The plan seems to change quite often!
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We need High speed Rail, but Is HS2 really Needed?
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The Planner
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It won't be Carstairs.
Thanks for that. But Macclesfield? Presumably for the potteries traffic.
That’s would certainly make more sense.
Whether we need HS2 or not, work is starting.
Ttoday I passed Great Missenden were the tunnel is emerging the area was occupied by many work sites a great many workers. This is going to be a main access point and will have a haul road from the roundabout on A413.
So if you use this route look for an alternative between Wendover and Amersham.
Ttoday I passed Great Missenden were the tunnel is emerging the area was occupied by many work sites a great many workers. This is going to be a main access point and will have a haul road from the roundabout on A413.
So if you use this route look for an alternative between Wendover and Amersham.
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Yes, it's primarily about Stoke, and secondarily to serve Stafford without penalising Liverpool. But there's time and space to take those trains to Macclesfield and back before they need to head south, so why not (I'd imagine that the Preston trains will extend to Lancaster, rather than spending nearly an hour at Preston before heading south).
I'd also imagine Carlisle, rather than Carstairs, will be the case eventually, but its all just rumours at the moment.
The Planner
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They can only get to Macclesfield though, if they could get it to Manchester they would. It is also about spreading the Liverpool load, the one via Handsacre and Stafford would be caught by the second via Crewe fairly quickly.
LNW-GW Joint
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In the dark days of WCML electrification (early 1960s), Stoke and Macclesfield had to put up with a single daily train from Euston to Stockport.
Manchester was served hourly from St Pancras via Derby, with 2-3 to Euston via Crewe.
Of course the train was really part of the remaining skeletal Euston service, running on to Longsight.
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Altnabreac
Established Member
There are several options, none of which are likely to involve Carstairs.
- Carlisle split is a decent one. Some capacity issues at Beattock but possibly resolvable with some more freight loops.
- Preston split is an option but it buggers up the WCML capacity over Shap and is harder to fix.
- Another option is not to split at all and run hourly 400m trains via Carlisle to both Edinburgh and Glasgow. This gives the same overall capacity as splitting but needs expensive infrastructure investment at Glasgow Central for 400m platforms. Edinburgh is easier to deliver 400m platforms but at some expense of platform capacity. Haymarket is pretty much impossible to deliver 400m platforms so Haymarket is losing its HS2 calls.
- Or you can run 2tph up the WCML to Glasgow, 2tph via Church Fenton to Newcastle and Edinburgh. This needs infrastructure investment in both Glasgow and Newcastle so is the most expensive option but potentially also has the most benefit.
Post 187 is a pathetic response to a capacity problem. What a [dumb/unadventurous/inept] railway we have now!
Capacity shortage? Yes.
Need to run freight as well as faster passenger trains? Yes, but can't be done unless we invest loads in reinstating lots of loops - even though modern freight is pretty fast compared with a stopping passenger train.
Run longer trains? Can't be done. Platforms supposedly too short and signalling can't cope.
Merge portions for efficient use of core sections? "Foreign rubbish!" It may work in Belgium (and lots of other places) but we are so de-skilled, risk-averse and incompetent that we daren't try it.
Just run combined trains (much easier now that we have an almost 100% EMU railway) and split them where needed.
Capacity shortage? Yes.
Need to run freight as well as faster passenger trains? Yes, but can't be done unless we invest loads in reinstating lots of loops - even though modern freight is pretty fast compared with a stopping passenger train.
Run longer trains? Can't be done. Platforms supposedly too short and signalling can't cope.
Merge portions for efficient use of core sections? "Foreign rubbish!" It may work in Belgium (and lots of other places) but we are so de-skilled, risk-averse and incompetent that we daren't try it.
Just run combined trains (much easier now that we have an almost 100% EMU railway) and split them where needed.
Altnabreac
Established Member
I don't think you have a clue what you are talking about!
Modern freight is still slower than passenger trains. You run more passenger trains you lose freight capacity unless you build loops. So you either kick the freight off rail or you need to invest in more and longer loops.
The platforms aren't supposedly too short. It's simply a fact that there aren't 400m platforms at Glasgow Central or Haymarket. You either run 200m trains into them (which means either splitting or losing capacity), extend them to 400m (which is possible but costs money) or drop the stop there (Haymarket).
As regards merging trains as you can see from the HS2 service patterns several merges are planned so its not being ignored as an option. But if you go away and work out how long splitting and joining takes, and then work out a cost to deliver each minute saving via speed enhancements on existing infrastructure, or via building new lines, then you may not be so keen on splitting and joining as a long term option if you're trying to get journey times down towards three hours.
There are ways to resolve any issue but they involve spending money. A business case must be made. Splitting and joining at Carstairs is the cheap and easy option but almost certainly also the worst option long term.
Really?
except that this particular conversation overlaps with the Liverpool- Scotland thread regarding the WCML. Expresses, Stopping trains and some freight can be flighted, and unchecked freights might fit well next to the stoppers, so we can actually have trains calling at both Penrith and Oxenholme again. I was present when a top LMR freight man was teasing a top passenger man that the overnight sleeper trains were getting in the way of his freights - and couldn't he speed them up?
When we're talking about Liverpool to Scotland through trains I don't see how splitting 4/8 en route is going to cause a problem at either Glasgow Central or Haymarket. If WCML trains are currently 11 coaches and with the historic platform lengths I am sure the intermediate stations will be able to cope.
Is joining/splitting really so difficult? On an EMU (or even DMU) railway it's already done as a matter of course in quite a lot of places - even in the UK, you know!
I disagree: It gives both Glasgow and Edinburgh services for reduced line occupation, and could be implemented almost immediately - given the rolling stock and the will to do it.
Altnabreac
Established Member
Are you replying to a completely different thread? I'm talking about the potential London - Glasgow / Edinburgh post HS2 Phase 2 service pattern in 2033 here. You seem to be talking about the 2019 Liverpool - Glasgow services instead.
Funnily enough modern electric passenger traction runs faster than in steam days.
HS2 is proposing to run 200m and 400m trains only. The 200m trains fit in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The 400m ones don't so need infrastructure investment.
Splitting is very possible and has some advantages - more spread of services - but at a time penalty cost. The decision on whether to split or not will involve assessing those benefits vs costs.
No, indeed it's Plan A for Scotland!
If you go away and read the train specifications for HS2, you'll find that it's meant to be done within the dwell time at the stops. This is perfectly practical - the problem on, say, the ex-Southern Region join/divides are that dwell times are much shorter than they will be on HS2, and so the join/divide delay stands out.
The only problem with splitting at Carstairs wrt journey time is that you wouldn't stop there, at what can be most charitably considered as Lanark Parkway, otherwise.
For someone apparently concerned about 3 hour timings, promoting the notion of Edi trains going via Newcastle as a good idea seems an odd way to go about it - such trains would certainly stop twice (York & Newcastle) and the route is slower. If stopping twice on the West Coast (Preston and Carstairs) is problematic, then stopping twice on the slower East Coast route is going to be worse.
There, quite clearly, are loads of good reasons why splitting at a station in the middle of nowhere has stayed the official proposal for years. I wouldn't be surprised if -stairs turns into -lisle (there are rumours, after all), but I also wouldn't be surprised if it stays the way it currently is publicly proposed.
My favourite reason for Carstairs is that the back portion can drive off forwards, rather than having to wait for the front portion to get out of its way (though obviously you need to do something with the staff - probably carry them from Preston). A split elsewhere (Carlisle being the obvious bet as its a useful place to stop) would mean the back portion would have to wait a few additional minutes.
But, AFAICS, those few additional minutes are not some massive problem. 3 hours is a ballpark figure of where the modal share curve begins to decline more rapidly not some magic bullet that above which service is rubbish. 2x200m trains each hour taking 189 minutes because they are the back portion of a split at Carlisle (assuming the infrastructure required to get) won't be significantly less popular than 2x200m tph taking 184 minutes because they split at Carstairs, and would be more popular than 1x400m taking 179 minutes that doesn't split because half-hourly intercity trains is more of a boon to ridership than getting under the 180 timing.
Altnabreac
Established Member
Indeed, splitting within the dwell time is an ideal scenario but having a stop at Carstairs is less ideal because you wouldn't intend to have a stop there normally.
Splitting at Preston would be best as it is intended to be a stop anyway but line capacity becomes challenging if you split there.
In the HS2 Business Case they did not propose any stops at Carlisle in the Scotland - London trains. My view is that is politically unsustainable anyway so splitting at Carlisle is the best option.
If you're looking at East Coast options then it is likely as part of a package of infrastructure investments that fits in with what Transport for the North are looking at in enhancing the line between York and Newcastle and the new High Speed line north of Newcastle being looked at by Transport Scotland:
https://news.gov.scot/news/cross-border-rail-improvements-planned
Dark days from a WCML perspective, but both Birmingham and Manchester did rather well, with excellent services being provided on the alternative routes then still available. (And dinner coming through the Peak District on a summer evening was a much nicer experience than anywhere on the southern WCML or the wretchedly slow North Stafford loop.)
The Planner
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They won't be splitting and joining in normal dwell times, that is just people that are uninformed on the HS2 side saying that.
Normal dwell time for HS2 trains will be about 3 minutes. Hitachi says 'less than 2 minutes' for Class 800s. Class 395s can do it very quickly at Ashford - actual uncoupling taking seconds.
At Carstairs, there won't be much boarding/alighting, so the time with the door open can be less. At Carlisle, Crewe, Toton, the southern portion has to be in the station longer - having the northern portion having a reduced dwell time can be managed by announcements, etc. In theory they can have those portions that will be in the station for less time function as one-way only with only boarding or alighting at the station in question (boarding on their way north, alighting on their way south), allowing time for a 'less than 2 minutes' procedure.
Even if the time to join/divide is additional to a normal stop, the "less than 2 minutes" is really not much of a problem.
At Carstairs, there won't be much boarding/alighting, so the time with the door open can be less. At Carlisle, Crewe, Toton, the southern portion has to be in the station longer - having the northern portion having a reduced dwell time can be managed by announcements, etc. In theory they can have those portions that will be in the station for less time function as one-way only with only boarding or alighting at the station in question (boarding on their way north, alighting on their way south), allowing time for a 'less than 2 minutes' procedure.
Even if the time to join/divide is additional to a normal stop, the "less than 2 minutes" is really not much of a problem.
Even if the dwell time is less than 2 minutes, the slowdown and speedup is another couple of minutes, plus quite possibly another 30 seconds as the second train has to draw up to the first much more slowly than it would to a platform-end signal. Add in a couple of minutes timetabling in order to make the joins work robustly and another 30 seconds to the Edinburgh trains for crawling round the curve and you've handily destroyed the Edinburgh timing. Certainly you've eliminated any significant benefit over sending it via the East Coast, where the costly extra stops would be happening at useful places that people might actually want to go.
DavidGrain
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When the joining/splitting operation is being carried out, is it not a requirement that the doors of both portions are locked? I have noticed this regularly at both Northampton and Malmö Sweden before the City Tunnel was built. Therefore the operation cannot be carried out in normal dwell time at the station.
richieb1971
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If hs2 is a new railway why are these bottlenecks appearing in forum threads 14 years before it's finished?
Dave_Cardboard
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IIRC there were clauses in the HS2 rolling stock technical specification document concerning the ability to split/join. E.G. how long it should take, whether doors could remain open. etc. etc. Of course, just because it's in the ITT, one presumes that doesn's mean it's bound to happen, but it demonstrates "they" are thinking about it.
EDIT: Section 9.8 of the following talks about coupling/uncoupling operations...
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploa...-000007_P07_Train_Technical_Specification.pdf
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The Planner
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One set is going to be dwelling for 5, 5½ minutes regardless. First train arrives, headway of 3 minutes, next train arrives. Lets be generous and say it couples in 30 secs, then you need the dwell for the rear trains, 2 minutes, then you can go. That original headway could come down with ETCS, but neither Crewe or Carlisle are confirmed for getting that in their re-signallings.
Which bottlenecks?
Hetlana
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Here are a few reservations that I have about the current HS2 plans. Where shall I get started?
The idea of having separate branches for Manchester and Glasgow rather than a through line connecting them both is just absurd. Why would you just want to allow travellers from London to reach these two cities, and not link them with each other? The idea of putting as many cities as possibly on their own deprecate branch lines has got to be a joke, given that the very purpose of any line is to link places together, not to drive them apart from each other up different branches.
In fact it suggests that the only real aim of it all is to ‘open’ each city up to London, and not to connect them with each other. Why else?
Here in China, the Shanghai-Beijing High Speed Line runs through multiple other cities en route, such as Tianjin, Suzhou and Nanjing, and linking them to the end destinations (and each other) is just as important as linking the two ends to each other.
Another is the sheer haphazardness of it all - if this were China, HS1 and HS2 would have been planned together in one master plan, and most likely as just one line. Why couldn’t we have been a more ‘joined up’ in our thinking and planned them as one?
There is no rule that says that London-Kent/Paris has to be a different line from London-Birmingham/Glasgow, particularly when they form the same axis, anymore than Shanghai-Nanjing has to be a different line from Nanjing-Beijing which they aren’t.
With both HS1 and HS2, we don’t have to be wasting our time with old terminus stations, just for the sake of tradition. Why not do what they did in Nanjing, or indeed Berlin, and build a single interchange to serve them both, or indeed a through station? Any one or two of these could have been built at either Stratford or Old Oak Common, for instance.
And please, let’s not waste our time and money with Euston, (which as stated, is just for the sake of keeping with the old) if we already have Old Oak Common. Either we have the line end at Old Oak full stop, or we have it ‘half end’ there by allowing some through trains to join HS1 with a through tunnel - a sort of ‘express crossrail.’
And having an ‘express crossrail’ for High Speed trains isn’t so far fetched, it’s what they do in Berlin, and Brussells. Why limit cross-city services to suburban and commuter trains?
The idea of having separate branches for Manchester and Glasgow rather than a through line connecting them both is just absurd. Why would you just want to allow travellers from London to reach these two cities, and not link them with each other? The idea of putting as many cities as possibly on their own deprecate branch lines has got to be a joke, given that the very purpose of any line is to link places together, not to drive them apart from each other up different branches.
In fact it suggests that the only real aim of it all is to ‘open’ each city up to London, and not to connect them with each other. Why else?
Here in China, the Shanghai-Beijing High Speed Line runs through multiple other cities en route, such as Tianjin, Suzhou and Nanjing, and linking them to the end destinations (and each other) is just as important as linking the two ends to each other.
Another is the sheer haphazardness of it all - if this were China, HS1 and HS2 would have been planned together in one master plan, and most likely as just one line. Why couldn’t we have been a more ‘joined up’ in our thinking and planned them as one?
There is no rule that says that London-Kent/Paris has to be a different line from London-Birmingham/Glasgow, particularly when they form the same axis, anymore than Shanghai-Nanjing has to be a different line from Nanjing-Beijing which they aren’t.
With both HS1 and HS2, we don’t have to be wasting our time with old terminus stations, just for the sake of tradition. Why not do what they did in Nanjing, or indeed Berlin, and build a single interchange to serve them both, or indeed a through station? Any one or two of these could have been built at either Stratford or Old Oak Common, for instance.
And please, let’s not waste our time and money with Euston, (which as stated, is just for the sake of keeping with the old) if we already have Old Oak Common. Either we have the line end at Old Oak full stop, or we have it ‘half end’ there by allowing some through trains to join HS1 with a through tunnel - a sort of ‘express crossrail.’
And having an ‘express crossrail’ for High Speed trains isn’t so far fetched, it’s what they do in Berlin, and Brussells. Why limit cross-city services to suburban and commuter trains?
DavidGrain
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I typed this post earlier this afternoon but I cannot see it on the thread so perhaps I forgot to press the Post Reply.
Is it not a requirement that, on joining/splitting of trains, the doors should be locked in both portions of the train? This means that the operation cannot take place in normal dwell times. Post 202 above has partly answered this question. I have noticed the locking of the doors regularly at Northampton and it used to happen in Malmö, Sweden, before the building of the City Tunnel moved the joining/splitting further north.
Is it not a requirement that, on joining/splitting of trains, the doors should be locked in both portions of the train? This means that the operation cannot take place in normal dwell times. Post 202 above has partly answered this question. I have noticed the locking of the doors regularly at Northampton and it used to happen in Malmö, Sweden, before the building of the City Tunnel moved the joining/splitting further north.
You did press Post Reply the first time - see #199. There's at least a partial reply in #201.
Hasn't it always been a project seen almost totally from London's perspective? After all, the original justification was additional capacity on the southern end of the WCML, achieved better by the construction of a new line to modern standards than by sextupling the WCML to Rugby. Little things like connecting Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds or serving Sheffield at all have always been very secondary concerns. And the design of the western leg is poiting straight to Glasgow, not answering the question of how to link London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool best with one another rather than just giving all of them as faster London conneciton.
Because we don't do joined up planning in this country, either for transport of for anything else. It's always and all short-termism to try to solve the immediate problem.
Railwaysceptic
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No, it's always been a project dreamed up by politicians and civil servants who are most concerned to have tax payers' money pay for something private capital will not touch with a disinfected bargepole. As a Londoner born and bred I assure you 99% of Londoners either actively dislike this project or simply don't care either way. Do not for a moment imagine that there is widespread enthusiasm in London for HS2.
If walk up fares matched the cost of petrol I might be tempted.
I don't live at Euston and don't travel to any of the city centres concerned so the need for local travel at each end takes away a lot of the time benefits compared with driving door to door for any destination in England.
HSTEd
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Because in the UK, unlike in China, we don't have infrastructure projects designed by party officials drawing a line on a map and then having all dissenters quietly liquidated.
Given that the train, even at 230km/h will eat up ~3.9km of track each and every minute, taking a train 15km out it's way to ensure you only need one track into a city centre is not a big deal.
Thus creating the problem OOC is designed to avoid of concentrating too many passengers onto one London terminus? Euston might have tube lines but it is not Chatelet les Halles, which is what it would have to be to absorb all HS2 passengers.
Where will they go?
Do you have destinations on HS1 for 18 express trains per hour?
You'd struggle to have more than a half dozen - and it would lock us into classic compatible trains forever, even more than the insane attempt to use stupid platform heights.
With 3+2 Seating double deck trains, £15 is easily achievable.
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