Airport links HS2
‘The rail industry... must be prepared with a Plan B to show other ways in which the capacity problems can be resolved – and these mean more than just focusing on the West Coast Main Line’ Christian Wolmar’s blog on HS2, 24 June 2012
Nottingham, Derby and Burton, East Midlands would have the critical mass to climb the league tables for long distance business flights, package holidays, aircraft servicing, visitors and local business growth. TGV-speed trains would stop here once the scheme had been extended south to London Stratford and their extra time savings made cost sense.
West Coast Main Line upgrade The NorthStart scheme would more than deal with the long-term capacity shortfall on the WCML, while its short-term shortfall would be met (Chris Stokes1 agrees) if the rail route between London Euston and Manchester Piccadilly were upgraded to take 12 carriage trains, with one car in each changed to Standard Class from First Class.
Major and minor chords
The scheme can offer connecting chords for high-speed EMUs off its main line into Cambridge, Coventry, Sheffield and Huddersfield in addition to its chords towards Nottingham and Derby from the interchange at East Midlands Airport.
Visible engineering and northern jobs A North-first start on UK high speed rail should be seen as an opportunity to anchor railway design, civil engineering, tunnel work, power supply, steel making,
component supply and train making capacity north of the North South Divide. In particular, it is an opportunity for more visible engineering by Team GB.
Bradford
Bradford and its economy have lost much ground over the last forty years and NorthStart aims to put them back on the map. The scheme would replace Bradford’s Forster Square and Interchange stations with a single new one, Bradford City, opposite the Cathedral and next to the Westfield shopping centre site. The main line would run north out of this new station in cut and cover and south from it on viaduct, a chance for some confident and visible engineering.
Leeds-Bradford Airport
The main line would continue north east from the Bradford cut and cover section into two tunnel and one bridge sections to emerge into an interchange station at Leeds-Bradford Airport with platforms for the rail link from Leeds long been proposed by Leeds City Council. Then, it’s on past Harrogate towards the Tees and Tyne.
So, what’s wrong with London-first? London will remain the UK’s great economic powerhouse. It has four major
international airports. Its commuter arteries reach out across the south of England to a population catchment and spending power twice that of Birmingham and Manchester put together.
If there is no Plan B and HS2 is launched London-first, central Birmingham will find itself within an hour’s commute of London’s massive business sector so that the London economy will grow off its new Birmingham business and the North South Divide will become set in stone. The NorthStart scheme could lessen that divide by bringing three of the four biggest business centres outside London closer to each other in rail journey times, supported by a catchment population twice that of Birmingham; all beyond the North South Divide and well beyond London’s huge gravitational pull. The HS2 package will not do that. Michael Wand is now retired but formerly part of the Eurorail team’s bid for HS1,1995; strategic adviser to the HS1 route planning team, 1990-94; a director of Trafalgar House Corporate Development Ltd, 1986-89; chief development surveyor, London Docklands
Development Corporation, 1981-4. 1
Chris Stokes was a non-executive board member at the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) 2004-2006, and non-executive chairman of Agility Trains 2008-2009.
March 2013 Page 71
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