HS2: What we know, and what we don’t know

Article by William Barter

Matt Brown, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What can be said with confidence about progress on HS2 is that the section of Phase 1 from Old Oak Common to Birmingham Curzon Street is under construction. Most major structures are complete or nearly complete, but there is more earth moving to do before the railway can be fitted out with track and signalling. After that, some four years is said to be allowed for testing, so the opening date could be a decade away.

And tunnelling from Old Oak Common towards Euston has started. At Euston, it seems clear that the six platforms needed for the Phase 1 train service of 10 trains per hour (tph) will be provided. What we don’t know includes whether further platforms to cater for anything beyond the Phase 1 service will be allowed for, and whether their number and length will match future requirements. The risk remains that the Euston terminus will form a constraint on the capacity of the whole HS2 route, which could carry up to 18 tph.

We don’t know when the WCML connection to Handsacre be restarted and completed, or even whether it is worth completing it before trains from Liverpool, Glasgow and Manchester can be diverted to run on HS2 through to Euston. There is even concern over the seating capacity offered by Phase 1, if using 200m trains in place of the present Pendolinos. In fact we don’t really know anything about the train services that will run, not just on HS2 itself, but on the rest of the railway once it is freed of those trains that make few if any stops at locations such as Milton Keynes and Watford. It is thoroughly sensible to focus on getting Old Oak to Curzon Street up and running, but does this draw enough of the London to Birmingham business to enable a rewrite of the WCML timetable around needs intermediate stations? What opportunities to run additional regional services truly exist, as Phase 1 avoids the worst bottleneck on the WCML only to feed its trains straight into the second worst, namely the double track section South of Stafford through Shugborough Tunnel?

Then, what if anything will be built beyond Phase 1? Can the erstwhile Phase 2A route to Crewe be revived, bypassing that Shugborough bottleneck? It adds a lot of value as the existing route is so slow, and can be made cheaper with little loss of benefit by joining the WCML South of Crewe instead of forcing rebuilding of Crewe.

Can the route right into Manchester be completed? The Bill for it is still in Parliament, and without the infrastructure shared with Northern Powerhouse Rail, that project is surely a non-starter. What if anything of the Eastern leg can be revived, as provision for the junction to feed it is still being made, and what services could run on it?

Although remarkable progress on construction is being made, the Government has much to answer, both on how Phase 1 will be used to provide a useful train service, but also on what could and should follow Phase 1 if scope for expansion is not to be designed out.