A Look at HS2's Old Oak Common Station

Most of the claims in this piece are simply nonsense. The Euston to Crewe train that's mentioned doesn't go anywhere near Birmingham, so it's not obvious that HS2 would make much of a difference to traffic on it.

And even if it did, it's merely one of a large number of routes heading out of London in all directions that are ridiculously overcrowded. At best, HS2 might reduce a small proportion of that overcrowding, but it's certainly not going to eliminate it.

The idea that HS2 can make Birmingham airport competitive with Heathrow for Londoners is clearly wrong. Birmingham doesn't have the flights, the destinations, or the capacity. London also has Heathrow Express for quick train journeys from Paddington to Heathrow - concourse to concourse. Even with a shorter journey time, HS2 can't match that.

And HS2 doesn't start to make sense until Phase 2 is built, linking Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds. You might see some benefits then - but the realistic total cost is likely to be the far side of £100bn. Which is madness.

It's actually five years of the total NASA budget, which is supposed to pay for development of the next Lunar program, as well as everything else NASA does.

It would be much better to spend a much smaller sum making the UK's broadband the best in Europe, set up a world-leading incubator fund for digital startups outside of London, with next-generation training and education, and try to persuade existing corporates to consider home working options. The return on that would be huge.

This is just a giant train set for rail nostalgists.

Good one. I can hop on a plane from London to Edinburgh tomorrow for £35 and be there in an hour and a half, call it 3 hours all in. By comparison I can hop on a train and it'll cost me £146 and take about 5 hours.

Hell, just last week I hopped on a ferry to France and back on a whim for less than it would have cost to go 20 miles by train.

The problem at the moment in off-peak times is that they dare not reduce the price because there are trains that run during the day which fill up, and there's no good way of differentiating fares between the ones which do and the ones which don't.

imho, to prepare for the long-term we should be building infrastructure on the ground to reduce short haul flights.

HS2 is probably going to be £300+ for a peak return from London to Leeds - yes, I pulled that from my backside, but given when it’s due to launch and the ever-ratcheting fares, I think it’s perfectly realistic.

As to supply and demand influencing pricing - yes and no. While there will be more capacity, existing operators and franchises may or may not take advantage of it, and even if they do, what possible motivation would they have for reducing their prices? They won’t be competing with HS2 on price - if anything, the inevitability high fares for HS2 will provide an anchor for a price increase on the old mainline. The only others trains running on the same route will be theirs, as that’s how the rail franchise system works, so their only competition will be themselves - i.e. none.

The open land near Oxford will be open because it's a swamp. If you could build on it cheaply somebody would.

Nice to know we explicitly provide for land owners to extract rent even when they don't own the land any more.

It's less about moving local traffic off current lines, and more about freeing them up to provide local services. You could potentially see something like Bawtry station[2], which is between the two, brought back into service if there is demand, whereas it might not currently make sense to do so as the line's primary purpose is intercity travel.

[1] Not necessarily something that might be affected by HS2 - just a set of stations I know as an example.

[2] Closed in 1959, but Wikipedia notes: "land near the station has been protected should the site be required as a new station, with car parking facilities, in the future as the town grows". The line initially went Doncaster-Rossington-Bawtry-Scrooby-Ranskill-Barnby-Retford, but now only Doncaster and Retford remain.

Theres also the fact that this route will have competition, against aircraft and cars, ideally it needs to be quicker than its alternatives in order to succeed.

Longer trains probably will increase capacity, but mailing around TB hard drives probably has higher bandwidth than the average internet connection. Good luck selling individuals on that 'upgrade' though.

So you are arguing against it when you don't know the cost?

You could go for Ballast rather than Slab, which means lower install costs and slower trains, but also means higher maintenence costs, but the headline price will be lower, even though the TCO will be higher and the service will be worse.

Longer trains don't work because you'd have to demolish the towns that the stations are currently in -- extending 200m north/south at every station between Euston and Rugby is not cheap and will piss off a lot more people than building a quiet railway through an empty area, not to mention all the signal problems and points fouling, and what will you do at Euston?

> I'd like to know what incremental cost there is for an increment of higher speed

The big costs are land acquisition and earthworks, which won't change at all regardless of the speed. Euston is another cost, but you'd have to completely rebuild the station, including putting all the platforms underground, for your longer train plan - and Underground space in London isn't that easy.

Yes. This is also why the Tube and the NYC metro have such big problems compared to more recently built systems.

A piece of route might have been designed in the 1800s, possibly to a speed limit of 20 or 30mph, then been rationalised and 'upgraded' over the years to a higher speed, but that section of track will still carry limitations that are implied by the way it was initially designed to be, signalling may be too close together, or too far apart, junctions that are rarely used but remain for whatever reason add complexity and potential failure sites, tracks.

There are of course some physical aspects of physically old track - shorter (~100m) sections of rail joined together have a higher risk of failure than the newer techniques of long (0.5km to 1km or more) single track pieces welded together, old wooden sleepers allow track movement that can result in delays and maintenance issues, whereas relative-new concrete sleepers, and really-new split-concrete sleepers are more reliable and permit faster and more reliable train operation.

Tearing routes apart and redesigning the sections from scratch is difficult politically, so the UK's railway network tends to suffer from the fact that 99% of it was designed and built before 1880.

High costs on the WCML for flexible peak fares are becase

1) The costs subsidise rail elsewhere, like regional networks in the North and Welsh Valleys

2) The price encourages people to take less busier trains

(2) falls down a bit with the hard cutoff, because there's no "shoulder peak" at Euston, meaning that 1840 is empty but the 1900 is really full, but the principle remains.