How to stop HS2
Merry Vole
Shipmate
In today's news the protesting tunnel builders under central London have been evicted.
And any other protests eg tree-dwelling always get evicted in the end.
And those types of protesting can easily acquire a 'cranky' image that Mr & Mrs Average can't relate to.
If you accept, for the sake of argument, that HS2 is a white elephant project with a massive carbon footprint (just for its construction -the track will be laid on solid concrete not normal ballast trackbed) and massive environmental damage, how can such a project be stopped?
What if, instead of tunnelling and tree-dwelling, a massive pledge petition was organised as follows:
If I, and tens of thousands of like-minded people, signed a petition in which I promise that I will never use HS2 in my lifetime, then surely from an economic and business point of view it would be dead in the water?
And any other protests eg tree-dwelling always get evicted in the end.
And those types of protesting can easily acquire a 'cranky' image that Mr & Mrs Average can't relate to.
If you accept, for the sake of argument, that HS2 is a white elephant project with a massive carbon footprint (just for its construction -the track will be laid on solid concrete not normal ballast trackbed) and massive environmental damage, how can such a project be stopped?
What if, instead of tunnelling and tree-dwelling, a massive pledge petition was organised as follows:
If I, and tens of thousands of like-minded people, signed a petition in which I promise that I will never use HS2 in my lifetime, then surely from an economic and business point of view it would be dead in the water?
Comments
I'm in favour of improved public transport, and high speed rail should be part of that mix - there's no justification for people flying short distances on the mainland when rail should be a better alternative, or driving long distances. There shouldn't be regular flights between Glasgow and Heathrow, much less Birmingham to Heathrow. The UK desperately needs a decent HS rail network. There's a carbon cost in constructing HS rail, as there is for any infrastructure, but operating HS rail has a much lower carbon footprint than airtravel or private cars. If I had to choose carbon costs for infrastructure, HS2 wins over airport expansion or new motorways.
But, the particular implementation of that in HS2 leaves a lot to be desired. First, it's very late - we should have had a HS rail system more than 20 years ago, thanks to Mrs T privatising everything in sight that programme was scrapped before it could get started. I recognise that routes from London would need to be the first sections to be built, and London-Birmingham makes a lot of sense. There could have been points where the route could be tweaked a bit - I'd have liked a route with some intermediate stations which would serve the communities it passes through - but they've gone for a route that's close to being a straight line between the cities which is fair enough given the physics of HS which makes curved track undesirable. I'm very unhappy that the route terminates in London, a London station which connects to the Eurostar service would be much better, connecting Birmingham (and, eventually cities further north) not only with London but other cities in the rest of Europe (even with the idiocy of Brexit we've not stopped being a European nation, and a connected HS rail system would replace demand for short-haul air travel).
The other problem with HS2 is that it seems to have sucked in a lot of investment, and maintenance and extension of the existing rail network has been lacking in investment. I know that's not really a problem with HS2, rather a government who for the last decade has refused to invest in the country under a very misguided "austerity" ideology. But, the perception is certainly there that if there hadn't been all that money spent on HS2 we'd have got further in electrification of our existing network, new and larger stations, additional tracks laid to increase capacity ...
That's what HS2 is.
{By the way, Mrs T didn't privatise the railways - that was John Major. There is an interesting question to be asked: the Tory MP Robert Adley, who knew a lot about the railways and was, I think, pretty senior in looking at the matter, died suddenly at a crucial point. Would things have been better if he'd lived?]
But it's far more expensive and destructive than it needs to be, and less useful in terms of stations, because it's high speed rather than just extra capacity.
They may well have been. A sad loss.
In answer to the OP - hydraulic buffer-stops, and efficient brakes.
I'll get me grease-top*...
(*Steam locomotive crew's cap. I have one, from my days as a fireman on one of the Great Little Trains of Wales...)
Still, I suppose they'll end up building the bloody thing, and calling it The Boris Line, or something equally meaningless.
Not nearly as many as the same amount spent on building affordable housing and/or upgrading existing housing stock. All the economic analysis says it will just suck more jobs and wealth into London.
But I also disagree with direct action. It’s anti-democratic. It’s harmful to the people who take part in it.
Put me in charge of services in the North. I can fix it.
Actually, quite a lot of extra capacity for Northampton. As well as Rugby, Nuneaton, Tamworth, Milton Keynes, and points south along the West Coast Main Line.
Reason being, most of the long-distance expresses to the north of Birmingham can be diverted from the WCML onto HS2. Which will free up paths on the WCML that can be filled by extra services to the parts south of Birmingham (though some should of course also be used for freight, to get some lorries off the roads).
And the services to Birmingham and further north will be faster, making them more appealing.
As for the other places you mention, there are already plans to extend HS2 further to the north, as well as more tentative plans for a cross-Pennine HS3. Each of those additions would also increase capacity on existing lines by moving long-distance expresses onto their own dedicated infrastructure, freeing up space for slower trains that stop at more places. Or even opening (or reopening) more stations.
A putative HS4 to South Wales and the south west of England has been mentioned in the press, but honestly I don’t think the existing infrastructure in those areas is already at full capacity the way the southern WCML is.
And I'm genuinely puzzled how the tunnellers etc think they can succeed in stopping the project completely.
To compete with the airlines that currently get all the “want to get there as fast as possible” traffic.
If you want rail to compete with short-haul air travel, then high speed is necessary. You can fly from London to Glasgow in less time than it takes to eat a cooked breakfast (I did it once, years ago, and the cabin crew were pushing their trollies up a steep hill shortly after takeoff and frantically throwing bacon and eggs at people, in the hope that we'd be finished before they had to fix up the cabin for landing). There is, however, significant overhead in terms of getting to the airport, getting though security, and hanging around waiting.
But the current fast trains from London to Glasgow take 5 hours. (Well, in theory, they take 4.5 hours, but they don't seem to be running that fast at the moment. Maybe the train has Covid.) HS2, after its second phase, will reduce that by 50 minutes. Assuming that Glasgow Central is more convenient for your destination than Prestwick, 3:40 starts to approach being a usefully competitive time.
(Of course, to compete, rail also has to not cost a lot more that the flight does...)
Fair enough. If you've got things to be getting on with so that you can make productive use of your time on the train, then perhaps speed is less important. Many of us are working from home right now - put a desk and a decent network connection on a train, and I could work from there as well as I could work from my house. But if you allocate enough space for people to work effectively on the train, you just tripled or more the price of a rail ticket.
But perhaps "work effectively" is too much of a challenge. After all, you can't get anything at all done while you're driving your car, so maybe poor-quality time is better than no time? But then it depends how long your journey is (the whole journey - not just the bit sitting on the train.) How long does it take by train vs by car?
I'll agree with you about reliability, though - I'd happily trade a little max speed for a reliable predictable journey time.
Fixed broken quoting code. I don’t know if that’s how you meant it to look, but at least the attributions are right. BroJames, Purgatory Host
Sorted now. BroJames, Purgatory Host
The Tavistock route wouldn't provide extra speed - it would only be replacing a relatively short section (Plymouth-Exeter) of the journey, has sharp corners and steep gradients, and would require a reversal at Exeter (and Plymouth as well, if it used the existing line to Bere Alston for the first half of the journey). You could completely reengineer it to eliminate those issues, of course - but at that point you're just building a new line anyway. The route through Dawlish is by far the faster and easier one from Exeter to Plymouth. Tavistock is mostly discussed by rail romantics who want to bring back the Atlantic Coast Express. It's only real value (other than to the towns it would serve, of course) is as a diversionary route in case Dawlish gets washed away again - that's a good reason for rebuilding, but it's not High Speed.
That's not to say a HS5 to Penzance wouldn't be a good idea at some point, of course, but there would have to be the demand to justify it and a suitable route identified that would be able to provide the required speed advantages. What would be really interesting would be to see how many of the current HS2 objectors would also object to it - I suspect not many, as its potential effect on house prices in the Home Counties would be minimal.
I think that says more about the company you keep than it does about opposition to HS2.
It’s not my fault I fell in love with a woman before learning what her parents were like.
Or maybe it is.
Either way, it’s not really company I have a lot of choice about keeping.
Well I'm in Derbyshire and don't give a shit about my house price.
I also know, from a railway engineer, that the route choice through the corridor between Nottingham and Derby is avoiding the Derby line, the Nottingham line and the freight line that exists between the cities that services the rail service companies in that area, and plans to demolish various historic buildings and head along an area that regular floods instead of improving one of three existing lines.
In addition, instead of improving either of the mainline stations, with existing transport links, there is a plan to create a major station at a sidings in the middle of nowhere with no transport links. None of the local authorities or the rail industry bods can see why. Lots of people up in arms there, including those from Derby and Nottingham who would love the line to come their way, not the planned route.
So operating HS2 at design speed requires much more gentle curves than existing lines. Were the existing lines to be improved to HS2 standard, as you suggest, what fraction of the existing line could be reused, and what fraction would have to be rebuilt tens or hundreds of feet away to accommodate the HS2 constraints? And what's the impact of doing this whilst trying to keep the existing line in operation, rather than building new?
As far as I know, the freight line doesn't need to be kept open in the same way as the other two lines. Or there's a fourth alternative, resolving the station at East Midlands Parkway - which is a station next to the old coal fired electricity plant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in the middle of nowhere and already takes express trains. It's there as it used to bring the coal in for the power station. But I really don't know the full ins and outs of the issues and it's not on the section currently being built.
In the UK we don't have a tradition of extensive elevated rail or road outwith city centre areas. Elevating HS2 would be a reduced environmental impact, could take the route through urbanised areas to link into existing stations without demolishing so many houses, and put even less gradient on the line making it faster (also lifts it above risks from floods or leaves on the line). But, there would be a significant visual impact, and cost. Would those who object to being close to the line prefer it if it was on silts 5m in the air so that it could be seen for miles? Even if the impact on wildlife areas, farmland, existing buildings etc were reduced?
tangent/
Exhibit A. I could watch this all day. There's plenty of action, especially when it's not the middle of the night in Tokyo, the video definition is great, and the audio is wonderful.
/tangent
I suspect there would be less resistance for raised rail lines than anyone imagines. The Ribblehead viaduct, among many others, is mostly liked. Lots of photos sharing the love of railway viaducts if you ever go and look.
It's not as if there aren't raised sections of road too, and the advantages of modern trains are that the noise of the trains is intermittent and the windows sealed preventing rubbish from being lobbed out the same way car drivers seem to find irresistible, remembering geocaching in the area under a raised stretch of motorway locally.
The proposed station of Toton requires Nottingham to run trams out that far, without funding, to create transport links for that hub to work. The tram now terminates at Long Eaton - another station needing a rebuild and another good candidate to become the HS2 station in the area.
So four stations, three with reasonably good claims: Derby (just refitted), Nottingham about to be refitted, Long Eaton, overdue a refit, East Midlands Parkway - a park and ride for East Midlands Airport in the middle of nowhere barring a coal-fired power station, all suggesting that HS2 improve those links. And the plans are putting the midlands station at Toton, in a siding in the middle of nowhere with no infrastructure.
Always assuming that that Phase 2 of HS2 is even approved for construction, which as Phase 1 continues to run over budget and time could be doubtful.
East Midlands Parkway might be a better candidate, I’ll grant you. But only if using an existing station is the priority. Given that the route is planned to go right past it I’m frankly amazed they’re not going to use it. I can only think the Toton site is linked to regeneration plans for that area, much like with the site of the Birmingham terminus.
Using either Derby or Nottingham would disadvantage the one not used. The principle of putting the station in between the two cities is a good one, ISTM.
But it creates the risk that the hassle of getting to Toton will undermine the time savings on HS2.
Currently National Rail Inquiries thinks Derby to London is 1h 32-36m. The link posted by @Curiosity killed promises 52 mins from Toton to London and 10 minutes from Derby to Toton via a local service. From memory, National Rail Inquiries tends to recommend you allow about 10 minutes for connections*, which is over-cautious for most people but does give space for the local service to be late. So that brings the total time from Derby to London to 1 hr 12 mins, which is a saving of 20-24 minutes.
* A friend of mine works for Northern Rail and tells of colleagues walking at glacial pace between Wigan North West and Wigan Wallgate in order to meet the National Rail estimate of ten minutes to interchange between these two stations which in reality are about 100 yards from each other ...
Though, as said much of that 10mins will be consumed by late arrival of the first train (though, can be made up for by late departure of the second).
I have never been sufficiently lucky to have all the trains on my journey running late by a similar amount, but I suppose YMMV. And yes, with the typical reliability of the rail system in the UK, I'd expect to use up more than 10 minutes of slop more often than not, because of train delays. Of course, if you're aiming for a frequent local service with a train every few minutes, the timetable doesn't matter, because you just turn up and get on the next one. But if there's one train an hour, I hope you brought a book. (On that note, how frequent would the Derby to Toton service be? And is it timed to meet the HS2 service (in which case it should / will be timed for relatively slow people), or is it asynchronous (in which case you expect, on average, to wait half the time between trains after you arrive at the platform).