COMMENT
concessions and compromises, the final route is the best one?
She said: “Since the route was published for consultation, it’s been improved with various mitigations to minimise some of the impacts. It’s been compared against the alternatives and it’s been clearly dem- onstrated that it’s the best choice over the alternatives. So we’d be fairly confident that this really is the best route – it delivers on the objectives of High Speed 2, deliv- ers capacity, delivers substantially reduced journey time, reliability in its connections to existing networks, and it minimises cost and it minimises environmental impact.”
Britain is a relatively small and densely populated island nation, leading others to question the necessity for 225mph services running on track designed for 250mph, ne- cessitating particularly straight and level routing: much more support could have been won, some say, for a slightly slower but more politically acceptable route, with only the barest affect on journey times.
Mills argued: “225mph is the current best practice across the world. There’s an ele- ment of future proofing built in, with the track designed for 250mph, allowing for fu- ture technological developments. We don’t know if and when that might materialise, but looking at the history of high speed rail development since the Japanese started doing it, there’s quite a steady record of improving speeds year-on-year, without increasing energy consumption and hence without increasing carbon emissions. So if we can do that in the future, we can take advantage of that built-in future proofing.
“Should we be designing the route for that speed, and does it have a greater environ- mental impact? Well, if you look at some of the alternative routes that HS2 Ltd have examined and compared against the now selected route, you can see some of the im- pacts. They tested, for example, the route alongside the M40, and because of the constraints of the M40 – it’s quite winding – they had to design it to a slower speed, 180mph, which is 300kph. So we’ve got a straight comparison there between the slightly slower route and the HS2 route.
“Testing that HS2 route, it adds seven min- utes to the journey time between London and Birmingham, and with a 45-minute journey time, that’s quite significant, and that’s worth quite a lot in economic benefit and revenue.”
HS2 Ltd calculates that a 300kph / 186mph line would ultimately cut the benefit to cost ratio figure to 1.3 for both phase one and
the Y network, due to smaller journey time savings and fewer people making the shift onto high-speed rail if the journey times are slower.
Population impacts
Mills went on: “But also, more importantly, there’s the impact on population centres – so you might avoid some of the sensitive environmental areas, but instead you’re impacting on settlements and habitations.
“So what you gain in some areas you lose in others, so there’s no straightforward environmental gain that you can point to. The route has to go through a difficult part of the country so you’re going to be having some impacts.
“Rather than adopting a different route that has different impacts, the route that’s been selected has been improved, so they’ve mitigated those environmental impacts and they haven’t needed to put the route nearer to settlements. Of course, if you go near a settlement, you have to have more tunnelling and that has a carbon im- pact; it’s much more carbon intensive than surface routes.”
Changes to journey times for other services to London
The DfT has now updated some of its February 2011 assumptions about journey times for other services into London once the Y network is complete.
Opposition Labour MPs have accused the Govern- ment of a ‘sneaky move’, with the new times – laid out in HS2 Ltd’s document, ‘Economic case for HS2: Updated appraisal of transport user benefits and wider economic benefits’, commissioned by the DfT – having received little fanfare.
Although just estimates at this stage – the consulta- tion on the second phase of HS2 is not even due to begin until 2014 – the revised projections make clear that some towns and regions will definitely lose out.
Wigan, for example, now gets one service an hour instead of two, terminating at Birmingham. York and Darlington will get two services an hour instead of three; one to Birmingham and one to London.
Warrington will not be served, the document sug- gests, and it also confirms that services to Liver- pool will be on the classic network from Lichfield onwards.
Other towns can expect a better service than first thought, however – Runcorn gets two an hour in- stead of one, Durham gets a service to Birmingham when it had nothing before.
Hubs and spokes
Others question the need for the interchange at Old Oak Common specifically – for example, the Bow Group and its transport committee chairman Tony Lodge, who argued the case in the previous edition of RTM for tunnelling under west London from Euston directly to a ‘Heathrow Hub’, from where HS2 would proceed north, with a negligible impact on journey times (and potentially even a one minute time saving using through-lines at the privately-financed Heathrow Hub).
Mills admits that even as a firm HS2 backer, she has her doubts about Old Oak Common. She said: “I’m not quite as positive as the Government on this one. The case that the Government put forward is that it helps manage the demand on the London stations. Euston is busy at the moment, it connects into busy underground lines, so the argument is that Old Oak Common will relieve some of that demand on Euston, by taking about a third of those passengers off and putting them on to Crossrail instead. That manages the impacts and provides the first stage of a connection through to Heathrow via Crossrail as well.
“But another way of relieving the loads on Euston is by taking out some of the existing suburban services that currently terminate at Euston, and putting them into Crossrail. Having a connection between the West Coast Main Line and Crossrail is something Network Rail have put forward in the Lon- don & South East RUS, and they’re very much in favour of this. So the people who travel from, say, Tring, or on Milton Keynes services, rather than going into Euston sta- tion, they go through into Crossrail, so they get much better accessibility because they’re going through places such as Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road and Bank, and so on. That takes some of the commut- ers out of Euston and makes Euston a bit easier to rebuild; it means you could reduce a couple of platforms, reduce timescales, reduce the demands on the Underground.
“That’s something that the French have done in Paris – if you look at the way the RER system works in Paris, they’ve got commuter lines going through the centre of Paris, so there’s lots of access points there and you don’t use up terminal capacity. Terminal capacity you use for long-dis- tance trains.”
The Scottish connection
Scotland is now seriously involved in the high speed debate, with the umbrella business and transport body the Scottish
rail technology magazine Feb/Mar 12 | 21
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