Apart from the Welwyn viaduct, all of the ECML as far as Peterborough can be increased to four tracks. North of Peterborough, the only section where ECML passenger trains and other DMUs share four tracks is the Stoke Tunnel area. If in the long-term these services are provided by newer EMUs, then this bottleneck can be relieved significantly. Headways can also be reduced between Doncaster and Leeds by faster stopping services. Freight can be diverted via Lincoln and much long-distance intermodal freight could run at night. If the railway loses unsustainable freight traffic such as coal traffic but gains other traffic, there may not be an overall growth in freight traffic. Between York and Northallerton there is a straight section of four tracks, where faster running would presumably be possible. North of Northallerton, all stations (except around Newcastle) are served by long-distance services and away from the Newcastle-Gateshead conurbation, population is sparse, so there are no local services (except for immediately around Newcastle) to make room for. In any case HS2 would not serve this area. What then is to stop 225 km/h running on the ECML which would benefit Yorkshire, the North East and Scotland sooner than HS2?
As I said in my post, these upgrades will be subject to a law of diminishing returns. If we predicted that rail usage were going to flatline around 2026 after Phase 1 opens then these schemes would probably be enough to keep us going. However, we are not predicting this at all. How much extra capacity would all these upgrades create? How much money would be spent on these upgrades? How much disruption would be caused while these upgrades are being done? These are the questions which are the cause for Phase 2's eastern arm to Leeds and beyond as we know that they are not a particularly good investment for the long term.
It is also not pure speed which causes capacity problems along the route; it is the speed differentials between the fastest and slowest services. If additional capacity is needed sooner than Phase 2 then we might be able to increase the speeds of the slower services as more of them will be electric and as Bombardier are planning to sell a 125mph version of their new commuter/regional EMU. Freight will be much more difficult to increase the speeds though so there is still going to be a large differential in speed and thus inefficiencies.
Coal traffic is indeed unlikely to increase when we are closing the coal power stations. If other freight traffic grows to fill or less than fill this capacity then there is obviously no problem. If it grows more, what do you do? If you want to upgrade the route to four-track there will be an enormous number of night-time possessions across every one of the north/south rail links so it won't be able to travel then. We have to encourage freight to go by rail as much as is possible as otherwise today it is not difficult simply to keep it on the roads on lorries. If the price of road haulage increases dramatically due to road pricing or higher fuel prices, there will still be an awful lot of things needing sent around the country and if there's no space left on the rails, what's going to happen? The cost of essentials is going to go up. The economy will falter. If your goal is for a zero-growth economy, completely localised economy then this will be a win.
Perhaps an alternative or additional scheme to regenerate the North and increase capacity could be targeted sections of new line, for example between Manchester or Rochdale and Huddersfield and between Wakefield and Meadowhall, reusing part of the Wakefield - Cudworth line, aiming to provide a sub-30 minute journey time between Leeds and Manchester/Sheffield. Is the current programme of investment in northern railways enough? More routes could be electrified or 4-tracked where feasible sooner, new light rail schemes could be implemented in major cities.
There is an awful lot of rail investment planned for the North at the moment and we only know about the schemes for the next five or so years. Those five years have Network Rail running at full capacity on these various schemes. After that anything is possible, such as your suggestions if they have a suitable business case behind them. HS2 isn't going to reduce the need for rail investment in the North at all; it will increase it. The timescales needed to build schemes in the North will also be much less than for HS2 itself - they're going to build more and more per year as you go further North as things become much less expensive to do.
What would ETCS Level 3 mean? Can we based investment on developments which might or might not happen?
ETCS is the new European standard for rail signalling, all based around in-cab signalling for high speed international services. HS2 is designed for Level 2 ETCS, which is also the standard currently planned to be rolled out across the ECML from Kings Cross to south of Darlington and along the GWML, then being used to replace any life-expired signalling across the country. It is effectively a digital version of the signalling blocks used today, so trains won't be able to be any closer together but they can read signals going much faster. Level 3 changes the network to use moving-block signalling, where the trains are separated not by physical distances between virtual or real signals but by computer-controlled distances based on how long they need to come to a complete halt, plus an extra few percent. It will allow more trains to use the same tracks and points as there can be today but it has never yet actually been used on a mainline railway. Railtrack, the predecessor to Network Rail, promised Virgin Trains that they would install moving-block along the WCML, which was to allow the Pendolinos to run at their full 225km/h top speed. It was not possible in the late nineties/early noughties and it is still not possible today as nowhere in the world has it working on a mainline. Even installing it on a dedicated London Underground track - the Jubilee line - proved to be a disaster despite the fact that they had a single fleet of identical trains all running more or less the same timetable. However, the technology will improve over the next few decades so we
may be able to use it to increase capacity on top of the plans for HS2, which do not require moving-block to work. If we try to rely upon moving-block to remove the need for HS2 then we will likely just end up with egg on our faces and another WCRM upgrade disaster.
If the price of kerosene increases hugely, will relatively small journey time savings be necessary to encourage modal shift?
If the price of kerosene skyrockets the price of air, coach and car travel will jump. The price of rail travel will not as electrification will increase more and more so it will become less dependent on fossil fuels. The people priced off the planes will travel by train instead and the capacity problems on rail will happen even quicker than were predicted by HS2 and the DfT. If this happens in 2022, we won't be that far away from the opening of Phase 1 so it would be problematic for the few years until it opens and then an accelerated Phase 2 is finished. If we wait until the fuel price soars, HS2 will still take many years to complete so we would have to suffer for much longer than if we just start building now.
I didn't suggest that digital technology might have slowed the growth of rail, rather than it has boost the growth of rail and now that it is established, this growth may slow down.
Perhaps. However, growth which slows down is still growth. Growth builds upon growth in previous years, like compound interest, so even with only 1% growth a year it will still rise dramatically in the end. The absolute worst case scenario for rail is that each person in the UK per year does no more travel than they do today. Then, our growing population will still cause the rail travel to increase year by year. When we invest in schemes in the North, we're going to make rail travel of all kinds more accessible than ever to the many tens of millions of people who live there. These schemes will only make more people want to travel and will make it only easier for people to access the intercity links which will need to be freed up by HS2.
If we do build HS2, and the passenger growth doesn't increase, there are still benefits for the people who do travel as it will be faster, more comfortable and more reliable.
If we don't build HS2, and the the passenger growth doesn't increase, we won't get these benefits for the people who travel today as by no means are our intercity links sufficient at the moment. The network will still be easy to disrupt and will still be slower.
If we do build HS2, and the passenger growth does increase, we will be able to meet the increased capacity needs without trouble as we had invested in the new infrastructure at the right time. Travel will be faster, more reliable and more comfortable for the people who do on both the new lines and the existing lines.
If we don't build HS2, and the passenger growth does increase, we will have an overstretched network which will be uncomfortable, unreliable, and still slow. If people are priced off the railways, even if the price of car and plane travel increases as well there will be more people who will continue to use these more environmentally damaging modes of transport as people will still want or need to travel.
Today it is cheaper to commute by easyJet from Barcelona to London than it is to get a flat there. HS2 is the only kind of scheme which can help to get rid of that kind of absurdity.
If the cost of living goes up hugely and incomes are squeezed, will people be able to afford extra rail travel whether it is cheaper than the alternatives or not or will they simply travel less? Has a range of socio-economic scenarios for HS2 been tested?
Our prediction is that people will continue to travel more. If that proves not to be the case, it is not the end of the world as we will have still delivered additional benefits to the rail network and additional investment to the economy. If we predict that people won't travel more, and we're wrong, then we will cause ourselves a whole series of problems. By building HS2 we're choosing the option with the least overall chance of being a failure. HS2 solves a whole series of problems in our country, not just pure numbers of seats on trains.
Pendolino seat occupancy is currently low (figures suggest around a third to a half), there will be capacity improvements on the existing line and growth is slowing.
How are these seat occupancy figures calculated? There will always be a time when fewer people are travelling and HS2 will be no different by our predictions. The Pendolinos are an InterCity only product where they can push off other people onto the London Midland routes instead at peak times - these are the trains which HS2 is really designed to relieve on the southern WCML. If there were one operator from Euston, as there is at Paddington, then you can see what effect this would have as people would insist on standing in Pendolino vestibules as they do on HSTs to Reading. After you increase all the LM services to 12 car 350s, where else is there to go? You could try to get Virgin to stop more services at the commuter end but this would heavily disadvantage their customers heading further north as their trains would become crammed and would be slower.
HS2 is the rare scheme which is supported by all three of the political parties. As a result, the press and other media give a huge amount of coverage to the anti folk despite the fact that they are very few in number but very loud and opinionated. I suppose it is democracy - otherwise there would be little critique of HS2 as there is no HM Opposition to attack it.
