HS2 at Calvert combined with EW rail and the Ox-Can expressway is likely to generate a new town of 30000 or 50000 new houses, stretching Aylesbury far to the north and changing the Vale forever.

 

All very true, possibly. But, even when adding the present catchment, it does not amount to a sufficiently large catchment for a major high speed stop, especially when considering most of the catchment will have access to other stations/lines into London anyway,which is where a lot of them will be going. There are unlikely to be many wanting to head North on a regular basis. It does not really add up as a destination either.

[Edwin_m]

2 hours ago, Mike Storey said:

 

All very true, possibly. But, even when adding the present catchment, it does not amount to a sufficiently large catchment for a major high speed stop, especially when considering most of the catchment will have access to other stations/lines into London anyway,which is where a lot of them will be going. There are unlikely to be many wanting to head North on a regular basis. It does not really add up as a destination either.

And EWR to MK or Oxford are alternatives (although slower) for those that do want to head north.  

[melmerby]

4 hours ago, Mike Storey said:

Interesting stuff guys, but what on earth does it have to do with HS2????

Nothing.

Unless it's going to be wood powered.

In a roundabout way it might be.

Edited February 23, 2020 by melmerby

[Ron Ron Ron]

35 minutes ago, melmerby said:

Nothing.

Unless it's going to be wood powered.

In a roundabout way it might be.

 

I just twigged, that brings a whole new meaning to "Branch Line".

 

 

.

[melmerby]

Groan.......

[Edwin_m]

8 hours ago, Ron Ron Ron said:

 

I just twigged, that brings a whole new meaning to "Branch Line".

 

 

.

I think you're barking up the wrong tree.  HS2 is a main plank of government policy.  

[The Stationmaster]

19 hours ago, Grovenor said:

The HS2 designers do seem to have a major aversion to intermediate stations, citing line capacity etc.

It is noteworthy that the Tokaido Shinkansen has quite a lot of intermediate stations and a mix of all stations, limited stop and express services, around 365 services per day. But the stations do need long platform loops so add a lot of cost. Would the likely traffic from Aylesbury be worth it?

While I think this particular horse has long since bolted from the stable I definitely wouldn't see an HS2 station at Calvert as being there for commuter use into London but for longer distance travel in the opposite direction and providing a northern connection out of/into East-West rail.   Clearly there would be local use which would inevitably require car parking space, but specifically targetted againsy London commuting by pricing.

 

The SNCF LGV intermediate stations have produced very mixed results.  On LGV Nord 'Picardy Parkway', as some of us irreverently christened it, took a very long time to build up any sort of ridership at all and as far as i now it became mainly a station used for journeys to/from Paris.  Calais Frethun, notwithstanding excellent connectional facilities (albeit not exactly providing much in the way of connecting trains for a number of years) was probably more of a political station to keep the good bughers of Calais quiet than a sensible commercial investment - at least for its first 6 years when it remained lightly used on the LGV side.

[Edwin_m]

42 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

While I think this particular horse has long since bolted from the stable I definitely wouldn't see an HS2 station at Calvert as being there for commuter use into London but for longer distance travel in the opposite direction and providing a northern connection out of/into East-West rail.   

But where's the demand for connections?  Anyone going north from Oxford or Bicester or MK will find the direct services to Birmingham from those places quicker than making a connection at Calvert, despite the speed of the HS2 leg.  The same applies from beyond Oxford, perhaps less so from beyond MK given the connection would have to be at Bletchley instead so probably onto a slower train.  But the further east you get, the fewer people will want to make the journey in the first place and the more likely any that do want to will have a more direct route to their northern destinations.  That just leaves Winslow and Islip, plus any new EWR stations in the area resulting from new development - who would probably access any HS2 station by other means given the shorter distance.  

Edited February 24, 2020 by Edwin_m

[Fat Controller]

4 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

While I think this particular horse has long since bolted from the stable I definitely wouldn't see an HS2 station at Calvert as being there for commuter use into London but for longer distance travel in the opposite direction and providing a northern connection out of/into East-West rail.   Clearly there would be local use which would inevitably require car parking space, but specifically targetted againsy London commuting by pricing.

 

The SNCF LGV intermediate stations have produced very mixed results.  On LGV Nord 'Picardy Parkway', as some of us irreverently christened it, took a very long time to build up any sort of ridership at all and as far as i now it became mainly a station used for journeys to/from Paris.  Calais Frethun, notwithstanding excellent connectional facilities (albeit not exactly providing much in the way of connecting trains for a number of years) was probably more of a political station to keep the good bughers of Calais quiet than a sensible commercial investment - at least for its first 6 years when it remained lightly used on the LGV side.

The 'Gare du Betteraves' was curiously sited, being built some miles south of where a conventional line (from Amiens to Tergnier, IIRC) passed under the LGV. It was, however, very convenient for a proposed motorway, which was completed more than a decade later.

You'd have a surprise if you visited Frethun, Mike. The Regional Authority (Les Hauts de France, inexplicably) subsidises commuter services to Lille, using some of the spare TGVs from Lille (they only came out on Fridays). There is a two-way traffic in students, as some faculties of the University of Lille are at Boulogne and Calais. The fields on the 'Up' side have been surfaced to provide car parking, but even then, it could be a trek from car-park to train. A far cry from twenty years ago, when there were more staff than passengers.

 

[Mike Storey]

4 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

While I think this particular horse has long since bolted from the stable I definitely wouldn't see an HS2 station at Calvert as being there for commuter use into London but for longer distance travel in the opposite direction and providing a northern connection out of/into East-West rail.   Clearly there would be local use which would inevitably require car parking space, but specifically targetted againsy London commuting by pricing.

 

The SNCF LGV intermediate stations have produced very mixed results.  On LGV Nord 'Picardy Parkway', as some of us irreverently christened it, took a very long time to build up any sort of ridership at all and as far as i now it became mainly a station used for journeys to/from Paris.  Calais Frethun, notwithstanding excellent connectional facilities (albeit not exactly providing much in the way of connecting trains for a number of years) was probably more of a political station to keep the good bughers of Calais quiet than a sensible commercial investment - at least for its first 6 years when it remained lightly used on the LGV side.

 

Quite so. Calais Frethun is almost confined to non-TGV services now, with the latest TT revisions, primarily feeding Paris/Lille-Boulogne local extensions.

 

The LGV Atlantique was built with virtually no local stops whatsoever (bar Angouleme, who had a Mayor with the negatives of somebody up top, or at least that is the speculation here). It drove many of us bonkers, with the works over three/four years to absolutely no benefit to us (in Charente Maritime and Deux Sevres at least), although we were expected to pay for part of it, through our Taxes Foncieres (like the Council tax). Similarly, the now-abandoned LGV from (Paris) Orleans down to Toulouse via Limoges, would have had no intermediate stops, something which engendered a mass revolt from the natives, but which was eminently sensible.

 

Italian high speed routes only stop at very major cities, albeit there are classic connections to wherever the Mafioso wanted down south. The Germans have tended to avoid suburban catchments, although there are exceptions. Even the Chinese have built their massive network to a plan that avoids tiddlers, although that is a moot point, given the size of many of their cities. It is only the Spaniards that seem to have connected almost anywhere to almost anywhere, on their AVE system, but then it is mostly single track, and is largely a scheme to convert their national system to standard gauge.

 

So, Calvert would not fall into the natural scheme of things for a high speed route, unless you have some interesting photographs of certain people in compromising positions, perhaps??

Edited February 24, 2020 by Mike Storey

[Joseph_Pestell]

6 minutes ago, Mike Storey said:

 

 

 

So, Calvert would not fall into the natural scheme of things for a high speed route, unless you have some interesting photographs of certain people in compromising positions, perhaps??

 

Entirely possible with Boris.

[jamie92208]

21 minutes ago, Mike Storey said:

 

It is only the Spaniards that seem to have connected almost anywhere to almost anywhere, on their AVE system, but then it is mostly single track, and is largely a scheme to convert their national system to standard gauge.

 

 

I believe that at least some of the peculiarities of the Spanish High Speed network is due to a promise to have an HS line to every provincial capital which explains the very expensive branch to Granada.

 

Jamie

[The Stationmaster]

On 24/02/2020 at 13:13, Edwin_m said:

But where's the demand for connections?  Anyone going north from Oxford or Bicester or MK will find the direct services to Birmingham from those places quicker than making a connection at Calvert, despite the speed of the HS2 leg.  The same applies from beyond Oxford, perhaps less so from beyond MK given the connection would have to be at Bletchley instead so probably onto a slower train.  But the further east you get, the fewer people will want to make the journey in the first place and the more likely any that do want to will have a more direct route to their northern destinations.  That just leaves Winslow and Islip, plus any new EWR stations in the area resulting from new development - who would probably access any HS2 station by other means given the shorter distance.  

If you were travelling to, say, Liverpool or Manchester from Bicester which way would you go if you could change trains at either a brand new station or Birmingham New St (also of course in many respects a new station).  Similarly would you like to travel on a 150% loaded Voyager from Oxford or get an East-West train in order to change for a reserved seat from Calvert Junction?

 

Interesting thing about rail travel is that it often expands to make use of the routes available.  For example if there is no  reason for Calvert as an interchange why should GWR longer distance services call at Old Oak Common when every station they will have called at (except Newbury) would have presented a valid alternative to changing to HS2 at OOC?

[Zomboid]

The GWR/ Crossrail interchange might be easier at OOC than Paddington?

 

And is Reading to Manchester/ Leeds via XC really going to be preferable to going via HS2 at OOC? Not to mention Liverpool and Scotland.

[APOLLO]

Leigh, Lancashire wants in on the act too !!!!!!!!!!!!

 

https://www.leighjournal.co.uk/news/10322200.plans-revealed-for-rail-station-at-leigh-linking-with-hs2-and-liverpool-manchester-line/

 

The London Yuppies could leave their two up two down in Plank Lane (after ensuring the Ferrets and Whippets are fed and watered), walk to their swish brand new station and be at their desks in Canary Wharf trading £££$$$Billions in less time than it takes to boil a pan of Lobbies !!!!!!!!!!!!

 

(Ahh well - better than the tree jokes)

 

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