It’s going to be a generation before this line actually manages Euston to Birmingham!
That’s not really the treasury’s fault - it’s just The cost of borrowing a lot of money. Even governments have cash flow issues.
A freight line would have had all sorts of cost savings, and taken freight off the WCML……but that’s an argument for another thread.
That only relieves the slows, the fasts would still be full on the WCML.
www.newcivilengineer.com
OK so HS2 should have cost meaningfully below $150m/km (2023) as per https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D6nUGPHWkvJChmuDDMF27jb2pImUJCvMxA4ycN1rdWg/edit?usp=sharing from the transit costs project. If we convert to pounds PPP as per the world bank that is £105m/km.
Marylebone is a 5 minute walk from one of the best connected tube stations (Baker street) in London with 5 tube lines running to it.
The challenges will keep happening until there are meaningful benefits for local people who are disrupted by the construction.Good news:
Judge dismisses council’s challenge against HS2 Bromford Tunnel extension | New Civil Engineer
In a judgment handed down this week, Justice Dove backed a decision taken by two government ministers last May to approve plans at appeal for the
Which is exactly the reason why some people believe that challenges at a local level should not be entertained.
There are plenty of ignored reasons. You're saying small in a geographical sense, but Euston currently sees 100k people a day (and will be 150k by the time HS2 is complete), while Antwerp has 34k. Please make better comparisons, or the criticism only applies to a different HS2 than the one being built.
Every other country has intermediate stations to appease local opinion.
OK so let’s only compare with HS1 then.
Ahh so because somewhere else does, so must we?
Given literally every other country that has built high speed rail would give a station to Aylesbury it seems pretty reasonable that Aylesbury should have one. Especially when Aylesbury currently has no rail connection to the north at all.
HS2 will have a service maximum of 360km/h.
Yeah but the design speed was 400km/h rather than a more typical 300/320km/h that other lines use.
Has that played a part in the cost as well as all the other nonsense that got us here?
Oh absolutely. Because the vertical and horizontal curvature is much more limited than in other countries.
There’s a pretty strong argument given the higher population density in Britain and the smaller size of our country that the design specifications of the Tokaido Shinkansen perhaps with higher grades like Frankfurt-Cologne would have been sufficient.
I don’t think that is true.
For info, this is the line profile at the viaduct.
The maximum vertical curvature on high speed one is 10000m as per Wikipedia. So at that specification you would need a significantly shorter viaduct.
Where in London specifically will journeys via Old Oak Common be faster than the current services into Marylebone?
The Tokaido Shinkansen and the LGV Sud Est absolutely do run an extremely intensive service and both have intermediate stops for places the size of Aylesbury.
Yes. And very much less excavation for the cuttings on either side.
Given the volume of water that goes through the Thame which is genuinely very narrow near Aylesbury I don’t think much mitigation would be required.
How do you work that out? If I assume journey times to Marylebone and Paddington via Old Oak Common are the same then the time to the Regent street Apple Store is 8 minutes on the Elizabeth line and 11 on the Bakerloo from Marylebone.
Heathrow would be quicker yes - although for High Wycombe you could get the bus and taxis are cheap and would be even faster for Haddenham and other places further south. For the other places in the South West yes journeys would be quicker but only if they aren’t quicker via Oxford.
Far better to have 12-14tph on the west and 12-14tph on the east. It gets you a lot more overall capacity and allows intermediate stops.
Agricultural land costs in Britain aren’t that high to make a meaningful difference for a rail project on cost so there is no excuse there.
Counter point: it is better to have 18tph on a dedicated high speed line with at least 2tph to all the main intercity destinations (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, York, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Brum) and then have 12-14tph of high intensity semi-fast and commuter services on the ‘classic’ lines, and this would do much more to transform rail travel for these communities than the current status, or by adding in daft stops on HS lines like Aylesbury would be.
Tens of billions of pounds of public money has been spent to avoid giving Aylesbury at station. And certainly any extension of HS2 beyond Crewe has been pushed back into the long grass because of the absolute nonsense of not giving mid sized places like Aylesbury and Leamington Spa access to HS2.
I know each London terminal likes to pretend it is at capacity even when they aren’t. But assuming you can turn around a long distance service in 40 minutes (which St Pancras manages) and a commuter service in 30 minutes (which Fenchurch Street more than manages) then you can run 16 long distance services an hour from Kings Cross, or 12 long distance services and 6 commuter services.
Well said. Isn’t the whole point to remove tge expresses from the existing network, thereby freeing those slots for more regional services. It would be better for places like Aylesbury to have twice as many conventional trains, going all sorts of places, than one high speed train per hour.
I suppose this is not the place to opine that the next stop after OOC on the Elizabeth Line should have been Marylebone/Baker Street… but this would obviously have affected the route taken elsewhere.