HS2 : Decisions Have Consequences
The decision to cancel Phases 2a [Lichfield to Crewe] and 2b [Crewe to Manchester] of HS2 was made without consulting the railway industry or transport experts who would have warned of the consequences. Phase 1 is so advanced that it cannot realistically now be cancelled. On the day of the announcement, the Prime Minister said that the section from Old Oak Common to the new Euston would still go ahead but not under the control of HS2 Ltd. The following day, this was revised to ‘it may go ahead if private capital comes forward to pay for it.’ The carrot being dangled was that a very large slice of land to the west of today’s Euston station was already cleared, enough for an eleven platform station, but HS2 would now only need six platforms, so the rest could become new hotels, offices and homes. Very profitable!
The assumption is that HS2 will now only have eight trains an hour so six platforms will be enough. What happens in years to come when the full potential of the expensive new infrastructure is to be realised? Will the nearly new hotels etc. be demolished - and at what cost?
At the other end of Phase 1, the branch to Birmingham will run to a seven platform station at Curzon Street. With all other phases cancelled, this is massive over provision. With building work already underway, no one has suggested spending millions on redesigning it. Architects’ fees for the now discarded Euston are already written off at more than £200 million!
Just north of Lichfield, at what was to be Fradley Wood Junction, Phase 1 will end with the Handsacre Link across to the Trent Valley line just south of Armitage. All but one train an hour was to continue on Phase 2a of HS2 towards Crewe. That one train is the hourly HS2 train to serve Stafford and Stoke, terminating in Macclesfield, (the one with by far the weakest Benefit to Cost Ratio!). So the layout was reduced to be simpler and cheaper, with the tracks of the Handsacre Link only joining the slow lines of the Trent Valley route. The original plan to have a flying junction onto the fast lines was descoped, a familiar word to railway engineers. It would have involved a massive cost and the disruption of rebuilding of a considerable length of Trent Valley line. With all HS2 trains except the London to Birmingham ones using the Handsacre Link, the fast line connection now looks unavoidable.
Already there is the suggestion that the Crewe - Euston service will have to be cut back to two hourly as this has to use the slow lines in order to serve the platforms at Atherstone, Tamworth, Lichfield Trent Valley and Rugeley Trent Valley. So much for HS2 creating new capacity for more local services and freight!
HS2
Phase 1 and the Handsacre Link will be used for trains to Manchester, but these
cannot now be double units at 400 metres length, as platforms are not long
enough. So the new trains will actually have fewer seats than an 11 coach
Pendolino. They are also limited to 110 mph north of Armitage, as the
West Coast Main Line’s 125 mph is only for tilting trains, so journeys will be
slower because of HS2. The contract has already been signed for 54 new
trains, far too many of them, as the high speed network has been shrunk.
There is a massive cost there.
The announcement to sell off the land and properties bought for Phase 2 has unthought through consequences. The day will come when it is realised that the point of building Phase 2 and the rest was to help solve a track capacity shortage. Six miles beyond the end of the Handsacre Link the WCML becomes a two track railway through Shugborough, already a bottleneck. A version of Phase 2a will be needed to take trains north of Fradley Wood Junction - but if the route has been sold and possibly built on, that looks to be so expensive.
Every increase in the cost of HS2 was signed off by the Department for Transport, which owns HS2 Ltd. Few people know that the government set up a ministerial taskforce back in 2020 to keep a grip on HS2’s spiralling costs - and even fewer may know it met for the first time on Wednesday 1 November 2023! The ‘good news’ is that Phase 2a was approved by Parliament, and the Queen signed the Act, so a political party conference speech is not sufficient legally to change it. It will need a new Act of Parliament and, realistically, that will not happen before the next general election.
Keith Flinders