Hilarious, Nimbopoops.
HS2 can’t go everywhere and it won’t. 14tph is less than 17/18tph. The services to the three ‘second cities’ is not up for debate. Even the idea of junking the eastern leg means replacement Leeds services going over the Pennines instead.
When Stoke kicked up a stink (a place HS2 was slated to avoid, funnily enough) it was agreed to send a path that way, terminating in Macclesfield. It was the Liverpool and Preston services that had to cop it with the portion-working, to make the path up. And that was at 17tph. 14tph will mean yet more sacrifices and it’ll be the places on the classic network that will make up the compromise.
Yet no one has justified why HS2 can't run more services (i.e. the 17tph) when the WCML could by using new signalling systems, the very same systems which could allow the increase in frequency on HS2 over what other High-speed lines elsewhere currently achieve.
Also, even if there's a problem with running 18tph (200 seconds between trains) or 17tph (211 seconds between trains), how's that mean that we couldn't run 16tph (225 seconds between trains) or 15tph (240 seconds between trains) and it has to be 14tph (257 seconds between trains)?
Even if it results in trains running a bit late you could well run subsequent services a little slower to close up the gap between trains and probable add in an extra path so that in a 30 minute window you squeezed in 10 trains rather than 9. Even if you couldn't, if there's 17 services an hour but with an 18th path available then disruption from a one off event is unlikely to extend beyond 1 hour and almost certainly not beyond 2 hours.
Of course an issue causing delays over several hours will impact for longer the recovery will still be fairly quick once it's over.
However we are taking about events which should be fairly infrequent, however if it's a significant problem (but somehow isn't a problem when it comes to more trains in the existing network) then it would just mean that more High-speed lines are needed. Such as an Eastern High-speed line heading north out of London or an extension to bypass the bottleneck which keeps causing the problems. In the case of the latter, this could be fixed by Northern Powerhouse Rail anyway (for instance if trains to/from Liverpool were causing a significant number of the problems).
It could even be the case that if a train is likely to cause problems from missing it's path that it gets diverted to Curzon Street Station and passengers are transferred to other services to get to London. Whilst that would be a problem if it happened all the time, mostly it's going to be an infrequent event (unless there's a clear need to expand the network).
To me (given the various measures available to mitigate against it, especially as it's something which would only come into play once the Eastern arm is built) it sounds very much like finding a reason not to build HS2 based on something which shouldn't happen much. However if it does happen a lot then it should mean that we try and find a solution which fixes the problem rather than not doing anything. Especially as any alternative to HS2 would be more at risk of these problems than HS2 will be.