Could HS2 have been planned and built in the 1980s?

[PTR 444]

HS2, despite being renowned for its cost overruns and delays, is actually progressing relatively quickly compared to a lot of other British megaprojects. The first proposal for such a concept was drawn up in 2010, and it only took another ten years before shovels finally hit the ground. Compare that with Crossrail which had been proposed since the 1970s, yet that took three decades before construction finally begun.

With that in mind, I have been wondering whether a brand new London - Birmingham high speed railway could have been conceived as early as the 1980s. Seeing as this was the era when the Chiltern Line was rationalised, that route could have been repurposed for a 125-140mph intercity railway with some new construction at either end and straightening of curves. Ultimately the originally planned full HS2 network from 2010 was a better idea, but I’d be interested to find out how an intercity railway network in the UK might have panned out if planning began in the 1970s/1980s with construction potentially starting as early as the late 80s/90s?

 

[swt_passenger]

In the 1980s, nobody was thinking about the ECML or WCML ever being completely full, so why would they have even considered a separate high speed line? When the WCML capacity was looked at, they then decided on Trent Valley four tracking, Rugby remodelling, etc etc. I think it was only when the difficulties improving the WCML became obvious in the mid 2000s that the idea of new lines gained momentum.

 

[Magdalia]

Two key dates for UK transport infrastructure in the 1980s are the completion of the M25 in 1986 and the Channel Tunnel Treaty with France in 1987. They indicate what were regarded as the priorities at the time.

 

[JamesT]

Two key dates for UK transport infrastructure in the 1980s are the completion of the M25 in 1986 and the Channel Tunnel Treaty with France in 1987. They indicate what were regarded as the priorities at the time.

ECML electrification?

 

[stuu]

British Rail were thinking about the need to do something with the WCML: the Intercity 250 project was proposed to follow on from ECML electrification and would potentially have involved new sections of line. Of course it never got any further, but the basic principle of what later became HS2 was there

 

[Peter Wilde]

What was lacking was the political will. If Governments had felt it a priority to compete for kudos with those annoying Gallic folk across the Channel, then of course a network of new high speed lines (not just HS2) could have been built, and we would not have needed a 5 or 10 year period of debate either. Instead, however we tried to do things on the cheap and came up with ideas like the APT and the attempt to use clever tech to provide much higher speeds on existing tracks.

 

[DanNCL]

In the 1980s, nobody was thinking about the ECML or WCML ever being completely full, so why would they have even considered a separate high speed line?

Same reason as Concorde was operated, for speed and prestige rather than capacity.

 

[Peter Sarf]

In the 1980s I doubt the need was there. Besides we had to make the mistake of trying to upgrade the West Coast Mainline first !.

Rewind ten years to the 1970s and I expect the Midland Mainline would have had to not exist. We copped off the Manchester arm of it anyway.

Rewind another ten years to the 1960s and I doubt if the Great Central route would ever have closed if demand (mainly freight) were there !.

Also we did not need the speed way back then as air travel was a distant dream.

But yes the French were doing high speed rail in the 1980s. I rode a TGV to the South (Avignon ?) in late summer 1986. So the French are forty years ahead of us.

There is more chance of me emigrating than there is of HS2 being done properly.

 

[Technologist]

In the 1980s I doubt the need was there. Besides we had to make the mistake of trying to upgrade the West Coast Mainline first !.

Rewind ten years to the 1970s and I expect the Midland Mainline would have had to not exist. We copped off the Manchester arm of it anyway.

Rewind another ten years to the 1960s and I doubt if the Great Central route would ever have closed if demand (mainly freight) were there !.

Also we did not need the speed way back then as air travel was a distant dream.

But yes the French were doing high speed rail in the 1980s. I rode a TGV to the South (Avignon ?) in late summer 1986. So the French are forty years ahead of us.

There is more chance of me emigrating than there is of HS2 being done properly.

If you go back to the 1960's options including tracked hovercraft, APT and VTOL jet aircraft were all expected to be potential solutions to intercity transport. The idea of building our own Shinkansen was not really on the pitch.

Ironically today an electric VTOL jet is possible in the near term and is probably the biggest longer term threat to the viability of high speed rail.

 

[Bald Rick]

HS2, despite being renowned for its cost overruns and delays, is actually progressing relatively quickly compared to a lot of other British megaprojects. The first proposal for such a concept was drawn up in 2010, and it only took another ten years before shovels finally hit the ground. Compare that with Crossrail which had been proposed since the 1970s, yet that took three decades before construction finally begun.

A couple of points of order - the first serious reports into what became HS2 were dated 2005 / 2006.

Crossrail was proposed in the 1930s.

With that in mind, I have been wondering whether a brand new London - Birmingham high speed railway could have been conceived as early as the 1980s. Seeing as this was the era when the Chiltern Line was rationalised, that route could have been repurposed for a 125-140mph intercity railway with some new construction at either end and straightening of curves. Ultimately the originally planned full HS2 network from 2010 was a better idea, but I’d be interested to find out how an intercity railway network in the UK might have panned out if planning began in the 1970s/1980s with construction potentially starting as early as the late 80s/90s?

In the early days of planning the West Coast upgrade (late 80s / early 90s) there was some quick work done to identify the cost of a high speed line - this was done to prove that the upgrade was best value option. Of course this was in BR days when cost estimates for upgrades type work were - to put it kindly - not exactly taking into account all costs.

 

[PTR 444]

If you go back to the 1960's options including tracked hovercraft, APT and VTOL jet aircraft were all expected to be potential solutions to intercity transport. The idea of building our own Shinkansen was not really on the pitch.

Ironically today an electric VTOL jet is possible in the near term and is probably the biggest longer term threat to the viability of high speed rail.

Erm, I don’t think so. You’re not going to get them anywhere near dense city centres

 

[Peter Wilde]

Erm, I don’t think so. You’re not going to get them anywhere near dense city centres

Indeed. Also:

What evidence is there that electric aircraft of commercially viable size are anywhere near getting the range to compete with fast long distance rail? (Most commentators say the only (perhaps) viable way to make airliners greener in the medium term is to use artificially created liquid fuels, like those made from recycled vegetable oil). And

“… an electric VTOL jet” ? How does that work exactly? Using the electricity to boil water, and then use the steam to create a jet, perhaps? The mind boggles ...

 

[A0wen]

What was lacking was the political will. If Governments had felt it a priority to compete for kudos with those annoying Gallic folk across the Channel, then of course a network of new high speed lines (not just HS2) could have been built, and we would not have needed a 5 or 10 year period of debate either. Instead, however we tried to do things on the cheap and came up with ideas like the APT and the attempt to use clever tech to provide much higher speeds on existing tracks.

The difference between France and the UK is geography - France being twice as large with a much lower population density and more amenable terrain for the links the TGV lines were being built for.

The APT was hardly the "cheap" option - it was a practical answer to how to speed up the WCML - a route to which nobody has come up with a sensible answer as to how to make a fast alternative whilst serving the same destinations.

 

[507020]

we had to make the mistake of trying to upgrade the West Coast Mainline first !.

Rewind ten years to the 1970s and I expect the Midland Mainline would have had to not exist. We copped off the Manchester arm of it anyway.

Rewind another ten years to the 1960s and I doubt if the Great Central route would ever have closed

Closure of the Millers Dale section of the MML was the biggest mistake here. Marylebone - Manchester over Woodhead was hardly sensible, but still added capacity and this survived until, coincidentally, the opening of the TGV Sud-Est…

And now Rishi has done the same to HS2 as the MML, likely illegally, when London - Manchester remains the largest domestic intercity market across all modes. What was all that about 5 tracking south of Stockport before privatisation?

How good would capacity be if there were both WCML and reinstated MML conventional services serving intermediate destinations cheaply (Manchester - Derby!) in addition to a HS2 premier service reaching Euston and Curzon Street fast?

 

[Technologist]

Indeed. Also:

What evidence is there that electric aircraft of commercially viable size are anywhere near getting the range to compete with fast long distance rail? (Most commentators say the only (perhaps) viable way to make airliners greener in the medium term is to use artificially created liquid fuels, like those made from recycled vegetable oil). And

“… an electric VTOL jet” ? How does that work exactly? Using the electricity to boil water, and then use the steam to create a jet, perhaps? The mind boggles ...

I happen to work in aerospace/energy.

SAF (Sustainable Aviation Fuel) is in my view an enigma (and I've seen the under pinning studies).

1. The SAF made from waste feedstocks is severely limited in volume compared to the amounts needed, there are also plenty of other high value applications for hydrocarbons such as plastics which would also have a claim on those materials.
2. SAF made from bio-fuels either displaces food production or natural environments, it is thus questionable in value.
3. SAF made from electricity and captured carbon plus hydrogen requires massive amounts of electricity and is massively inefficient. This will never be economic and is an affront to elegant engineering.

We did this **** with cars over the last 20 years (E5 and E10 fuels) billions were wasted and EVs won anyway because it is fundamentally more efficient.

Aviation is advocating for SAF because it keeps governments, regulators and public opinion off their backs for a while longer. The seniors advocating for them will be retired by then, and maybe some better solutions will emerge.

You don't need to replicate current airliner range to keep aviation working, you just need enough range to cross the narrowest bits of the ocean, once you can do that everything is just a matter of daisychaining flights together. There is plenty of scope for making changing flights and airports a slicker experience.

Regarding eVTOL or similar the prototypes flying today have useful ranges of around 150 miles. Given that they currently reserve ~50% of their battery capacity for safety purposes improvements of 10% to battery capacity would add 20%+ to range so expect this figure to go up rapidly. These ranges are perfectly adequate to create an intercity network in the UK given that changing between vehicles with less than 20 seats is relatively frictionless.

The Lilium which is pictured in one of the quietest eVTOLs, you can hold a conversation without raised voices 65m away from it at the hover. In most city locations if it is flying from a elevated roof its noise profile will be within the background noise. A good location for an eVTOL station is likely to be existing railway station roofs and existing multi-story car park roofs. As they take of vertically an eVTOL "station" has a comparable density to a rail station of similar capacity.

For avoidance of doubt I'm not advocating for the Uber vision of using these things for intra city flying but for scaling up the initial eVTOL designs to 10-20 seaters. That makes the cost of the pilot relatively small (given the speed of the craft its likely a lower per mile cost than an national express driver) and means you don't need cabin crew or extensive security checks. The picture I posted is the 14 seat stretched Lilium.

 

[The Ham]

I'm not sure that there was the need for another line in the 1980's, as such whilst HS2 could have be possible it wasn't politically viable.

As for eVTOL aircraft, sometimes it's forgotten just how much capacity railways have.

If you were to build a new line with 12tph (so only 1 train every 5 minutes in each direction) to be able to run 12 coach 350/450 trains for 15 hours a day your capacity for that line is 285,000 seats.

If you were to run 30 seat aircraft 24 hours a day you'd need to run 400 an hour to have the same capacity. That's one every 9 seconds.

Now whilst you wouldn't need all that capacity in one location, your air space along one route is going to get fairly congested fairly quickly and it's just not going to be viable for into London travel. Whilst it might be possible between other locations (say Woking to Reading where rail travel isn't easy), it's still likely to be fairly expensive to build the landing locations.

Whilst rail station rooftops could work, I'm not sure network rail would be all that keen unless there was a significantly low risk of aircraft coming down near (let alone on) a rail line - that would likely mean a significantly large area of roof space built to a high enough strength to withstand a small height uncontrolled decent.

 

[mike57]

Could a high speed line have been built in the 80s, yes it could, Japan had the Shinkansen and France had the TGV, the technology was there.

The problem, look at the the state of the railways in the early 80s. There had been an extended period of contraction, and the benefits of the HST were just begining to filter through. The APT was still on the table, but it was becoming increasingly clear that it wasn't ever going to enter full commercial service. Also the political landscape, which completely changed in 1979.

Other projects (rightly in my mind), the main one being ECML electrification took priority, and also the Selby diversion. Then as the 80s progressed the need to replace first generation DMUs. Also passengers numbers had only just started to pick up, so I dont think anyone foresaw that the growth would carry on until the mid 2010s.

So if anyone had suggested High Speed line building during this period I think they would have been ignored or worse. It wasn't until the WCML modernisation program that it became apparent that there is only so much that can be acheived with route upgrades.

Had HS rail been on the table I dont think the current route would have been chosen. There was capacity at St Pancras, HS1 wasn't on the cards, so a TGV style route using classic lines into St Pancras and a spine route following roughly the M1 and M6 would I suggest have been more likely, using (upgraded?) classic lines for the last few miles into the large cities, remember there were not the capacity issues at this time. Principle aim would be reduction in journey time.

The problem with HS2 has been more about delivery, the original concept with East and West legs made sense, the reduction in scope has meant that benefits have been eroded while costs have mushroomed. Getting a bit off topic, a short northern section, perhaps the route out of Manchester, should have been built first to get construction and operating experience before embarking on the longer sections. I also think its been over specified, all we needed was a traditional 300kph TGV style route.

 

[sprinterguy]

For reference, at the time Intercity Director John Prideaux announced the Intercity 250 project for the WCML in June 1990, it was estimated that the alternative of an all-new alignment would take fifteen years to build - So 2005 at the earliest even if the funding and political will was there. Hence the project envisaged a more incremental approach to modernisation of the existing route, to deliver some benefits (like new trains on existing infrastructure) sooner.

It's worth noting that at the time the goal of the project, including the proposed cut offs for the south WCML, was the acceleration of journey times for commercial advantage, rather than additional capacity: As noted by several posters above, I don't think any proposals for a completely new domestic high speed route would have been seriously entertained at that time or earlier. In the seventies in particular the focus, with the HST and APT projects, was maximising operating speeds on the existing network.

 

[Guano]

What information is available about the various iterations of the Intercity 250 project? Exactly what cut-offs for the south WCML were considered? Which sections of the Great Central alignment were considered and how would they have joined the WCML alignment?

 

[HSTEd]

The Lilium which is pictured in one of the quietest eVTOLs, you can hold a conversation without raised voices 65m away from it at the hover. In most city locations if it is flying from a elevated roof its noise profile will be within the background noise. A good location for an eVTOL station is likely to be existing railway station roofs and existing multi-story car park roofs. As they take of vertically an eVTOL "station" has a comparable density to a rail station of similar capacity.

For avoidance of doubt I'm not advocating for the Uber vision of using these things for intra city flying but for scaling up the initial eVTOL designs to 10-20 seaters. That makes the cost of the pilot relatively small (given the speed of the craft its likely a lower per mile cost than an national express driver) and means you don't need cabin crew or extensive security checks. The picture I posted is the 14 seat stretched Lilium.

You would never be allowed to fly large numbers of large VTOLs like that over cities, because of how useful they would be as terrorist weapons.

They would have to be extremely tightly regulated with major security monitoring which would drive the price way up. They would be treated like airliners etc are treated today.

For example, imagine stripping the interior out of one and filling it to its MTOW with steel flechettes, then using a very low performance explosive to fragment the airframe in midflight over a heavily built up area.

EDIT:
Electric airliners are going to require major improvements in battery technology before they become competitive with surface transport, and indeed I would expect short sea crossings like the one to Ireland to shift to electric hovercraft instead. Currently most electric aircraft are operating well under 200 knots, and many under 100 knots.

A 400 knot airliner with 300km range is itself a major ask. If you are flying under 100 knots, travelling at 70 knots with your car is a major attraction.

 

[The Planner]

What information is available about the various iterations of the Intercity 250 project? Exactly what cut-offs for the south WCML were considered? Which sections of the Great Central alignment were considered and how would they have joined the WCML alignment?

I doubt any of the Great Central would have been used, its too far west from the WCML.

 

[Guano]

Indeed, the Great Central is significantly west of the WCML. However use of the GC alignment is usually mentioned when Intercity 250 is mentioned in threads here, which is puzzling. That is why I am asking if anyone has ever seen anything with more details, or what other cut-offs were considered.

 

[Peter Sarf]

I doubt any of the Great Central would have been used, its too far west from the WCML.

I think the temptation is because the Great Central route started just down the Euston Road from Euston and ended up crossing the West Coast Main Line at Rugby. But the Great Central route then got lost continuing too far East for Birmingham and Manchester.

As others have said the motivation for a high speed route in the 80s would have been different. Then it would purely have been for speed and not for relieving pressure on existing mainlines. So the need for HS2 now is (well was pre Covid) greater than it would have been then as capacity is being stretched too far. But we've stalled.

Back to the Great Central route - would it be any use as a freight spine to take freight of the Southern West Coast Main Line ?. Probably not because its easier to justify the expense for a high speed passenger line with freight getting the crumbs that fall off the table.

 

[The Planner]

Back to the Great Central route - would it be any use as a freight spine to take freight of the Southern West Coast Main Line ?. Probably not because its easier to justify the expense for a high speed passenger line with freight getting the crumbs that fall off the table.

Where is the freight going once it gets to South Ruislip? No easy way to get towards the North London Line or Kew etc... Doesn't help with DIRFT or Northampton Gateway terminals either.

 

[Peter Wilde]

Erm, I don’t think so. You’re not going to get them anywhere near dense city centres

I happen to work in aerospace/energy.

SAF (Sustainable Aviation Fuel) is in my view an enigma (and I've seen the under pinning studies).

1. The SAF made from waste feedstocks is severely limited in volume compared to the amounts needed, there are also plenty of other high value applications for hydrocarbons such as plastics which would also have a claim on those materials.
2. SAF made from bio-fuels either displaces food production or natural environments, it is thus questionable in value.
3. SAF made from electricity and captured carbon plus hydrogen requires massive amounts of electricity and is massively inefficient. This will never be economic and is an affront to elegant engineering.

We did this **** with cars over the last 20 years (E5 and E10 fuels) billions were wasted and EVs won anyway because it is fundamentally more efficient.

Aviation is advocating for SAF because it keeps governments, regulators and public opinion off their backs for a while longer. The seniors advocating for them will be retired by then, and maybe some better solutions will emerge.

You don't need to replicate current airliner range to keep aviation working, you just need enough range to cross the narrowest bits of the ocean, once you can do that everything is just a matter of daisychaining flights together. There is plenty of scope for making changing flights and airports a slicker experience.

Regarding eVTOL or similar the prototypes flying today have useful ranges of around 150 miles. Given that they currently reserve ~50% of their battery capacity for safety purposes improvements of 10% to battery capacity would add 20%+ to range so expect this figure to go up rapidly. These ranges are perfectly adequate to create an intercity network in the UK given that changing between vehicles with less than 20 seats is relatively frictionless.

The Lilium which is pictured in one of the quietest eVTOLs, you can hold a conversation without raised voices 65m away from it at the hover. In most city locations if it is flying from a elevated roof its noise profile will be within the background noise. A good location for an eVTOL station is likely to be existing railway station roofs and existing multi-story car park roofs. As they take of vertically an eVTOL "station" has a comparable density to a rail station of similar capacity.

For avoidance of doubt I'm not advocating for the Uber vision of using these things for intra city flying but for scaling up the initial eVTOL designs to 10-20 seaters. That makes the cost of the pilot relatively small (given the speed of the craft its likely a lower per mile cost than an national express driver) and means you don't need cabin crew or extensive security checks. The picture I posted is the 14 seat stretched Lilium.

Thanks for expanding on this. I tend to agree with most of what you say about SAF, it does have severe drawbacks and problems if scaled up.

On quietness and range of electric airliners, I tend to be more sceptical of all these claims by techno-optimists; but have no data, just an inner reaction.

Also bear in mind that nearly all innovative tech proposals tend to go through an over-hyped starting phase, followed by a slump in public expectations when the hyped performance does not materialise. Then after a few more years there may be a slow return of some confidence if the real (and inevitably lower) performance comes to be demonstrated as commercially viable.

Where I can’t go along with your comment is about ease of use especially in the current security environment. There will have to be baggage checks before boarding any airborne vehicle, and those will create much delay and inconvenience. Even a slow 20 seat aircraft would create unacceptable damage in an urban context if just falling out of the sky after a bomb explosion; and much worse if hijacked and flown to cause maximum impact.

Also, if the pilot’s salary is such a small part of the total operating cost, why does helicopter travel remain such a high cost luxury, after some 80 years of technical development? It’s not all down to high fuel costs, surely? Doesn’t this example show there is considerable resistance to flying aircraft low over urban areas, and that such things are only acceptable given high levels of safety extras, and subject to noise being kept down by there being only a few flights?

 

[HSTEd]

Back to the Great Central route - would it be any use as a freight spine to take freight of the Southern West Coast Main Line ?. Probably not because its easier to justify the expense for a high speed passenger line with freight getting the crumbs that fall off the table.

The Great Central route would be so expensive to reopen that you aren't going to justify it unless it has some major operational advantages over the status quo freight options.
Giving those advantages (loading gauge, train length, access to terminals etc etc) would probably require so many remedial works that you might as well just start fresh.

 

[PTR 444]

Thanks for the replies. It appears clear that the main reason for not planning or building HS2 (or anything similar) in the 1980s was due to the capacity not being needed at the time. Of course, HS2 was primarily intended to be a capacity improvement project, but speed played a huge part in the marketing of the project.

Air travel was already well established in the 80s as well as an emerging awareness of environmental issues. Even if we didn’t need the capacity back then, I think we could have still benefitted from some incremental speed improvements by building high speed bypasses like the one proposed at Stafford in the 90s. Over time these could have been joined up to form a network not too dissimilar to the full HS2, but with many more spurs to the classic network allowing a greater variety of services to operate.

It’s interesting that the Great Central is mentioned, as this could have formed a high speed route from London to the East Midlands and North East avoiding Birmingham. Back then, it would have made sense to combine it with an upgraded Chiltern line as the main London - Birmingham high speed route, since they could have both shared the same terminus at Old Oak Common or Marylebone (with local trains diverted through Crossrail or onto the Metropolitan Line).

 

[RT4038]

Where is the freight going once it gets to South Ruislip? No easy way to get towards the North London Line or Kew etc... Doesn't help with DIRFT or Northampton Gateway terminals either.

The GC line went pretty close to DIRFT, so presumably spur lines would have been built to cater. There would have been additional junctions required south of Ruislip to access the North London line, Kew etc.

Probably would have ended up with less completely new line required?

 

[The Planner]

The GC line went pretty close to DIRFT, so presumably spur lines would have been built to cater. There would have been additional junctions required south of Ruislip to access the North London line, Kew etc.

Probably would have ended up with less completely new line required?

And the existing trains on the Chilterns?

 

[sprinterguy]

What information is available about the various iterations of the Intercity 250 project? Exactly what cut-offs for the south WCML were considered? Which sections of the Great Central alignment were considered and how would they have joined the WCML alignment?

My particular information comes from the contemporary issues of RAIL magazine; I know which issue announced the proposal and which announced it had been canned, but I'd have to rummage some more through my back catalogue to unearth any mention as the project developed.

There's a fairly cursory summary of IC250 in 'The Intercity Story 1964 - 2012', by Chris Green and Mike Vincent, which Wikipedia quotes as a source, and I don't have the book to hand right this minute but some of the more targeted deviations to "straighten out" the south WCML sound plausible.

John Prideaux stated at the start that any new deviations would be "less than Selby", so wholesale use of the GC alignment was probably out of the question.