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Curzon Street HS2 Railway Station

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city dweller

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Also worth noting HS2 has restarted its search for a contractor to build the £571m Curzon Street station in the heart of Birmingham.

Birmingham-Curzon-Street-station_View-13.jpg
 

Wychwood93

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The Reading job ended up as around a billion - Curzon Street will be, I suggest, somewhat similar - the £571m starting point will certainly double.
 

Ianno87

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The Reading job ended up as around a billion - Curzon Street will be, I suggest, somewhat similar - the £571m starting point will certainly double.

Reading wasn't just the station, you know.... And was built around a live railway.
 

Wychwood93

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Reading wasn't just the station, you know.... And was built around a live railway.
I know! Just saying that I cannot see the 571m budget not going a lot higher - not sure where 'Reading' started, but I am certain it moved upwards. A 'second coming' (ref. to another thread) would see a rail major project come in on budget - some have, but it would probably depend on how you twiddle with the sums. Cynical. Yes. True. Quite possibly.
 

MarkyT

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Comparing to Reading is unhelpful I think. That was miles of largely new railway, flying junctions, and signalling over a much wider area in addition to the station construction (because they had to knock down the signal box for the new relief side platforms), built over many stages and including a new depot. Depending on how the budget is apportioned, the quoted Curzon Street station budget may not even include any track alignment at all beyond the platform ends, no signalling, etc, so it could be quite reasonable. Reading came in under its (admittedly revised) budget, and a year early I think.
 

HSTEd

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I think they probably should have called it Moor Street High Level rather than Curzon Street.... but we are where we are.
 

The Planner

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I think they probably should have called it Moor Street High Level rather than Curzon Street.... but we are where we are.
Apart from Euston, they seem to keep every interface with a seperate name to existing network locations to differentiate.
 

boxy321

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Think I might pop in the Woodman after work. The shiny new diggers have moved a fair bit of dirt around recently.
 

MarkyT

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Apart from Euston, they seem to keep every interface with a seperate name to existing network locations to differentiate.
It seems sensible to identify different terminals, as at major airports. Manchester and Leeds will be directly adjacent to and well integrated with the existing classic stations, but I've not seen any separate names used, although they may perhaps use some kind of suffix or another qualifier to identify the HS platform group. At Birmingham, I think there's a bit of a historical nod to the old station, which is cool in my book.
 

najaB

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The Reading job ended up as around a billion - Curzon Street will be, I suggest, somewhat similar - the £571m starting point will certainly double
I suspect that they will have considerable contingency built into the estimate and they are unlikely to come across any unexpected surprises - unlike working around a live railway. I would like to think that the final price tag won't be more than 10-20% more than the current estimate (taking into account inflation, etc. since it was originally costed).
 

Bald Rick

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The Reading job ended up as around a billion - Curzon Street will be, I suggest, somewhat similar - the £571m starting point will certainly double. As I mentioned on another thread, there was a time when, to my friends, I could defend HS2 expenditure ...………. not sure now.

Almost certainly the figure quoted for Curzon St does not include any railway systems (track, signalling, OLE, etc), nor all the site clearance, nor land purchase. And it’s a brownfield site.
 

hooverboy

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The Reading job ended up as around a billion - Curzon Street will be, I suggest, somewhat similar - the £571m starting point will certainly double. As I mentioned on another thread, there was a time when, to my friends, I could defend HS2 expenditure ...………. not sure now.
london bridge was similar.
the figure quoted should be at least tripled.

HS2 still makes sense if it can provide a comparable to/better than end to end journey time with all bells and whistles of flight, ie check in etc.
london-edinburgh in 3 hours would be acceptable..it's about the same as flight time+security control/boarding /check in etc.
HS2 could do that with HS1 specs.
 

JamesT

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london bridge was similar.
the figure quoted should be at least tripled.

HS2 still makes sense if it can provide a comparable to/better than end to end journey time with all bells and whistles of flight, ie check in etc.
london-edinburgh in 3 hours would be acceptable..it's about the same as flight time+security control/boarding /check in etc.
HS2 could do that with HS1 specs.

I assume to do London to Edinburgh in 3 hours with HS1 technology you would have to build a complete end to end line on the shortest route.

So you won't gain benefits on anything bar that route, whereas HS2's Y gives improved journeys for several city pairings. The increased speed over HS1 spec also gives journey improvements before you get a complete end to end line built.
 

tomuk

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london bridge was similar.
the figure quoted should be at least tripled..

There is a big difference between Curzon St and London Bridge and Reading it is just a big empty plot. No need to work round a live railway with 20 odd tph.
 

fishwomp

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There is a big difference between Curzon St and London Bridge and Reading it is just a big empty plot. No need to work round a live railway with 20 odd tph.

The other big difference is that the lines at both London Bridge and Reading that pass adjacent to the terminal platforms also have the common sense of platforms to enable interchange capabilities!
 

HSTEd

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I assume to do London to Edinburgh in 3 hours with HS1 technology you would have to build a complete end to end line on the shortest route.

That depends by what you mean by HS1 specs.

It's only 530km from Edinburgh to london on a straight line.
That implies under 2 hours at 300km/h.

So you won't gain benefits on anything bar that route, whereas HS2's Y gives improved journeys for several city pairings. The increased speed over HS1 spec also gives journey improvements before you get a complete end to end line built.
Eh, not really.
A straight line gets you a new high speed line to Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds.

30-40km extra track gets you a high speed line to Manchester almost as fast as HS2's proposal.
Birmingham is abit harder but it can still be done.

EDIT:
Base on the performance of the Tokaido Shinkansen.
A train with 20 stops could do London-Edinburgh in 3 hours if it was the local stopper.
 

NotATrainspott

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'HS1 specs' is also a bit of a waste of time. The state-of-the-art for HSR lines around the world has shifted up to around a 350km/h design speed, even if trains won't be running at it. Also, HS2 Ltd have looked in detail at linespeeds along the route and have reduced them when the benefit is outweighed by the cost. For instance, 400km/h running in tunnels requires a 10m diameter single bore (i.e. larger than the Channel Tunnel). This is acceptable for short sections of tunnels (e.g. at Crewe) on otherwise plain line but many of the longest tunnels on HS2 are located at the southern end. The linespeeds through London and the Chilterns step up gradually to 400km/h since trains will need to slow down anyway. Therefore, the benefit from reducing the linespeed down to 300km/h or so would now be fairly marginal - the best places for it are already not far off, while the rest of the line is suited fine for faster running.
 

HSTEd

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'HS1 specs' is also a bit of a waste of time. The state-of-the-art for HSR lines around the world has shifted up to around a 350km/h design speed, even if trains won't be running at it. Also, HS2 Ltd have looked in detail at linespeeds along the route and have reduced them when the benefit is outweighed by the cost. For instance, 400km/h running in tunnels requires a 10m diameter single bore (i.e. larger than the Channel Tunnel). This is acceptable for short sections of tunnels (e.g. at Crewe) on otherwise plain line but many of the longest tunnels on HS2 are located at the southern end. The linespeeds through London and the Chilterns step up gradually to 400km/h since trains will need to slow down anyway. Therefore, the benefit from reducing the linespeed down to 300km/h or so would now be fairly marginal - the best places for it are already not far off, while the rest of the line is suited fine for faster running.

This just shows the madness of continuing to build single track tunnels in the modern era.
We now have access to 15m+ TBMs, we should use them and put both tracks in a single bore, either with interspersed escape routes every 1000m or with a second emergency bore.

Also making assumptions about the acceleration curves of future trains is probably not a brilliant plan.
 

civ-eng-jim

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Twin bore tunnels make more efficient use of space and produce less spoil than twin track/single bore......

But I'm not sure how this is related to Curzon Street.
 

JamesT

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This just shows the madness of continuing to build single track tunnels in the modern era.
We now have access to 15m+ TBMs, we should use them and put both tracks in a single bore, either with interspersed escape routes every 1000m or with a second emergency bore.

Also making assumptions about the acceleration curves of future trains is probably not a brilliant plan.

Is anyone building high speed lines in twin track tunnels? Surely the airflow from the two trains passing each other would be horrendous at that kind of speed?

You also mention having a second tunnel for emergencies, surely it’s far more efficient to have two smaller running tunnels interconnected so you can escape through to the other tunnel if required?
 

HSTEd

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Is anyone building high speed lines in twin track tunnels? Surely the airflow from the two trains passing each other would be horrendous at that kind of speed?
In Germany this has been done for relatively short (~8km) long tunnels.

The air flow from trains passing is not too problematic because your tunnel tends to have more free volume than a comparable singel track tunnel (for obvious reasons!), and because the pressure wave doesn't have time to build into anything nasty, because the trains are after all only 400m long.
This is why bridges don't require pressure hoods like they are proposing for tunnels on HS2 - the effect only becoems significant as your length of time spent in the pressure wave generating situation increases.
Since the trains will have passed each other in something like 2 seconds, nothing too terrible can occur, meanwhile the free volume of the tunnel available to each train being larger actually reduces the pressure effects relative to a single track tunnel the rest of the time.
You also mention having a second tunnel for emergencies, surely it’s far more efficient to have two smaller running tunnels interconnected so you can escape through to the other tunnel if required?
Well potentially but in the UK situation, probably not.
We will be running most of our tunnels at relatively shallow depths, or at least close tot he surface in some direction (in places like the pennines you could imagine running the tunnel inside a valley wall with near horizontal escape adits) so escape shafts become more economic than the second bore.

You would only have to provide an emergency tunnel bore over the section of the route that requires them, without altering the profile of the running tunnel at all.

There is also talk of allowing tunnels to be a single bore but separated from their escape passages by suitably fireproof safety walls.
But I don't know of anyone who has got that through a risk assesment yet - after all tunnels have long lead times.

It is worth noting that various EU studies put the cost index of a double running line tunnel at 220, whereas calculations based on the options suggest a double tunnel with secondary escape bore would be only 190.

If you can use 1000m spaced access shafts the cost of the tunnel falls drastically to only 130!

EDIT:

Apparently the Bologna-Firenze high speed railway has all its tunnels built into a single operational bore.

Also apparently something like 95% of it's length is in tunnels......
 
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Bald Rick

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london bridge was similar.
the figure quoted should be at least tripled.

HS2 still makes sense if it can provide a comparable to/better than end to end journey time with all bells and whistles of flight, ie check in etc.
london-edinburgh in 3 hours would be acceptable..it's about the same as flight time+security control/boarding /check in etc.
HS2 could do that with HS1 specs.

London Bridge - the station - was a billion, give or take. However this included complete demolition of the station, right in the middle of the largest city in Europe, with horrendous road access, whilst running a station that has around 2000 trains a day and 50 million passengers a year using it. The station was built in stages that were constrained by the need to run those train services and move the passengers, and was therefore done in around 50 separate stages. For example, piling was done over 4 years. Had there been a ‘clear run’, it wasn’t about 6 months work.

Curzon St meanwhile is on a brownfield site, with good road access, and no need to do any staging. It’s also about half the size of London Bridge. £571m is plenty.
 

Bald Rick

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Is anyone building high speed lines in twin track tunnels? Surely the airflow from the two trains passing each other would be horrendous at that kind of speed?

Yes, HS1! Although the North Downs Tunnel does have a big concrete wall down the middle of it principally for derailment protection but it does help the aerodynamics.
 

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