COMMENT
A few things wrong with HS2 Graeme Phillips
the track with a suitable loading gauge.
Buying British loading gauge rolling stock means we will have to spend an awful lot of money on specially-designed trains, just as was the case with the BR Class 395s used by Eurostar, given that we took several years to pull our fingers out and build the CTRL.
T
here are many merits in building the line to Scotland from the
beginning.
London-Birmingham is only about one-and-a-quarter hours anyway and the HS2 will bring it down to three quarters of an hour.
This route is already competitive with air travel anyway and I don’t see how a saving of half an hour will benefit the economy that much.
Building the line all the way to Scotland straight away will give significant journey time benefits from the word go.
Given the enormous average speed of the West Coast Main Line anyway, the only ways to make the line offer big time savings are to make it very long or to make it very fast.
It has been decided that it will be necessary to order rolling stock to suit British loading gauges, which would hopefully only be needed for a few years anyway if the line makes its way further north.
Buying European loading stock (I recall this is to be the case with some of the rolling stock) means the range is limited to
Oct/Nov 10
If you have a different loading gauge, you need a different bogie and several other new parts, the end result being that only 60% of the Eurostar’s parts are the same as those on the TGVs, which results in a huge maintenance expense.
Also, Eurostar is unnecessarily stuck with trains with a small loading gauge that are extremely uncomfortable in standard class if the train is filled up.
Eurostar has taken some steps to resolve this, given the plans announced recently to buy more-or-less off-the-shelf Siemens Velaros which, from my experience of Spanish rail travel, are wonderfully comfortable to travel on.
However, we could have avoided having stupidly cramped trains and a third rail pickup system (now obsolete) by just building the CTRL right the way to London from the beginning.
It seems we just aren’t willing to learn from our mistakes. The simple solution is to just build a system with a sufficiently large critical mass from the beginning. A good example of this is the Madrid-Seville high-speed rail line in Spain.
The line was the first standard gauge line in Spain and the first trains to use the line (the RENFE
Class 100s) are not gauge- convertible.
However, the Madrid Puerta de Atocha-Ciudad Real- Puertollano-Córdoba Central- Sevilla Santa Justa market (all the stations along the Madrid- Seville route) is big enough for the system to operate by itself without exchanging trains with the Iberian gauge tracks.
Since then, gauge-convertible trains have been introduced, but the fact remains that it is a big enough system by itself.
If it is necessary to build the system all the way to Scotland for it to be big enough to act as a good standalone system, then that is what we should do.
There are other problems with the plans too. For instance, the plans involve the construction of far too many new stations. This means that more people will have to change to reach the station, thereby reducing the door-to-door journey times for many people.
Unfortunately, the lack of foresight in the upgrade of St. Pancras International means we won’t be able to get two-way entry-exit for trains very easily, meaning that another station may have to be used.
But not all stations suffer from this lack of foresight. For Birmingham, they could just build an underground tunnel and construct underground platforms (as with Barcelona Sants station), rather than waste money building a new station.
Ideally, they would build a system that links well into existing interchange capability but no, we aren’t learning from the mistakes made by London in
creating inordinate numbers of terminus stations.
The CTRL is a great example of a line having too many stations: - four stations along a 68-mile stretch of track is disproportionate.
One has to either incur a journey time penalty stopping the trains at too many stations or leave stations severely underused if there are too many stations.
As for the carbon contribution, the HS2 is not designed very well to help matters. There are too many non-central stations planned meaning that they could remain unused or if so, the city might sprawl out to meet the station.
Encouraging urban sprawl is a silly idea. In Spain, for instance, most city dwellers live in flats several stories high meaning that many Spanish cities can be walked around very easily.
The British plans are only likely to increase dependence on the car as people will have to drive to many of the stations and they will have longer commutes if urban sprawl increases as a result of the parkway locations.
To cut down on our carbon consumption, the HS2 should be targeted at city centres, so as to increase the quality of life benefit from living there.
In conclusion, there are many areas in which we are doing things that past experience tells us are obviously bonkers. We need a rethink of many aspects of the plans.
Graeme Phillips is a rolling stock engineer
rtm11
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