Why are people opposed to HS2? (And other HS2 discussion)

PR1Berske · 17 May 2019

EM2 said:
I don't understand that stance, but I do admire it.

Well I just thought, I'd like to have a more positive reputation around this forum so I'll set out my stall, be clear about what I believe, and then move away from this thread. I just felt the last few pages were getting a bit too much, we all got a bit heated, and this way there's my opinion laid out for people to see.

There are other threads I want to join and this one was taking over a bit, that's all!

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underbank · 17 May 2019

6Gman said:
2. There is a clear plan to allow trains from a Euston - Trent Valley/ Crewe HS2 to continue north to serve various destinations. If Manchester - Birmingham had been built first how would trains feed onto an already congested WCML (south) ? And the likes of Liverpool and (cough) Preston wouldn't benefit !

Again, that's a London-centric view. What about all the people in "The North" who don't need/want to use the South end of the WCML?

There will be a proportionally small number of people in Preston wanting to go to London as opposed to massively more Prestoners wanting to go to, say, Manchester, Leeds, York, Sheffield, Newcastle, Hull. The latter aren't remotely interested in the WCML at all, let alone the Southern end.

Esker-pades · 17 May 2019

underbank said:
Again, that's a London-centric view. What about all the people in "The North" who don't need/want to use the South end of the WCML?

There will be a proportionally small number of people in Preston wanting to go to London as opposed to massively more Prestoners wanting to go to, say, Manchester, Leeds, York, Sheffield, Newcastle, Hull. The latter aren't remotely interested in the WCML at all, let alone the Southern end.

HS2 phase 2 is what makes HS2 really worth it for a number of cities (London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham/Derby) and others which aren't directly on the route.

I think it would be fundamentally wrong to not build HS2 phase 2, but I fear that the current anti-HS2 rhetoric will not prevent phase 1 from getting built, but will prevent phase 2 from getting built.

DynamicSpirit · 17 May 2019

underbank said:
Again, that's a London-centric view. What about all the people in "The North" who don't need/want to use the South end of the WCML?

There will be a proportionally small number of people in Preston wanting to go to London as opposed to massively more Prestoners wanting to go to, say, Manchester, Leeds, York, Sheffield, Newcastle, Hull. The latter aren't remotely interested in the WCML at all, let alone the Southern end.

That's easy to answer! Clearly most of us are concerned about those people. And trying to help those people is exactly the reason why Northern Powerhouse Rail is under development. (And it's also the reason why there is already a fair bit of ongoing investment in the North... electrification, new trains, extensions to Metrolink, etc.).

But the simple fact is that the sheer numbers of people who are affected by the lack of capacity on the three main lines out of London is far greater than the number of people affected by the lack of capacity in the North. Sorting out the Southern end of HS2 first also makes a lot of financial sense, since it means the line will start generating more revenue from the start. And I think you can also put a good case for arguing that working out the solution to increasing capacity in the South was a lot simpler than it is in the North - where you have a lot of competing demands from various cities all wanting a slice of the pie, and the existing network which NPR/HS2 will have to feed into is already pretty complex. For all those reasons - and given that you can't build everything all that the same time - industry professionals with far more knowledge than you or I have - appear to have determined that it makes more sense to build HS1 phase 1/2a first. That doesn't mean the people in the North are being ignored. They will get massively improved services in time (provided, of course, that the anti-HS2 brigade don't succeed in killing HS2 phase 2. That really will screw the North if that happens!)

6Gman · 17 May 2019

underbank said:
Again, that's a London-centric view. What about all the people in "The North" who don't need/want to use the South end of the WCML?

There will be a proportionally small number of people in Preston wanting to go to London as opposed to massively more Prestoners wanting to go to, say, Manchester, Leeds, York, Sheffield, Newcastle, Hull. The latter aren't remotely interested in the WCML at all, let alone the Southern end.

Manchester, yes. And they've now got an electric service.

The others, I suspect, rather fewer.

jfowkes · 17 May 2019

A few people have asserted that without HS2, NPR won't happen (or similar). Can someone explain that reasoning in more detail?

Peter Kelford · 17 May 2019

EM2 said:
HS1 was on time and on budget.

How much influence was there from France? (Hint: quite a bit)

HS2 is the right thing for this country but it's being delivered in a way that is not appropriate. HSR in the UK would be constructive, but it should be rather as a series of relief lines permitting capacity it's certainly better to spend £60 billion with £30b on relief routes and £30b on bringing the rest of the network up to scratch.

EM2 · 17 May 2019

Peter Kelford said:
HSR in the UK would be constructive, but it should be rather as a series of relief lines permitting capacity

Isn't that exactly what HS2 is?

Bald Rick · 17 May 2019

Taunton said:
I do recall that when the HS1 Kent services were first launched, after a while several of the 5-car sets were parked, and peak services cut down from twin units to one, because in revenue terms this gave a better return than adjusting the fares to increase the demand.

The real example is Eurostar, which was portrayed during construction, and rolling stock built accordingly, as a mass-market high volume shuttle between the cities. But it has turned out nothing like that. Fares were pitched way higher than the original plan, and passengers much reduced compared to plan, but overall this gave the best return to Eurostar. The fact that it no way met the objectives of the governments was by the by. A good proportion of the initial fleet were parked, some of course eventually sold off to SNCF for domestic runs. The rolling stock utilisation is decidedly thin, for a 2.5 hour journey to Paris few sets make much more than one return trip a day. For all that this may look poor asset utilisation, in fact most of the costs are directly related to usage rather than fixed. And you try and buy a walk-up ticket on the day and see how much it costs - that substantial market has been pretty much eliminated by their pricing plan.

I must say I don’t remember the Javelins being parked up (they are 6 car by the way).

Eurostar is an imperfect example. The forecasts were done before EU open skies deal and the low cost airline revolution.

I don’t think that fares have been pitched ‘way higher’ than plan either. The range for the toll per train passenger was set IIRC as part of the original negotiation, and even now Eurostar’s minimum fares are essentially the cost of that toll. Without any of their costs. Adjusted for inflation, the current minimum fare is much, much lower than d this is because of low cost airline competition. The units used for SNCF domestic runs were the North of London units, which there was never a case for in the first place and was done to but off politicians to get the enabling act for the tunnel through. As for walk up tickets, the same is true of the airlines, which of course is the real competition.

Bald Rick · 17 May 2019

Peter Kelford said:
How much influence was there from France? (Hint: quite a bit)

HS2 is the right thing for this country but it's being delivered in a way that is not appropriate. HSR in the UK would be constructive, but it should be rather as a series of relief lines permitting capacity it's certainly better to spend £60 billion with £30b on relief routes and £30b on bringing the rest of the network up to scratch.

The French influence was the standards. The railway was built by us Brits. I was there.

HS2 is, exactly, a series of relief lines into Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and the busiest part of the WCML south of London.

Bald Rick · 17 May 2019

kevin_roche said:
I'm hoping that they will go forward with the full Southern Heathrow Railway plan so we can get to Old Oak Common easily to get HS2.

Someone is going to have to pay, as it will be expensive...

Bald Rick · 17 May 2019

Sceptre said:
Take for example, Glasgow Central to London Terminals via air. It'll take you twenty minutes to get out to Glasgow Airport, about an hour to get onto the plane, 90 minutes to get to Heathrow, fifteen minutes to come off the plane, 20 minutes to get into London. So, between three and a half and four hours.

HS2 will bring the rail time down to be similar to that, and will be less of a hassle than going through airport security.

So HS2, hopefully, will make the bottom fall out of that aviation market, like how Eurostar has reduced demand for London–Paris and London–Amsterdam short-hops.

No doubt HS2 will put a dent in the London - Scotland air market. But it won’t cause the bottom to fall out of it. By no means everyone flying London - Glasgow or Edinburgh is going city centre to city centre. Indeed many are transfer passengers, particularly at Heathrow, Gatwick and increasingly Luton.

There are still 20+ flights a day London to Paris, and 50+ London to Amsterdam. And the of those have great international connections of their own already. Eurostar made a big dent in Paris, but has barely touched Amsterdam - the journey time is a bit too long, particularly for the return trip.

Glenn1969 · 17 May 2019

I live in Yorkshire. I spent a lot of time going cross country to watch sport in Yorkshire, the North East, the North West and the East and West Midlands. I am still in the position of "hoping" HS2 and HS3 will benefit me rather than knowing it will. I also think the Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield congestion issues need solving now, not in 2033. Hence why I wish HS2/3 construction would start up here as soon as is practical because the capacity it will bring is needed now not in 14 years time

MarkyT · 17 May 2019

Bald Rick said:
There are still 20+ flights a day London to Paris, and 50+ London to Amsterdam. And the of those have great international connections of their own already. Eurostar made a big dent in Paris, but has barely touched Amsterdam - the journey time is a bit too long, particularly for the return trip.

It's also frequency. Rail is somewhat handicapped by the sheer size of its minimum train which tends to limit the total number of departures and their spread across the day. The original DB idea of running coupled 200m Dutch and German portions from London and splitting them at Brussels had a lot of merit in that respect. With only its fixed length 400m Velaro units, Eurostar are unable to do this at present.

The Ham · 17 May 2019

jfowkes said:
A few people have asserted that without HS2, NPR won't happen (or similar). Can someone explain that reasoning in more detail?

HS2 is building new platforms and new track on the approaches to these new platform which NPR will be able to benefit from being able to use without having to pay for them.

As such NPR can keep its costs low resulting in a better return. If it had to fund those elements (or at least parts of those elements) the value for money for the project falls.

Without providing them there may not be the scope to provide the improvements, which could then reduce the benefits from the scheme.

If the value/benefits get hit to much then there's a risk that the whole project gets binned.

Paradoxically, of you cancel HS2 to build NPR and it is still justified and built then the case for building HS2 goes up. Firstly because there's more people using trains so you increase capacity issues on the long distance services

Secondly, you've reduced the costs of building HS2 as NPR had done some of our.

These two things means that the business case for HS2 gets better.

Although I would like to point out that rail growth between London and the regions which benefit from HS2 phase 1 was supposed to (based on ~50% growth at open) be ~25% at this point in time, yes it's nearly three times that at ~70% growth. It's not that far off the predicted growth for the opening of the whole network (~100%) in 2033.

The only reason that I use London is that travel between other regions (such as West Midlands to North West) is much harder to define which route people are taking to travel. Including if they are using long distance services.

As such cancelling HS2 now would appear to be a foolish thing to do when it's smashed the amount of growth anticipated for the opening of Phase 1.

Those opposed to HS2 haven't dealt with this "problem" that they have, nor can they add they have no comeback to it.

The Ham · 17 May 2019

Bald Rick said:
Someone is going to have to pay, as it will be expensive...

It's not going to be cheap, although at ~£1.6bn although fairly cheap compared to HS2, however given the sheer numbers of people who travel by train in the local area there's plenty of scope for tickets to meet the costs

Bald Rick · 17 May 2019

The Ham said:
It's not going to be cheap, although at ~£1.6bn although fairly cheap compared to HS2, however given the sheer numbers of people who travel by train in the local area there's plenty of scope for tickets to meet the costs

It will be more than £1.6bn given what they have to tunnel through. And that would be an awful lot of tickets.

Andrew1395 · 17 May 2019

underbank said:
Again, that's a London-centric view. What about all the people in "The North" who don't need/want to use the South end of the WCML?

There will be a proportionally small number of people in Preston wanting to go to London as opposed to massively more Prestoners wanting to go to, say, Manchester, Leeds, York, Sheffield, Newcastle, Hull. The latter aren't remotely interested in the WCML at all, let alone the Southern end.

The point is that London is so dominant that Watford a town of 90,000, (smaller than Preston which also has a university), has 5 national railway stations within the borough and a terminus on the London Underground. Aggregate annual usage for those six is about 12.5 million compared to Prestons 4.9 million. In 1986 seven out of ten railway journeys were to or via London. I doubt that has changed much today. That's not to say that HS2 north of Birmingham and better cross pennine railways should not be a top priority. But the capacity constraints on the WCML are more manifest south of the Trent Valley. In those 35 years my three 8 car fast services to London in the morning (07.34, 08.04 and 08.34), have turned into nine (ten if you include the 08.49), with three between 6.20 and 6.51 matching those 24 coaches. Now my local station needs 68 coaches for those 9 fast trains and still people complain it's overcrowded. And of course we now have fast services on Saturdays and Sundays. All points to a massive increase in demand that needs a strategic plan. None of this is to say other flows do not need investment either. I am often in Nottingham, a city with 60,000 students. Yet the Nottingham to Birmingham service is a 3 car DMU. I nearly always drive from Watford to Nottingham, the M1 is quicker than the train, and the train journey is either a hitch potch of changes via Tamworth or a sleep into London. Neither are terrible but HS2 will offer the possibility of better service options on the classic WCML, that will evolve East Croydon to Lincoln via Watford and Nottingham anyone?

Peter Kelford · 18 May 2019

Bald Rick said:
The French influence was the standards. The railway was built by us Brits. I was there.

HS2 is, exactly, a series of relief lines into Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and the busiest part of the WCML south of London.

Except that relief lines can parallel motorways and tend not to be too long.

Ianno87 · 18 May 2019

Peter Kelford said:
Except that relief lines can parallel motorways and tend not to be too long.

They need to be long enough to bypass the most congested sections.

So by the time you've built a London to Rugby bypass and a Coventry to Birmingham bypass.... you might as well join them together and cut off some distance whilst you're at it.

Bald Rick · 18 May 2019

Peter Kelford said:
Except that relief lines can parallel motorways and tend not to be too long.

Can they? Examples? With details of how they provide relief in terms of trains per hour.

The Ham · 18 May 2019

Bald Rick said:
It will be more than £1.6bn given what they have to tunnel through. And that would be an awful lot of tickets.

Even at £3bn if we used a single class 444 for each journey each seat would need to generate less than £3 per seat to pay for the infrastructure over a 60 year period just from the Woking direction. Given that ticket prices could easily average to be £10 each way you'd only need trains to be about 1/3 full (112 passengers) to cover the costs.

Yes that's the best part of 6 million extra passengers a year, but given local passenger numbers over the area which could use such a service and that's not a very large increase per station.

It's likely that there would be a lot of Basingstoke/Guildford to Woking travel during the peaks which would significantly assist with income.

jayah · 18 May 2019

The Ham said:
OK, like some evidence like this:
View media item 3340
Looking at the numbers on the table between London and the West Midlands/North West there's now about 10 million (as the figures are in thousands) extra trips being made every year.

That's about 27,000 extra a day, filling an extra 39 trains (assuming 100% seat occupancy) with 429 coaches between them.

That doesn't even allow for Scotland or North Wales, which although have seen smaller and are split over more than one route would only add to those problems.

Based on that can you start to understand why adding a few extra coaches and a few extra trains here and there isn't going to cut it when trying to provide the capacity needed.

It's why those who have looked at the information are more and more thinking, "you know what we do need HS2, or at least something very much like it".

HS2 is far from perfect, but what other option is there? Even if there is one it's probably too late to start design work on it to be able to deliver it within the timeframe.

Most of the trains to East Midlands are very low capacity indeed.

Much of the traffic to West Midlands is already carried on Chiltern and in turn is being stimulated by extremely low fares.

Predict and provide went out of fashion for roads a long time ago. Once you have made all the easy capacity fixes like forcing non time sensitive freight to run at night and lengthening the trains you need to ask should we really be spending £60-100bn to provide capacity for £10 tickets from London to Birmingham?

jayah · 18 May 2019

PR1Berske said:
I've been thinking about this on the walk to work.

What would I need to see for HS2 to be acceptable? Well, we all know Option A is "scrap the whole thing", though that's not a helpful response, so let us look at Option B.

I would have started the project in the North, with no connectivity at all with Birmingham to begin with, to radically improve the railways up here with action rather than words.

I would have built P15/16 at Piccadilly, a scheme I was initially against until the evidence became overwhelming that it must be built in conjunction with Ordsall Curve. This could have been the High Speed platforms for the North, allowing for interchange with the wider region.

I would not have spent one single penny on London Euston.

My HS2 would have improved east-west links between strategic points of the region, looking at how to connect the North East to more interchange opportunities. TransPennine routes, both classic and HS, would invigorate the economy far more than a new railway line into Euston.

What we see in the news and through numerous parliamentary reports is the case for HS2 crumbling before our eyes. Had we seen real, confirmed, credible investment up here, rather than at London like always, perhaps the scheme would have been popular and more likely to be built.

As the scheme is built to improve Euston first and connect the north seventh or eighth, I can't see any reason to be enthusiastic about it. Had it been focused on the north first and foremost, maybe I would not be so heavily opposed.

I am sympathetic to 15/16 but it would be very expensive. Adding capacity should always be the last resort. There are virtually no trains longer than 4 cars using those platforms. This tiny trains mentality must be challenged.

Bald Rick · 18 May 2019

I’ve explained quite a few times how you can’t simply say “£x per seat over 60 years”, as you must allow for the cost of capital. At standard rates £3 now has to be £23 in 60 years at today’s prices to allow for that.

Besides, a full 5 car 444 would barely cover its own operational costs. And Basingstoke / Guildford to Woking won’t cover costs to Heathrow.

jayah · 18 May 2019

Peter Kelford said:
How much influence was there from France? (Hint: quite a bit)

HS2 is the right thing for this country but it's being delivered in a way that is not appropriate. HSR in the UK would be constructive, but it should be rather as a series of relief lines permitting capacity it's certainly better to spend £60 billion with £30b on relief routes and £30b on bringing the rest of the network up to scratch.

There are already 6 tracks as far as Watford. The Overground trains are half length.

The Bakerloo Line needs to be pushed out onto its own infrastructure and the DC lines electrified with AC and or extended northwards to better relieve the outer suburban commuter traffic.

Building a £60-100bn HSL to Leeds is not needed to relieve the southern WCML.

Bletchleyite · 18 May 2019

jayah said:
I am sympathetic to 15/16 but it would be very expensive. Adding capacity should always be the last resort. There are virtually no trains longer than 4 cars using those platforms. This tiny trains mentality must be challenged.

I do agree - 240m trains on a half hourly base is the way to go.

jayah · 18 May 2019

The Ham said:
HS2 is building new platforms and new track on the approaches to these new platform which NPR will be able to benefit from being able to use without having to pay for them.

As such NPR can keep its costs low resulting in a better return. If it had to fund those elements (or at least parts of those elements) the value for money for the project falls.

Without providing them there may not be the scope to provide the improvements, which could then reduce the benefits from the scheme.

If the value/benefits get hit to much then there's a risk that the whole project gets binned.

Paradoxically, of you cancel HS2 to build NPR and it is still justified and built then the case for building HS2 goes up. Firstly because there's more people using trains so you increase capacity issues on the long distance services

Secondly, you've reduced the costs of building HS2 as NPR had done some of our.

These two things means that the business case for HS2 gets better.

Although I would like to point out that rail growth between London and the regions which benefit from HS2 phase 1 was supposed to (based on ~50% growth at open) be ~25% at this point in time, yes it's nearly three times that at ~70% growth. It's not that far off the predicted growth for the opening of the whole network (~100%) in 2033.

The only reason that I use London is that travel between other regions (such as West Midlands to North West) is much harder to define which route people are taking to travel. Including if they are using long distance services.

As such cancelling HS2 now would appear to be a foolish thing to do when it's smashed the amount of growth anticipated for the opening of Phase 1.

Those opposed to HS2 haven't dealt with this "problem" that they have, nor can they add they have no comeback to it.

Next Wednesday, rail fares London to Birmingham start at £7. In the evening peak £20 it is from Euston.

If that is what they want to charge fine, but do not ask the taxpayer to shell out £60-100bn because you want more capacity.

Ianno87 · 18 May 2019

jayah said:
Most of the trains to East Midlands are very low capacity indeed.

Much of the traffic to West Midlands is already carried on Chiltern and in turn is being stimulated by extremely low fares.

I don't the % of traffic carried by Chiltern is actually that high. Although trains are well loaded, a good chunk is to the likes of Bicester and Banbury. I was on the 1815 off Marylebone a few weeks back, and I was only one of maybe 3 or 4 getting off at Snow Hill.

Predict and provide went out of fashion for roads a long time ago. Once you have made all the easy capacity fixes like forcing non time sensitive freight to run at night and lengthening the trains you need to ask should we really be spending £60-100bn to provide capacity for £10 tickets from London to Birmingham?

The easy capacity fixes have by and large been done. The extra capacity is being provided to meet demand at the busiest times of day.

The £10 tickets are to fill this capacity at the times of day it is not required. Exactly like today.

Ianno87 · 18 May 2019

jayah said:
Next Wednesday, rail fares London to Birmingham start at £7. In the evening peak £20 it is from Euston.

If that is what they want to charge fine, but do not ask the taxpayer to shell out £60-100bn because you want more capacity.

The £20 fares are on LNWR, not Virgin (they are £76 upwards). A revenue generatoon tactic by them.

Buy an LNWR ticket and there's a good chance you'll be standing until at least Milton Keynes.

Why are people opposed to HS2? (And other HS2 discussion)

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