In view of the capacity problems on the West Coast line and the desire for more services to more destinations, I was wondering about a couple of ways to address this and reduce wastage.
Taking the Manchester to London services for example, there do seem to be unnecessarily long turnaround times at both ends for these services. I don't know about the others, but for Manchester to London it is about 20-25 minutes at each end.
I realise this would need a completely new timetable written for it, but if this and other WCML routes were reduced to roughly 10 minute turnarounds at each end, then I bet this would free up at least a couple or even a handful of units over the course of the day to create new services; such as the second Liverpool service; second direct Scotland; more frequent service to North Wales etc.
Cleaning isn't really that important between turns as the units are thoroughly cleaned before the start of service each day, and there should be some personal responsibility from passengers and staff to keep the train clean en route for themselves and other passengers and staff.
This proposal would only work if new paths were created too, so how about banning freight diagrams from all sections of the WCML, say from 06:00-20:00? Existing freight could be diverted to other routes during the day if necessary, but there should be a greater emphasis on running as much freight as possible during the quieter evening hours and overnight. Freight drivers would be compensated for the tougher working hours with improved pay and conditions.
Right. Let's have a closer look at your proposals.
Timekeeping on the British network is notoriously difficult. The WCML is the pinnacle of this. I'm assuming you're not proposing building any extra infrastructure to support your new timetable, apart from HS2 when it arrives, but I'll point out a few places where you'd need to think about building more stuff to make your timetable work.
Firstly, the timetable itself. Rewriting the E&G timetable when the wires came online took about a year, and timetables are incredibly complex algorithms. Rewriting the WCML timetable to this degree would require about three years to make sure it would work, and even then you'd have to start building the HS2 timetable about that time anyway.
Secondly, turnaround times. These aren't arbitrary. These are incredibly important. The general rule for a turnaround time of a long distance, high speed train is a minimum of about 25 minutes, and if you have a spare platform, it's even better to have at least one service gap waiting at each end (ie a 15 minute frequency service should have a turnaround time of about 20 minutes, so if one is late, you can send the one in front out instead in an emergency)
The WCML is so long, and so complex, that any service can import delays from anywhere else. You risk importing delays from as far afield as Huddersfield, Dalmuir and Holyhead on this route, so you need a lot of resilience. It's no use having a ten minute turnaround at Edinburgh if it's going to be delayed five minutes approaching Haymarket on the way in, and only have five minutes at the platform to get everyone off and on again. You'll inevitably be delayed departing again, and have to run late all the way south.
LDHS services have lots of people with big bags, and lots of people taking time to find their seats ect. There's a reason that these services usually stop for 3 minutes at intermediate stations, just for how long it takes to get everyone off and on again.
It would be ideal to do as you suggest, and if you could guarantee that everything would run perfectly, every time, it might work. In real life the line is just too complicated to do that, with up to 30 services each hour departing from Euston, so you'd never have that confidence. Too many things can go wrong on the real railway, and then we're back to square one, with delayed trains importing delays from everywhere else.
Thirdly, your proposal needs a lot more paths, and many more units than would be freed, for your increased services. More units might help, but then you're running more trains, and there is even more chance if things going wrong. You'd need more platforms at Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and Euston to serve those extra services, even with reduced turnaround times, and more four tracking and grade separation to guarantee everything still ran to time.
Finally, freight. A lot of the freight services in this country are one of two types. The first, bulk flows, run with one engine and one rake of wagons. They go to load in the morning, and come back loaded in the evening. Think places like the Shap quarries, or the stone flows to London. These are big trains, and need a lot of time to get up to speed. But, they often run when other trains aren't running. The northern WCML up to Shap for example is empty for 30 minutes an hour, and that's a perfect time to run a freight train.
If you forced them to run only at night, you'd have to half the number of these trains, unless you used two engines or two takes of wagons. That costs more, and more freight would move to road.
The second type of freight is intermodal traffic. This is a lot faster, often travelling at 75mph, and on the northern WCML especially, it's often not much faster than passenger trains when they get up to speed. They're easy to path between passengers, and only need a loop every 100 miles or so to swap drivers or wait to be overtaken. You could easily run these at night, but what's the point. They don't use much capacity.
Furthermore, most of this second type of freight goes a long way. Felixtowe to Trafford Park or Daventry to Mossend is pretty far, and some of these services take longer than 8 hours. If you forve them to run at night, then they might have to be diverted due to engineering, taking even longer. Sooner or later, you'd end up trying to run them during rush hour at either end, and we're back to square one. They're too valuable to leave in a loop all day, and the freight companies wouldn't like their assets being wasted for 16 hours a day if it happened to get stuck somewhere.
In conclusion, this is a terrible idea, but for the right reasons. The British railway system is oversaturated and the current level of infrastructure spending is inadequate to deal with (pre covid) growth, and we desperately need more segregation of fast passenger trains and freight trains. This is what HS2 does.
Reducing turnaround times and extra paths are all in the pipeline, and those extra paths mean services can be better separated by speed. A medium speed freight train isn't too different in overall speed from an EMU stopping service, so all this capacity helps both freight and passengers, without needing to resort to drastic steps outlined above. The UK's system is just too old, and with too many moving pieces for this to work.
