This was looked at, but ruled out because it trashes a significant portion of the bus network between Cambridge and Huntingdon.
The southern approach means that it’s not necessary to do that in any event.
As
@zwk500 says:
You would also have to expand capacity on the West Anglia Mainline south of Cambridge to run services through, negating much of the cost and constructability advantage.
This is very much a ‘long term sustainability and quality of development’ decision.
That being said, the St Neots South station location wasn’t all that much better in terms of immediate benefits because it’s still a fair way from the town centre and on the ’wrong’ side of the river.
The MVL service pattern isn’t confirmed. There’s a high likelihood that all 3FP on the MVL will run through to Cambridge and, potentially, it might be a consistent stopping pattern for all three i.e. all three call at largest settlements with the remaining stations going parliamentary or getting a bus instead.
The opportunity has been taken to grasp the nettle: houses are going to be demolished.
This is going to be looked at again as part of the next phase of detailed design, but ultimately if the railway is going to be built then there will be some inevitable impacts.
You won’t believe some of the internal arguments about this, but things ended up where they did. There was a large contingent in the company which wanted to say even less!
The service pattern needs to be confirmed first. The timetable modelling indicated that trains wouldn’t really get up to this line speed due to the intermediate station calls which then calls into question whether a 100mph uplift is actually value for money.
And if a lower maximum line speed reduces the scope of works, costs and severance (level crossing closures and so on) then that has to be factored in as well.
It’s not that simple because you would have to expand capacity between Cambridge and Cambridge South to run anything more than a token service each hour. That increases the costs significantly, but is already being done on the selected southern approach.
There isn’t one.
In theory, yes, but that wouldn’t align with the strategic and economic case for the scheme which is about joining up the shorter intermediate flows as well i.e. EWR only makes sense if you call at Cambourne, MVL settlements and so on to join them to the bigger population and employment centres.