The latest iteration of the Tory’s beleaguered transport plans for the North West could result in billions of pounds being spent for a net negative outcome, TLE analysis of the plans has revealed.
As most followers of the HS2 saga will be aware, the main reason for building a new high speed line between London and the North of England was, is, and always will be the need to provide extra capacity to a network that already struggles to meet current demand. This can be seen very obviously through the use of capacity pricing by the current operator, Avanit West Coast, which charges £369.40 for an anytime return ticket – for use during both off-peak and peak times – between London and Manchester.
The effect of this extreme level of pricing is to price people off the intercity network, and HS2, by dramatically increasing the capacity as it would run alongside the existing West Coast Mainline, would have enabled more sensible pricing – with a commensurate benefit to the economy as a whole – as well as freeing up access to existing track for more commuter and freight trains, thereby providing benefits for those who did not have HS2 stations near to them.
Presumably, the government forgot about this when it decided to replace a high-speed railway from London to Birmingham and Manchester with a £50 billion pound underground railway between West Ruislip and Birmingham.
Yet to the amazement of industry experts, the government appears not even to have understood that cancelling the northern leg of HS2 from Manchester to Birmingham would not just not increase capacity but reduce the capacity from what we have today.
This is because the HS2 trains will move onto the existing West Coast line from Lichfield upwards, but the trains for HS2 are 60m shorter and with less capacity than the existing Avanti Pendolino trains. This was because HS2 trains were intended to run much more frequently than is possible on the existing track, but will now have to run at existing frequencies because a large part of the journey is on the existing West Coast track.
There is not even an obvious way to solve this as doubling up the new HS2 trains – by running two sets together – is almost certainly not possible with existing power infrastructure and even then the doubled-up trains would then be too long for the platforms.
So the result of Sunak’s genius back-of-a-fag-packet plan to cancel HS2 is that we will end up with the world’s most expensive underground railway through the countryside (thanks, Tory Nimbys!) while making the problem HS2 was meant to solve, capacity on the network, worse rather than better. Genius….
Related post: Things the Tories will not tell you about HS2
