A Beginner’s Guide On Opposing HS2
I found this here on Rail News.
Read it and enjoy.
As I’m a simple man, who prefers words of one syllable, my views on HS2 are as follows.
1. The best way to increase the capacity of our motorways is to move as much freight as possible off the roads onto the railways. As there are a limited number of freight paths on the East and West Coast Main Lines, one way to increase capacity would be to create a new high speed railway that is used by the high speed passenger trains from London to the Midlands, North and Scotland. Passenger trains would take HS2, thus releasing capacity on older lines for freight.
2. It is well known that speed attracts more passengers. At the moment there’s a lot of speculation about Norwich in Ninety. Every route from London has a time, that would attract passengers. Perhaps, it should be Birmingham in an hour, Cardiff and Manchester in two and Edinburgh in four. Speed will attract people to use the trains, hopefully freeing up the roads.
3. A lot of our older stations like Euston and Manchester Piccadilly need rebuilding, or are on cramped sites like Birmingham, Leeds and Newcastle, so building HS2 with a few well-connected and spacious stations may well make a better railway for every passenger. The network’s Victorian designers didn’t envisage the number and size of trains we are using today, let alone those that we will, in a few years time.
4. HS2 is making us think. In the past couple of months, George Osborne has laid out a plan for HS3 across the north of England from Liverpool and Manchester to Hull. The government has now announced that the existing line will be electrified as a priority. Would a politician have ever thought of this without HS2?
5. I also believe that HS2 should be freight enabled, so that at night, when the line won’t be busy, freight trains can be sneaked up and down the country. Network Rail are experimenting with using Euston in the middle of the night, as a distribution point for retail goods, so could we see that in cities like Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester?
6. I also think that HS2 could be the solution to how we get freight from London Gateway up to the North, if we built a tunnelled link from HS2 to HS1, This would also allow direct passenger and freight services between most of the UK and the Continent. Surely, it would be a better way to distribute Jaguars, Land-Rovers, Toyotas and Nissans all over the Continent and perhaps even further. That is just one example of probably many on how rail freight could be used.
7. I have my doubts about direct passenger services between say Manchester and Berlin, as for a journey of that length, the easyRyans of this would will always be a lot quicker and probably cheaper.
8. A properly linked up high speed rail system, connected to most parts of the country, will open up all sorts of possibilities.
9. Suppose the North Wales Coast line between Holyhead and Crewe was electrified and made into a full-size faster line, would this ease the problem of transporting freight and passengers to and from Ireland? At the present time it take nearly four hours to get to Holyhead from London, so with something like a Class 800 train, under three hours should be possible, even without the sections of HS2 north of Birmingham.
10. South Wales isn’t a problem from London and the South East, as by the end of this decade, Brunel’s Great Western will be making his ghost jump for joy, as trains speed along an electrified railway to Cardiff and South Wales as trains speed along at 225 kph. The line which, I’ve called HSW will probably change the way we think about high speed rail.
11. The main problem of South Wales is getting to Birmingham and the North. But this will probably be solved in the short term by the use of Class 800 running via Gloucester.
12. The Class 800 will have big part to play with HS2, as it will be used as a route extender, as I said in point 9, where it could be used to Holyhead.
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