High speed rail
Lords Bradshaw and Berkeley have submitted an alternative option for the London end of the HS2 route, the Euston terminal and the HS1-2 connection, to the Secretary of State for Transport. Here Tony Berkeley lays out his thinking
B
ill Bradshaw and I, two of the ‘Railway Lords’ who follow closely issues relating to railways in the House of Lords, have long been concerned that the current
design of the southern end of HS2 is a nineteenth century solution to the problem of where to terminate main lines in cities, and how best to distribute passengers on their onward journeys. Add to this the very high cost of building railways in cities now, and the need to link our first high speed line to our second one without using a small gauge and intensively used line called the North London Line, and there is clearly a problem. Hence our idea of a full GC gauge connection between HS1 and HS2, which would not affect existing and future passengers and freight on the North
London Line, which would provide better connections between the HS2 and West Coast Main Line (WCML) trains and the Underground, and between Euston and St Pancras stations. We were initially put off by the ‘experts’
who said that ‘all high speed lines have city centre termini, and that anybody who was silly enough to want to go from Birmingham or Manchester to Paris by train could easily walk along Euston Road between Euston and St Pancras stations. However, the problem is that if one is going to terminate 18 high speed trains per hour at a new Euston station, it needs a lot of platforms to allow adequate times to turn round, clean and service the trains; hence the need to demolish a large area of Camden to provide more and longer platforms. So in a letter to Patrick McLoughlin
“We were initially put off by the ‘experts’ who said that anybody silly enough to want to go from Birmingham or Manchester to Paris by train could easily walk along Euston Road between Euston and St Pancras stations”
Secretary of State for Transport, we suggested an underground station with two or three platforms in each direction, with a two track link to HS1 and, equally important, a link between the surface WCML lines and HS2 lines so that trains from HS2 and the WCML could either go
June 2013 Page 69
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132