Bombast and the bailout

Christmas came early for Stagecoach and Virgin on 29 November, when the Department for Transport announced secretary of state Chris Grayling’s ‘new strategic vision‘ for railways.

The announcement was bundled with a government bailout for (Stagecoach) Virgin Trains East Coast, the operator of nearly all long distance services out of Kings Cross since 2015.

Investment bank Liberum believes the risk of Stagecoach defaulting on the franchise has been ‘removed’ – perhaps not surprisingly, given that inconvenient back-loaded payment obligations which won VTEC the franchise competition seem to have been ‘disappeared’. In GB rail, ‘competition for the market’ seems to amount to which bidder has the rosiest spectacles, or the best cock and bull story.

ITV News at 6.30 pm did not mention the bailout, and mainstream media coverage was distracted by the guff about ‘reversing Beeching’.

Trashing of ancient woodland for HS2 is ‘a crime against the natural world’

Britain’s political establishment has got itself so obsessed with the ‘H projects’ (HS2, Hinkley and the Heathrow expansion), that it seems to have forgotten that spending smaller amounts of money locally and effectively would improve the lives of a far greater number of people in far greater ways (wrote Jonathan Bartley, co-leader of the Green party).

[Jonathan Bartley: HS2 is an environmental disaster – we have to stop it in its tracks, Left Foot Forward, 29 Nov 2017]

Why I’m backing direct action against this expensive attack on nature

[…] The construction for HS2 threatens just under a hundred ancient woodlands across the country. The people of Hillingdon are determined to protect theirs, along with the waterways of the Colne Valley which provide over 20% of London’s drinking water, and the meadows which protect people’s homes from flooding.

This is our countryside, and the government is going to cover it in concrete. Nothing of this scale has ever been attempted before. Nobody fully understands the ramifications or possible consequences.

Beyond the impact on people, the trashing of ancient woodland is a crime against the natural world. The local woods are home to a huge range of irreplaceable species, ecosystems and habitats. From slow worms, to voles, to badgers, to bats, HS2 contractors routinely ignore evidence of the abundance of wildlife and plough on with the destruction.

With such brazen disregard for the local wildlife, activists believe that the construction is actually illegal – a clear breach of the EU habitats directive.

There’s also the small matter that this is all costing an eye watering £56 billion – equivalent to nearly half the entire NHS budget. But of course no one can put a price on the real cost of the environmental destruction.

HS2 is a carbon-intensive project

‘Experts’ behind the building of HS2 have said they had an ‘obligation to reduce their carbon impact and were insisting that all their Tier 1 contractors were PAS2080 accredited within 12 months of contract award’, according to Construction Europe (27 November 2017).

The inescapable reality is, by its very nature, HS2 would be a carbon-intensive megaproject, in both its construction and operation phases. For example,

• thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gases would have to be released just to push earth around to create the alignment for HS2 track (a completely unnecessary activity, because a ‘ready-made’ alignment for 200 – 225 km/h trains exists, in the form of the Great Central Main Line to Rugby and the East Midlands)
• running trains at ‘HS2 speeds’ (330+ km/h) vastly increases the traction energy requirement, and hence the carbon emissions
• the environmental impact of concrete production is significant, but HS2 would require enormous quantities, for tunnels, slab track, viaducts, and so forth.

In July 2017 the government announced plans to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2040. Accelerated change in the energy mix of road vehicles must further reduce the chances of HS2 ever achieving ‘CO₂ neutrality’.

Get trucks off rail

No mention of a design capacity

London’s first inter-city train station, Euston, now caters for around 42 million passengers a year – more than double the design capacity of the current station which was built in 1968. That’s according to the government, and HS2 Ltd’s Rupert Walker.

However, according to freedom of information responses from HS2 Ltd and Network Rail, those organisations hold no documents from the time Euston was rebuilt, which mention a ‘design capacity’.

HS2 and decreased capacity

According to Network Rail, HS2 ‘releases capacity’ for ‘faster, more frequent trains’ on the West Coast Main Line.

However, the available evidence suggests that HS2 is more about ‘decreased capacity’ than ‘released capacity’.

On the busiest section of the West Coast Main Line – the London approach – the number of tracks would be permanently reduced from six to five, so at any one time, inbound and outbound capacity would not be equal.

This problem would be compounded by the number of classic platforms at Euston reducing from 18 to 13.

At St Pancras, hundreds of millions of pounds were spent on a cack-handed redesign of the station, which left the Midland Main Line with just four platforms. Despite growing commuter demand from the east of London, half the capacity of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (HS1) goes unused, because it, and New St Pancras, was not designed to take trains from Essex.

Is Theresa May’s government really going to proceed with an even bigger botch?

Adonis golden arrow delusion

The theoretical throughput of HS2 is about 19,000 passengers per hour, in each direction. So if its entire capacity were used for commuting in the 2-hour morning peak, HS2 would allow a one-time increase of just 38,000 commuters to London, from everywhere served by its trains.

The capital’s population is reportedly growing at around ‘100,000 per year‘, but according to Andrew Adonis, ‘HS2 helps fix the housing crisis by bringing more homes within easy distance of London’.

[We need a ‘golden arrow’ to link London and the north, Evening Standard, 16 Nov 2017]

[Andrew Adonis:] With HS2, you could live on the outskirts of Manchester and easily commute daily, or a few times a week, to Birmingham or London.

In the opinion of Mr Adonis, “In respect of London, there is a readiness to commute up to three hours a day – an hour and a half each way – provided that all-told quality of life is good enough, that is, whatever the trade-off between housing costs and amenities that works for each individual and family”. But, he says, it’s “critical” that “each of the HS2 stations also have good metro and other fast, high capacity connections to get passengers from the HS2 stations across the respective cities and regions”.

HS2 is supposed to connect Manchester Piccadilly to Euston in ~68 minutes. So how would anyone living on the ‘outskirts’ of Manchester, ‘easily commute’ to a London workplace in ‘an hour and a half each way’?

The Black Country tram extension, approved by the government yesterday, is part of the Transport for West Midlands so-called ‘HS2 connectivity package’. But how long would it take to commute from Brierley Hill to a London office, with a 25 km tram ride, and HS2?