Short term vs. long term: why Britain should say Yes to HS2

Two years ago, when the initial plans for HS2 were announced, I wrote a blog post trying to make the case for High Speed 2, or HS2 as it is now universally referred to. Today, it is being reported that a Network Rail review has concluded that the main alternatives could not generate the required capacity.

First of all, let's clear up one common misconception. The Daily Mail article on Saturday led off with "The biggest rail project in over a century will cut the journey time between Britain’s two biggest cities from one hour 24 minutes to just 49 minutes." Yes, it's true, but that's not the point!

The point of HS2 is not speed, it's capacity. Simply put, the railways are very rapidly running out of capacity. The West Coast Main Line (WCML) between London and Rugby is particularly bad, and will be completely out of capacity by the mid-2020s unless something is done.

So, what should be done? HS2 involves building a new high-speed railway line from London to Birmingham and Lichfield, so that all the long-distance services on the WCML can be diverted onto the new high-speed tracks, leaving the existing tracks free for more commuter services, meaning more capacity for everyone. While a price tag of £17bn seems like a lot, we're already spending £16bn building Crossrail, and another £6bn rebuilding Thameslink; and HS2 would have an impact across the country, rather than on "just" commuter services in the south-east.

Nonetheless, there is a significant amount of opposition, and various alternatives have been proposed. In particular, the HS2 report published two years ago examined in detail a range of incremental upgrades to the existing network which would deliver comparable capacity increases. Since the Network Rail report hasn't been published yet, I'm going to try and explain why such incremental upgrades won't be enough.

Option 1: longer trains. Fortunately, Virgin Trains are way ahead of you: they're already lengthening the Pendolinos from 9 carriages to 11. Any longer, and the trains won't fit into Liverpool Lime Street station; even if you disregard Liverpool, there are very few platforms that can cope with trains longer than 12 carriages. So lengthening trains any more all of a sudden comes with a huge disruptive price tag of having to lengthen platforms.

Lengthening platforms sounds easy, but it betrays the complexity of the network. For example, at the end of the platform there may be some points or signals, meaning that in order to extend the platforms you have to move the points and the signals too. The line may be on a curve, and thus extending the platforms requires curved platforms, which means a gap between train and platform, and more inconvenience (and I don't believe curved platforms are allowed any more).

Option 2: faster trains to Northampton. This sounds slightly counter-intuitive at first, so bear with me. There are two kinds of train on the fast lines out of Euston: Virgin Pendolinos, which can do 125mph, and London Midland Desiros, which (for the time being) can only manage 100mph. Each hour (off-peak), there are nine Pendolinos and two Desiros on the fast lines. Because the Desiros run slower, there has to be a gap behind them so that the next Pendolino doesn't catch them up; this means that you end up with fewer trains than you could in theory have.

The solution to this is to make all the trains the same speed. In theory, it doesn't actually matter whether you speed up the Desiros or slow down the Pendolinos; but slowing down the Pendolinos would be political suicide for Virgin and would significantly increase the journey times out to Birmingham and Manchester. So, the Desiros ought to be speeded up to 125mph.

Well, good news! The Desiros are currently being speeded up, but only to 110mph (they're not physically capable of any faster). This will mean a gain of at least one extra train per hour on the fast lines. In an ideal world, the Desiros would be supplemented (or replaced) by more 125mph trains to serve Northampton; while that would gain you some capacity, one starts to run into problems with running basically InterCity trains on commuter journeys to Northampton, such as it taking longer to get people on and off the train, which starts to negate some of the benefit.

Option 3: grade separation at Ledburn Junction. Ledburn Junction, between Tring and Leighton Buzzard, is the junction where the London Midland Desiros turn off the fast lines onto the slow lines, to get out of the way of the Virgin Pendolinos through Milton Keynes. Because of the arrangement of the tracks and the layout of the junction, trains crossing from fast to slow or vice versa block the junction to trains in the other direction.

It's like having a right-turning lane in the middle of a dual-carriageway: you have to wait for the traffic to clear before you can turn right. Because trains can't run on line-of-sight, and have to be signalled, it's usually the other way round: it's like the traffic stopping at traffic lights just so you can turn right. That slows lots of people (trains) down for only one person (train) to turn right. Much better would be to have a motorway junction, where you go up a ramp, and over the offending traffic. Which is a great idea, but it's fairly expensive to build. More importantly, it's disruptive: imagine trying to drive through the junction while they're in the middle of building the ramp.

Option 4: four-track Birmingham to Coventry. Or, more accurately, Stechford to Berkswell, since Birmingham to Stechford is too tight to fit any more tracks, and there's a tunnel just east of Berkswell that would be impossible to widen (to say nothing of trying to fit two extra tracks through western Coventry without demolishing several streets). The Birmingham-Coventry corridor is one of the most congested railway lines in the Midlands, with fast trains between Birmingham and London having to share track with stopping services calling at local stations.

Prior to 2008, the stopping services called at all the stations, every half-hour. But in order to fit the new every-20-minutes London to Birmingham service from Virgin in, the local trains have had to become every 20 minutes and only call at about 2/3 of the stops each. So at Canley, my nearest station in western Coventry, only two of the three stopping trains actually calls; one runs through non-stop. This means that, rather than an easily memorable half-hourly pattern, trains to Birmingham leave at 14 and 33 minutes past the hour (the third should be at 53, but runs through non-stop), and trains to Coventry leave at 17 and 44 minutes past the hour (where the third should be at 57).

Four-tracking between Stechford and Berkswell, then, would permit local trains to be overtaken by fast trains, and remove the risk inherent in the current timetable: the line has so little slack in it that one stopping train being just 3 minutes late can delay up to four or five trains behind it. Were it not for the huge disruption it would require to construct, and the enormous cost of £900 million, I would be entirely in favour of four-tracking Birmingham-Coventry.

Unfortunately, to deal with the capacity problems on the WCML, we don't just need one of options 1, 2, 3 and 4 above, we'd need all four of them, and many more besides such as extra platforms in London and in Manchester as well as speed improvements around Stafford and Northampton. The so-called "Rail Package 2" proposed by the DfT as an alternative to HS2 would cost £4.2 billion, including all the above track upgrades and new rolling stock.

Admittedly, it does represent good value for money; indeed, in the way the DfT has calculated it may even be better value for money than HS2. But looking at the number of calories will tell you that a bag of sweets is better than a hot meal, since it will give you more energy; it won't tell you that an hour after eating the bag of sweets you'll be hungry again.

Rail Package 2 undoubtedly has the ability to deliver a significant increase in capacity, but it provides a trickle of incremental benefits rather than one huge step-change, something I believe can only be delivered with long stretches of new track rather than quick fixes to bottlenecks and extra bits of track bolted on here and there.

It would also be horrendously disruptive to deliver Rail Package 2. Some of you probably think I'm over-egging the disruption that upgrades cause; my earlier blog post showed my experiences of the right way to do engineering works, diverting trains instead of replacing them with buses. However, that doesn't hide the fact that what should have been a four-and-a-half hour journey from Coventry to Edinburgh became six hours - a third longer - though at least the disruption was confined to one bank holiday weekend.

Imagine having to spend a third longer on your commute to work every day. A 2003 study put our average commuting time at 45 minutes each way; suppose instead that that went up to an hour each way. That's an extra half an hour of your day wasted on travelling; half an hour less with your family; half an hour less to relax and unwind. Imagine doing that every day for a year - or maybe even five years - and you begin to get some idea of the disruption caused by an upgrade on the required scale.

The worst thing, however, about Rail Package 2 is that we've been here before. All the anti-HS2 campaigners seem to have incredibly short memories: for eight years during the West Coast Route Modernisation, between 2000 and 2008, the whole WCML was left with a mediocre, sub-standard service, particularly at weekends, while they closed half the track to rebuild it all. I, for one, do not want an upgrade of that scale to happen again.

HS2, by contrast, would require minimal disruption to existing journey patterns; of course it will cause significant disruption to the countryside it runs through, but except for a few towns there aren't actually very many people living near the route. Were the Birmingham-Coventry line to be four-tracked as part of any alternative to HS2, I have no doubt that the very large number of people living alongside that line would far outweigh the number of people disrupted by building HS2 in the Chilterns.

The leading article in Saturday's Independent advocates against HS2, as follows: "The most convincing argument in favour of HS2 is that it will act as a much-needed bypass, easing the congestion that bedevils the West Coast Main Line. But to plump for an all-new high-speed rail link, rather than dealing with the bottlenecks in the existing network, runs counter to the advice of the most recent review of Britain's transport infrastructure and relies on passenger numbers soaring at an unprecedented rate to balance the sums."

True, the Eddington Report in 2006 did indeed shy away from recommending high-speed rail as a solution to our transport problems. But this was in an era when oil cost just $60 a barrel, rather than the current $110 or more; and with no prospect of the oil price going down any time soon, the economics of transport have changed dramatically in the last five years.

The rate of increase in passenger numbers is hardly unprecedented either: today the rail network is booming in a way that no-one expected even five years ago. Between 2005/6 and 2010/11, the total number of rail journeys increased by just over 25%, and now stands at 1.35 billion passenger journeys per year. Indeed, that represents nearly a doubling since the early 1990s, when there were fewer than 750 million journeys per year.

Fifteen years ago, the incremental, disruptive, West Coast Route Modernisation - which cost a whopping £9 billion - was touted as the long-term solution to the capacity problems then facing the WCML. Given that, just four years after its completion, we're even discussing such solutions as Rail Package 2 or HS2, it's clear that it wasn't. The modernisation of the last decade was much-needed and is very welcome, but it came at a huge cost of disruption and only solved the problem in the short term.

Once again, we are faced between the choice of a short-term sticking-plaster, in the form of Rail Package 2, or a long-term cure, in the form of High Speed 2. We are often told that we never learn from history; let this not be one of those occasions. If we reject HS2 it would prove that Britain has become incapable of thinking beyond the short-term.

Let us learn from our mistakes. Let us plan for the long-term. Let us endorse HS2.