HS2 under review

[Re6/6]

Thank goodness. 

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21795755

 

Still the 'nimbys and bananas' rant on about trying to delay it all.

[Dawg]

Just a thought about the route to the north through Wigan where it rejoins the WCML - I'm from Wigan and am all too aware about the bottleneck that was created when the 4 main lines to Preston were cut back to just two between Wigan and Euxton - there was an avoiding line called the Whelley loop which bypassed Wigan at Bamfurlong near to where the Hs2 route joins the WCML and rejoined at Standish that carried a lot of freight. With super fast trains heading to Scotland, how will this be dealt with? The Whelley loop returns?! (See my avatar - fantastic viaduct over the river douglas still stands)

 

 

Very interesting to see that it follows part of the old GCR Wigan - Glazebrook route straight through the site of Lowton Jcn station. I used to teach at a school that was very close to Lowton Jcn station. No more Derby 4F's on lengthy 20mph coal trains or Stanier 2-6-4's on 3 coach stopping services through there again though!

Edited March 18, 2013 by Dawg

[rob D2]

I'm with swampy on this one...

[Joseph_Pestell]

I'm with swampy on this one...

 

What became of Swampy? I have always had a sneaking suspicion that he may have become a merchant banker earning huge bonuses.

[DavidH]

What became of Swampy? I have always had a sneaking suspicion that he may have become a merchant banker earning huge bonuses.

2006 living in a woodland community with family. 2007 took part in Heathrow protest. That's it.

[rob D2]

37383 was christened ' swampy ' when I saw it at toton in 98.

Random fact...

[APOLLO]

I don't think they will rebuild the Whelley route, especially as the WCML is 4 tracks to Bamfurlong, then 6 track to Wigan NW.

 

Wigan NW to Standish (station/junction) is 2 track, but room for 4 tracks as per my previous post on this thread. Easy to replace 2 tracks north from Standish to Euxton.

 

Would be nice though to see trains whoosing past Haigh Hall at 250mph !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Anyway we will all have flying cars and star-trek teleportation by the time this line reaches Wigan !!

 

Brit15

[Joseph_Pestell]

My wife was pondering the future of StarTrek style teleportation the other day after a particularly rough landing with Ryanair at Bristol.

 

It can only be a matter of time before HS2 objectors posit it as a reason to not build the line.

[Re6/6]

The usual Daily Mail biased reporting: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325254/Controversial-HS2-rail-link-3bn-black-hole-budget-ministers-got-sums-wrong.html

 

One would have thought that they would have printed an appropriate image rather than one of a (nearly) 20 year old Eurostar. It is the Mail though.....

 

The qualifications of the MPs on the Public Accounts Committee to make a judgement regarding 'railways' has to be questioned.

[Joseph_Pestell]

The sums probably are wrong. The economic benefits will turn out to be even higher than allowed for (as has been the case for every recent electrification project).

 

Like everything in acccounting, it's not an exact (or even remotely exact) science. It depends on taking a view on what information you think is relevent and should be accounted for. When you are looking 15 years into the future, that's very random indeed.

 

So let's look at it sensibly from a point of view of what we do know: the example of High Speed railways in many other countries across the world. They have all brought benefits. Why would it be different here?

[Gruffalo]

Whilst advanced travel options undoubtedly bring benefits in the longer term, my questions revolve around the investment required and how a benefit will accrue from phase one.

 

Initial cost projected at £20b, rose to £30b and now touted at £33b. From where is this money being found when other vital social budgets (not the nice-to-have ones) are being cut as I write this? If we just have more Quantative Easing to fund this, that just fuels inflation on every day-to-day item we all buy. We already have to borrow to pay the interest on governmental expenditure.

 

Without a station between Birmingham and Marylebone and on a line dedicated to express passenger services without freight, there will be no improvement on the London-Birmingham WCML and no relief for freight going by rail or road on that corridor. Government policy remains somewhat London-centric so, unless and until that changes, millions need to live within commuting areas for London.

 

Enlighten me please!

[The Stationmaster]

The usual Daily Mail biased reporting: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325254/Controversial-HS2-rail-link-3bn-black-hole-budget-ministers-got-sums-wrong.html

 

One would have thought that they would have printed an appropriate image rather than one of a (nearly) 20 year old Eurostar. It is the Mail though.....

 

The qualifications of the MPs on the Public Accounts Committee to make a judgement regarding 'railways' has to be questioned.

The qualification of MPs to make judgements on anything has to be questioned in my opinion (and past experience).  However that isn't entirely the issue with HS2 as we are either going to advance our transport infrastructure in Britain or we are going to get ever deeper into the mire of the traffic gridlock age and - for those who don't know - all the figures for projects like this are only estimates until the money has been spent and the results are happening (and then very often not until the results have been happening for a number of years).

 

Major projects like this always escalate in price - partly because of inflation, partly because of things which need to be incorporated as design develops and partly because the initial estimate was a deliberate undershoot to make the project look more attractive.  HS1 might well have come in on budget but one reason it did so was because stuff was stripped out - you should have seen the original St Pancras track layout (and it still wouldn't meet the service spec but that was quietly forgotten) and you only have to look at Reading station to see what has been stripped out of the spec there if the original artist's impressions are to be believed.

 

The decision has to be whether or not you are going to do whatever it is you are thinking of doing - and then to adopt the French attitude of getting on and doing it instead of spending more time and money arguing about it than actually building the thing.  HS2 should now be going into detailed design in order to get construction underway within no more than 18 months - 2 years (because it has been decided to do it); construction should be started on several sections simultaneously in order to deliver the benefits as early as possible although I do wonder about the level of emphasis on 'parkway' style stations (or the lack of them at the southern end) and the choice of Birmingham as an initial destination - but that doesn't undermine the value of the whole project.

 

So 'Daily Mail' (free in Waitrose this week if you spend over £50 so it clearly needs a sales boost) and bleaters - just get on with it and start to take us out of the gridlock age, and make a lot more paths available on the WCML.

[clecklewyke]

 

 

The qualifications of the MPs on the Public Accounts Committee to make a judgement regarding 'railways' has to be questioned.

Their representative talking on Radio 4's "Today" this morning talked about how foreign railways had got more capacity out of existing lines by using double decker trains. That's a great idea, which Mr Bulleid tried out so successfully on the Southern. We should start raising all the bridges and enlarging the bores of all our tunnels immediately. 

 

Ian

[40F]

Their representative talking on Radio 4's "Today" this morning talked about how foreign railways had got more capacity out of existing lines by using double decker trains. That's a great idea, which Mr Bulleid tried out so successfully on the Southern. We should start raising all the bridges and enlarging the bores of all our tunnels immediately. 

 

Ian

 

 

And who is going to pay for it ???????????????

[Re6/6]

Further to reporting on the Public Accounts Committee's pronouncement, the on the BBC 2's 11 o'clock news bulletin, much was made of the 'Stop HS2' group's glee and the words of an 'anti' professor but nothing from the other side.

 

A very lucid positive argument was put on an earlier R4 today interview from a spokesman from the Manchester Chamber of Trade who argued the capacity issue and freight. Nothing about this argument from the R2 news. I assumed that The BBC's news policy was balance. This 'imbalance' in their reporting on railways has been mentioned recently by Nigel Harris in 'Rail' magazine. 

[phil-b259]

On the BBC news website their transport correspondent writes

 

"But ministers have come out fighting following the report's publication. They feel they've made a great deal of progress recently, announcing the full route up to Leeds and Manchester, seeing off a number of legal challenges against the project, and putting two bills into the Queen's Speech.

 

They keep reminding me of other schemes that had a weak business case - bits of the M25 and the Jubilee line extension, for example - schemes that the UK couldn't now live without".

 

If what he says is true maybe the NIMBYs in Buckinghamshire, etc. should think more carefully. Most of the M25, (especially the bits closest to the Tory supporting Chilterns) were overloaded from day one and the Jubilee extension to get the bankers to the financial centre that is Canary Wharf wasn't exactly empty when it opened.

Edited May 16, 2013 by phil-b259

[Dr Gerbil-Fritters]

Their representative talking on Radio 4's "Today" this morning talked about how foreign railways had got more capacity out of existing lines by using double decker trains. That's a great idea, which Mr Bulleid tried out so successfully on the Southern. We should start raising all the bridges and enlarging the bores of all our tunnels immediately. 

 

Ian

 

Would it actually be cheaper to increase the loading gauge on major routes to accommodate proper European loading gauge (proper double deck trains, not Oliver's Toothpaste Tube) than build HS2?  Just curious!

[The Stationmaster]

Would it actually be cheaper to increase the loading gauge on major routes to accommodate proper European loading gauge (proper double deck trains, not Oliver's Toothpaste Tube) than build HS2?  Just curious!

I would be surprised - the engineering costs are but one part of it, you then have to add in the disruption costs which would probably amount to even more than actually doing the work.  And all overhead wiring would have to be altered, many signals plus the knock on from resiting the ohle higher.   It's probably cheaper to lengthen station platforms where the capacity is needed and that in any event allows dwell times to be maintained unless you put at least 3 doors per vehicle into your double deckers.

[Fat Controller]

Would it actually be cheaper to increase the loading gauge on major routes to accommodate proper European loading gauge (proper double deck trains, not Oliver's Toothpaste Tube) than build HS2?  Just curious!

Almost certainly not; apart from the costs of the Civils, Resignalling and Electrical work, there's the additional payments that would have to be made to the TOCs for the service disruption. Don't forget that, not only do the heights of bridges and tunnels have to be increased, but platforms have to be lowered in order to give additional width at a lower level. Having done that, then you'd have to provide all existing rolling stock with access steps of some sort, to allow them to access the rebuilt platforms.

[Gruffalo]

As the route doesn't directly affect me, I feel my comments are straightforward questions rather than projecting a NIMBYist approach.

 

Fact 1 - All government projects take far too long to deliver and almost all are widely over budget. Mike's point about escalations in the design can be countered by a simple question of why hasn't the specification already been decided - this has been going on for years now! No project that changes from specification is ever delivered on cost and in time, just look at the MoD for numerous examples.

 

Fact 2 - Infrastructure must be a national issue. We are seeing examples of our gas capacity and network being inadequate due to a lack of investment which is expected from private companies. They will not make those investments in an unstable political environment. Similarly we need more (reliable) power generation to accomodate our growth. Wind turbines may have their place but cannot be relied upon to meet all the requirements of our population growth (let alone business needs); shutting down coal plants because of (ultimately) blindly implementing EU directives whilst not building new capacity is a national disaster.

 

Fact 3 - The HS2 route uses the idea of Parkway stations for the major conurbations it is supposed to serve but the links into those stations have in the past proved less than satisfactory. To locate one half-way between Derby & Nottingham seems to me just to avoid pi**ing of either too much but neither city can be satisfied.

 

Fact 4 - Every infrastructure scheme developed since the second half of the last century has always proved itself to be of barely adequate capacity (examples above) and this will always be the case, nature and people abhor a vacuum!

 

Fact 5 - Rail passenger numbers are at their highest for decades - despite issues of overcrowding, soaring prices, cancellations and old stock. Rail companies are making significant profits but are reluctant to invest (so their shareholders pocket the dividends). All this is happening in a climate where they may lose franchises, cannot be sure there is a fair decision-making process in the franchising of routes and don't know what "bung" they will have to give HMG to stay in business.

 

Within those points, I ask whether we should spend a now estimated figure of £33b (up by 2/3rds from the £20b first mooted) on a route that will take 10 years to get to Birmingham when for a quarter of that, the whole of the route between Birmingham and London could be provided with twice as much capacity (extra track on newly purchased land) and thereby allow faster express working whilst mixing freight with local services. The power to drive the enhanced trains won't be more than that required for HST trains and the infrastructure for supplying that power is less costly to improve than to install new across the HS2 route.

 

Should we spend a minimum of £33b on a railways when we have falling educational standards because schools or worn out and overcrowded, or when our society is slipping out of the top 20 nations for the provision of health-care, when there are a significant number of pensioners who we are told find it necessary to chose between staying warm and eating, when our universities cannot "afford" to train our own science and engineering graduates (who should be our future) because they need more foreign students to generate the fee income necessary to operate the universities? If we choose to do so, will we be happy with the consequences that our currency has to be diluted further (who will lend money cheaply to a country that has soaring debts already and needs to borrow to pay the interest on those debts?) and so yours and my living costs have to rise.

 

From that perspective, is this a wise use of money when we don't have the resources anyway, shouldn't the lower costs of improving the WCML and changing policies so they are less London-centric provide a sensible alternative?

 

Like it or not, we have now got politicians of every party who have vastly inflated views of their own importance and egos even bigger. This project is being used by some of them as their own ego-trips and that is why it is slow to be decided, delivered and will be probably more than 3x the original cost if it actually happens!

 

And no, I do NOT read the Daily Mail!!!

[Titan]

I would be surprised - the engineering costs are but one part of it, you then have to add in the disruption costs which would probably amount to even more than actually doing the work.  And all overhead wiring would have to be altered, many signals plus the knock on from resiting the ohle higher.   It's probably cheaper to lengthen station platforms where the capacity is needed and that in any event allows dwell times to be maintained unless you put at least 3 doors per vehicle into your double deckers.

Its is far from correct to say all OLE would need altering, most of it is already well clear of the European loading gauge. It is only an issue where it comes down much lower for bridges and tunnels etc. which are areas which would need rebuilding in any case. 

[lmsforever]

All the money reserved for this white eliphant should be used to upgrade the wcml.east west link,mml,and provide the cash for the various regional hub projects.The line will definitely not stimulate regional economies, as said before it will perpetuate the London concentric bias that is prevelant in our country.I will be affected by the route but I am not a NIMBY merely one who cannot see the economic sense of a railway that I and many of my neighbours cannot access.What would happen to the excellent services that we have on the wcml from Milton Keynes the word seems to be a downgrade would happen making journeys north a considerable inconveience .The current services north on both the main routes from London are providing what passengers want ,connections,good through journey times in reasonable rolling stock at good price fares.Overall this project is a vanity one for poloticians and will not deliver the promised returns for the massive outlay ,just in case someone calls me names the line passes just a quarter of a mile from my home.

[martin_wynne]

http://www.planningportal.gov.uk/general/news/stories/2013/may13/160513/16052013_1

[Edwin_m]

Its is far from correct to say all OLE would need altering, most of it is already well clear of the European loading gauge. It is only an issue where it comes down much lower for bridges and tunnels etc. which are areas which would need rebuilding in any case. 

The biggest problem with converting to European gauge is likely to be the platforms.  They need to be set further back and so can't be used by UK gauge trains as the gap is too big.  So you have to factor in some fairly horrendous logistics including significant suspension of service during the conversion and/or through services having to be split for long periods with passengers changing trains en route. 

[frobisher]

Gruffalo, on 16 May 2013 - 09:21, said:

Without a station between Birmingham and Marylebone and on a line dedicated to express passenger services without freight, there will be no improvement on the London-Birmingham WCML and no relief for freight going by rail or road on that corridor.

Why not? "Stopping services" are better served on a non-highspeed route surely? You take the majority of the passengers off of those trains who just want to go between Birmingham and London and you don't need to run as many of them (because, let's face it they are the majority of the passengers between those two points), ergo more capacity.