HS2 and Heathrow

It is very difficult for the layperson to make a balanced judgement about something when rival experts come to opposite conclusions about it.  HS2 is a case in point.  How can one judge between the conflicting claims of the Chair and Deputy Chair of the committee that was set up to establish the facts and make a recommendation on whether the thing should be built?  Since the experts can’t agree, I feel justified in putting in my own twopenn’orth.

I am very much in favour of railways and I believe that air travel should be discouraged except where the journey is really necessary and there is no reasonable alternative.  There should be no more airport runways (at Heathrow or anywhere else), air fares should be subject to VAT at 20%, air passenger duty should be increased and aviation fuel should be taxed at the same rate as petrol and diesel.

The effect of this would certainly be to drastically increase the cost air travel.  I am not aware of any conclusive evidence of the elasticity of demand for air travel (i.e. the extent to which consumers are sensitive to price changes) but I would guess that the increased cost would substantially reduce the demand.  Holiday flights would become uneconomic. Airlines and travel agents would go out of business and airports would close.  Indeed the recent failure of Thomas Cook and near demise of Flybe suggest that this is already happening.

If the cost and availability of air travel were to increase in this way, it could have further consequences.  Travellers could decide against making the journey at all (e.g. conduct their business by video conference call), or they could make a shorter journey – e.g. to Brighton rather than Benidorm.  And/or they could divert to another mode of travel such as car, coach - or rail.

This brings me to HS2.

HS2

Proponents of HS2 advocate it on two main grounds: speed and capacity.

Dealing with speed first, the eventual time saved from Birmingham to London is claimed to be 35 minutes; from London to Manchester (non-stop) it is 60 minutes.  From Birmingham to Leeds it is 61 minutes. From London to Glasgow (assuming trains use existing track north of Wigan) the saving is 54 minutes.   

Whether these time savings are significant is a matter of opinion.  Time spent on a train is not necessarily wasted; by using mobile phones, laptop computers and the internet the journey time can be made very productive.  Alternatively, the traveller can just relax and enjoy watching the scenery going past (assuming the train is not in a tunnel). For the shorter distances the saving is arguably marginal.  By European standards, most intercity services to London are already quite fast.

The more important issue is capacity – that is, the potential to relieve overcrowding or enable more and improved services to be provided on the existing lines (rather as a motorway bypass can improve conditions in the town that is bypassed). 

It is undoubtedly the case that overcrowding on some services has reached unacceptable levels.  This report¹ from the DfT gives statistics for commuter services into major cities, especially London.  There is also overcrowding on many cross-country inter-city services such as Southampton to Manchester via Reading, Oxford and Birmingham.

However, as the above report indicates, there are measures that can be and are being taken to provide some relief for the overcrowding – e.g. longer trains and platforms, redesigned seating layouts, improved signalling permitting more frequent services.

What is not clear is how the construction of HS2 would relieve this overcrowding – except on the parallel West Coast Mainline and possibly some of the routes to the East Midlands and Yorkshire.  

So if time saving or relief of overcrowding are the main claimed justifications for HS2, then the case for its construction must be in serious doubt.  Moreover there are other problems.  These concern the terminuses of the line, its route, the nature of the “high speed” rolling stock and the connection to other transport interchanges, including Heathrow.

Terminuses

London shares with Paris and some other major cities the problem that it has no central interchange station.  This is of course a legacy of 19^th century capitalism whereby competing railway companies each built their own lines and stations and prevented their competitors from using them.  Thus London has at least 10 mainline terminuses dotted around the city centre core. Anybody wishing to travel from the South of England to the Midlands, North or Scotland therefore has to change not only trains but also stations – which typically involves using the London Underground².

When the Channel  Tunnel Rail Link (now called HS1) was built in the 1990s its original London Terminus was Waterloo, for which a new departure lounge and long platforms were specially built.  However, it was decided that an eastern approach to London would kickstart regeneration in east London, and in 2007 the permanent terminus was changed to St Pancras in north London, with an approach route tunnelled under the east end of London. (The Waterloo platforms and departure lounge then lay empty and unused for over a decade before being taken over for suburban services).

Little thought appears to have been given to the possibility of running trains from the North through London to the Channel Tunnel either direct without changing trains or at least without having to change stations.  With the benefit of hindsight it could be argued that the best (admittedly expensive) option would have been to build a new terminus underneath central London to which all the main lines could be connected.  I have no idea what engineering problems this would entail, but it may still be a possibility. (Or it may be argued that if Crossrail 1 (the Elisabeth Line) is completed and Crossrail 2 built, a central terminus is unnecessary).

Anyway, given that St Pancras has now been established as the terminus for HS1, it would seem to be blindingly obvious that it should also be the terminus for HS2. Instead, the choice has fallen on Euston as the main terminus, with a possibility of a minor, single track connection to St Pancras, but even this has now been ruled out on grounds of cost and disruption.  As a result a future traveller by high speed rail from Birmingham to Paris will have to disembark and unload his or her luggage at Euston, trolley it along the Euston Road a distance of 1000 metres, and board another train at St Pancras. 

It gets worse.  It is now understood that one of the cost-saving measures being considered is to terminate HS2 at Old Oak Common, adjacent to Wormwood Scrubs in north west London.

A similar problem arises at the Birmingham end of the first phase of HS2.  Rather than try to connect to Birmingham’s primary central station (i.e. New Street, for connections to other destinations in the Midlands, Wales and the North) the plan is to terminate HS2 at a rebuilt Curzon Street, a former station that was axed under the Beeching proposals in the 1960s.  Here, again, the traveller wishing to go on to Wolverhampton, Stoke-on-Trent or Solihull would have to trundle their luggage from Curzon Street to New Street or Moor Street.  In practice, for most people it would be more convenient to stick with the West Coast Main Line – even though it might take 35 minutes longer.  What this means is that the Birmingham section of HS2 Phase 1 will only really benefit central Birmingham and not the rest of the West Midlands.

The route

The ambition to provide fast, additional rail capacity to connect London with major cities is a reasonable one.  Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds are the obvious main targets, with links into the existing main lines to access, for example, Liverpool, Sheffield, Newcastle and Glasgow.  However, there has been controversy over the links to East Midlands cities, Nottingham, Derby and Leicester.  Originally the first draft of the route would have tunnelled under East Midlands Airport (EMA) before reaching a new interchange at Toton between Derby and Nottingham (the route has now been changed to skirt around EMA).  Whether the possibility of an underground station beneath the airport was ever considered I do not know, but there would seem to have been an opportunity to create a major interchange linking the rail lines to Derby, Nottingham and Leicester, as well as the line via Nuneaton to Birmingham, all with immediate access to the airport terminals and only about a kilometre from the M1/A42 motorway junction.  EMA, which is currently underutilised, could then have become a more attractive airport and relieve pressure on Birmingham airport.  Anyway, the opportunity seems to have been rejected in favour of an East Midlands Hub at Toton, a parkway type of station with no direct rail link to central Derby or Nottingham – let alone Leicester.  So much for the integrated transport system advocated by John Prescott (remember that?).

Non-tilting trains

Existing rolling stock on many current inter-city main lines is typically tilting, which enables it to achieve higher speeds than non-tilting trains.  However, HS2 will use non-tilting rolling stock.  The ironic consequence is that when HS2 trains link into existing mainlines, they will not be able to travel as fast as current rolling stock, and therefore timings from Wigan NW to Glasgow will be slightly longer.

Heathrow

Assuming that Heathrow remains a major airport with at least two runways for the foreseeable future, there is still controversy about how to link it to any future route for HS2.  One suggestion was that it should be part of the direct route from the Midlands and be a stop on the way to central London.  However, this has been rejected in favour of a separate branch link to Old Oak Common.

What are the real investment needs of the railway?

So if the case for building HS2, especially in its currently planned form, is weak, what other transport investment should have higher priority?

Electrification

Electric traction has many advantages over diesel: greater efficiency, better acceleration and hence punctuality and reliability, less noise and pollution, greater passenger comfort.  It has been estimated³ that by 2017 42% of the British railway network was electrified – mostly via overhead 25 kV AC wires but with some 750 V DC third rail systems especially in the South East. 

It had been planned to extend electrification to the Great Western mainline to Bristol, Oxford and Swansea; the Midland mainline to Leicester, Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield; and the “electric spine” route from Southampton to the Midlands by converting existing third rail to overhead wires and infilling sections such as Basingstoke to Reading.  However, on cost grounds these projects were cut back in 2015, so that electrification would not extend beyond Cardiff or to Bristol Temple Meads or Oxford, and the Midland Main Line electrification would terminate at Market Harborough. The electric spine was not authorised.

The full reinstatement of these projects is an absolute priority, and they should be followed by a rolling programme of electrification of all the remaining services except where the traffic clearly does not justify the expenditure.

Local capacity improvements and bypasses

As indicated above, part of the justification for HS2 is to relieve overcrowding on the West Coast Main Line (WCML).  If HS2 is not built (or even if it is) there is still a strong case for incremental improvements to relieve overcrowding – that is, by creating space for additional or services or longer or more frequent trains. An example would be the quadrupling of the track where possible, and the insertion of bypass loops and improved signalling, between Rugby and Wolverhampton, where intercity services are in competition with local stopping services for train paths.

Northern Powerhouse

Much has been made, especially in the 2019 election campaign, of the need for investment in improved rail links in the North of England (sometimes called Northern Powerhouse).  In particular this should include the cross-Pennines links from Manchester to Leeds, Sheffield and other Yorkshire destinations, and to the North East.  This would be achieved by completing electrification of existing lines, additional and realigned track and possibly new routes, in order to achieve increased line speeds and reduced journey times.

Southern Powerhouse

Railways south of London and around the coast from Weymouth to Dover and the Medway towns were electrified from the 1920s onward using the third rail 750 V DC system.  This is cheaper to provide and maintain than overhead wires and is well suited to commuter lines with frequent stops.  However, it suffers from lower line speeds and is less efficient in terms of power.  It is also obviously incompatible with the overhead wire system used in most of the rest of Great Britain, which means that connecting services such as Thameslink need to be bimode (or diesel only).

One consequence of this is that major cities like Southampton, Portsmouth and Bournemouth are treated as the ends of commuter lines, with slow, stopping services.  For example, the fastest service from Waterloo to Portsmouth takes 91 minutes for a distance of 119 km at 78 km/h, which is nearly double the time for Kings Cross to Peterborough (50 minutes for 123 km at 147 km/h).  

Portsmouth also suffers from the disadvantage that it has no direct connection to the Midlands or North of England or to Scotland.  If and when the “Electric Spine” is created  (from Southampton to the Midlands) an overhead wired link from Eastleigh to Portsmouth Harbour would then enable Portsmouth to be linked into the national rail system without the need to change at London.

As part of the national electrification programme, the third rail system in the South East should be phased out and converted to overhead wires.  Following the completion of the “Electric Spine”, priority should be given to the Eastleigh to Portsmouth link.

Crossrail 2

Crossrail 2 is a proposed tunnelled link from Wimbledon to Victoria and "Euston/St Pancras" (sic).  This would link the South West mainline to the West Anglia mainline, with interchanges to the WCML, MML and ECML. It would thus make it possible to run direct services from Southampton and Portsmouth to Cambridge and Stansted, as well as connecting services to the Midlands, the North and Scotland without the need to change stations (albeit the Euston/St Pancras interchange could be a formidable challenge).

Conclusions

So my conclusions are:

• Cancel HS2 (but in the medium term consider a lower priority scheme on a revised route that connects to HS1 at St Pancras)

• Cancel Heathrow third runway (and withdraw the effective subsidy to air travel)

• Divert savings to:

1. Reinstating full electrification programme for Great Western, Midland Main Line and Electric Spine, and overhead wired link to Portsmouth
2. Improved links across the Pennines from Manchester to Yorkshire and the North East (“Northern Powerhouse”)
3. Local capacity improvements
4. Rolling programme of electrifying the rest of the rail network
5. Converting remaining third rail systems to overhead wires, especially in the South East
6. Crossrail 2.

©  2020   Robin Paice

¹https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/820770/Rail_Passenger_Numbers_and_Crowding_2018.pdf

² It is possible to reach Kings Cross/St Pancras (but not Euston) from the South by using the Thameslink service from Brighton to Bedford, but this still involves changing trains.  Also, from 2021 Crossrail will facilitate east-west journeys (e.g. Reading to Liverpool Street) without changing stations, but this will provide no relief for the crucial connection to Euston.

³See this article in Rail Engineer, 24 October 2017