YES to High Speed Rail

Today, the alliance of opposition groups to HS2 released their report, ‘A Better Railway for Britain’, in which they formally lay out their proposals for alternatives to High-Speed Two (HS2).

Their alternative, essentially the previously proposed Rail Package Two (RP2) with some additional tweaks, is not the ‘catch-all’ solution for Britain’s railway crises that these groups claim.

Prof David Begg, Director of the Campaign for High Speed Rail, commented:

“Groups opposed to high-speed rail keep touting the same, discredited alternative.

“Giving it a different name doesn’t change the fact that it would result in fewer services than HS2, fewer seats than HS2, and allow no room for growth in rail passenger numbers in future.

“It would be a disaster for British transport and the British economy.”

HS2 remains a far more viable and long-term solution for the following reasons:

1. Alternatives would damage the reliability of services
• The proposed alternative calls for ‘better timetables to run more trains’. However, this will remove timetabling allowances that currently help to safeguard reliability.
• Network Rail believes that introducing even one additional service at Euston could have damaging effects on reliability. The alternative proposed by these groups assumes that 3 extra services can be accommodated, which is clearly unfeasible.

2. Upgrading existing lines would create chaos for commuters
• As well as other proposals, such as four-tracking sections of the line, the alternative relies heavily on the lengthening of the Pendolino fleet to 12-cars. This would require significant infrastructure works – including platform lengthening, signalling moves and track remodelling.
• Works of this scale would create unprecedented disruption for existing travellers, particularly on a line which is the busiest mixed-use rail line in Europe.
• We have already had experience of this – the previous upgrade of the West coast Main Line took over a decade to complete, which was far slower than originally predicted.

3. Alternatives would create worse, not better, services
• Alternatives would offer none of the enhanced connectivity that a high-speed line would offer, such as new connections to Crossrail, High Speed 1 and the Great Western Main Line.
• Alternatives would deliver only a slight improvement on journey times. These would come from reducing timetable allowances and removing intermediate stops. This would have a damaging impact on reliability and would reduce services for local stations such as Watford Junction.
• In contrast, HS2 would deliver incremental time-savings and would enable services to intermediate stations to be increased. This is because HS2 will release capacity on existing lines for extra commuter trains as long-distance services transfer to the dedicated high-speed line.

4. Alternatives will not provide the capacity.
• Opposition groups claim that their alternatives would increase capacity on the railways by 215%. However, this increase is spread thinly across the whole day and fails to take into consideration the contribution that 1st class carriages make to current capacity levels.
• The increase in capacity that the proposed alternatives would provide is in fact only 68.9% at peak time – the morning and early evening crushes when extra seats are most desperately needed.
• However, even this revised figure is inflated. Their claim is made on the basis of 2008 capacity figures, and therefore fails to take into consideration the fact that the Government have now committed to capacity-upgrade schemes, such as lengthening many pendolinos to 11 cars. Once this is taken into consideration, the extra capacity that their alternatives would provide at peak time drops to only 38.2%.
• It is clear that, with such a limited increase in capacity at peak times, the alternative can only ever be short-term ‘make-do-and-mend’ solution. In the long-run, the railways would require further capacity upgrades either through creating a new line (such as high-speed rail) or through radical schemes such as six-tracking the WCML through many urban areas causing untold disruption to both passengers and residents living along the line.
• HS2 will have 400m-long, European-sized trains, with up to 1100 seats on each vehicle. Initially, the infrastructure will allow up to 14 trains to run each hour, although this is expected ultimately to rise to 18 trains. This does not include the space that will be freed on the existing lines as long-distance journeys transfer across.
• This has been supported by the experts – Network Rail recently concluded that the route would be full by the mid-2020s and the only long term solution is a new high-speed rail line.

5. Alternatives are costly without bringing required benefits
• Lengthening the current fleet would require huge infrastructure works which has not been studied or costed by advocates of the alternative.
• There are already plans in place to extend some of the current fleet to 11- cars; lengthening the fleet by 1-car would require platform lengthening, track remodelling and signalling moves without delivering a justifiable increase in capacity.
• Removing first-class carriages would also significantly reduce earnings from the line, and hence have a negative impact on the business case.
• The last upgrade of the WCML ended up costing £6 billion more than originally predicted. It is much harder to reliably quantify the cost of upgrading existing lines than it is brand new infrastructure developments. The predicted costs of alternatives, where they involve line upgrades, may therefore rise once the upgrades begin.