Tricky one.
HS2 is essential because the main lines north from London are already running at around maximum capacity (both in terms of number of services per hour and length of services – you can say “magic signalling” as many times as you want but it won’t get away from the fact that an eleven coach 390 every three minutes is as much as the infrastructure can cope with – see also twelve coach 350s or ten coach 800/801s).
We need HS2 because there’s no simple way that we can provide much additional capacity on existing lines (you can fiddle at the edges, replace some First Class with 2+2 seats, replace a couple of short Open Access services on the ECML with proper length trains, but proper surgery is required rather than anything cosmetic).
The Manchester – Leeds line though… (which, let’s be honest, is what this is about – I don’t think that there’s any point in pretending that Sheffield is part of this) … that’s a lot of three coach trains at the moment, soon to be replaced by five coach trains (5x26 will provide significantly more seats than 3x23, especially given the layout of 185s!), but still nowhere near what the current platforms can cope with (ignoring the “local” services stopping at Marsden etc).
It’s therefore harder to make a case for new infrastructure (when we are already running six/hour from Manchester to Huddersfield, six/hour from Huddersfield to Leeds and planning six or seven per hour on bits of the Calder Valley line, given the apparent need to link Bradford to Hull/ Nottingham/ Liverpool/ Chester/ Manchester Airport etc).
Some “local” stations will struggle to accommodate longer services, granted, but the “proper” TPE services can surely accommodate InterCity length trains (before we start worrying about new lines). Very different to HS2.
I’m also sceptical about 15/16 at Piccadilly being such a priority or being such an apparent panacea – we already send too many short services through 13/14 – we already send too many services to Manchester Airport (based on the average passenger loading of around thirty five passengers) – building 15/16 will improve reliability a bit by permitting longer dwells at the island platforms but won’t solve the number of conflicts (e.g. the “Oxford Road” services heading to Stockport whilst “Main Shed” services head to the Airport) – or the number of other flat junctions, given the messy combination of services around Manchester.
It feels like Theresa May asking for Brexit extensions, only to wade back into the same issue a few weeks later because she hasn’t tackled the actual problem – we’d spend hundreds of millions of pounds on 15/16 and then use that to squeeze even more short trains through Oxford Road to the Airport (or create even more conflicting movements by running more Stockport services beyond Piccadilly). We’d be better simplifying the service patterns around Manchester and lengthening services before we start on more big projects around there.
Spend the money on additional coaches (for existing services) instead and tidy up the route map; northern England needs to stop with the “running direct services from everywhere to everywhere” approach and focus instead on running longer trains on simpler service patterns.
We don’t need services from the Calder Valley to all of Blackpool/ Southport/ Liverpool/ Chester/ Manchester Airport in one direction and York/ Hull/ Nottingham in the other direction… we just need proper length services at a reasonable frequency (that the infrastructure can cope with) to Manchester in one direction and Leeds in the other direction (and, if, for operational reasons, these are married with another unelectrified destination at the other side of those cities – e.g. Hull to Southport – then fair enough – but it’s not worth crippling the infrastructure so that we can run short DMUs to half a dozen distant destinations in each direction – we’d be better to focus on better longer trains.
I can see the logic in HS3/NPR – if you have High Speed infrastructure at both Manchester and Leeds (built as part of HS2) then you can piggy-back upon that sunk cost and use it to create a much better business case for a fast Trans-Pennine service. Given the 400m platforms required to accommodate a few HS2 services at Manchester/ Leeds, it seems obvious to try to use that infrastructure as the starting point for something that will connect Manchester/ Leeds. I can see why “London” want to tie the two together, to try to sell it as a benefit from HS2 (that you’ll only get if HS2 is properly built first) – that’s a good political trick. I just can’t see the need for it just yet, when we have trains significantly shorter than the infrastructure (and a lot of capacity wasted by conflicting movements that often only exist because we are trying to link everywhere to Manchester Airport and link Bradford to everywhere).
(also, if you want HS3/NPR to provide fast services from Manchester to Leeds then fair enough but then running a dog-leg via Bradford seems to defeat part of the point in building such a “fast” line – especially given the way Bradford city centre sits in its own dead-end valley – if you are starting with a blank sheet of paper and want to put intermediate stops in then why not consider places without heavy rail stations like Oldham/ Cleckheaton etc)
