Blooper duper

Following the Economic Affairs Committee hearing on high speed rail on 22 January, HS2 ‘afictionado’ William Barter took to Twitter (as newspapers say) to throw some shade at committee chairman Lord Hollick.

All sooper-dooper signalling does is reduce the technical headway between trains a bit (opined Mr Barter). But on mixed use main lines [like the West Coast Main Line] with inner and outer suburban and freight, the number of trains that can run is limited by the difference in speed between them (he continued). So to run more trains, the fastest will have to be slowed to the same speed as the stoppers, so most journey times will be longer.

Actually, under the government’s plans for HS2, the West Coast Main Line would become more of a mixed-traffic railway than it is now. Line capacity would likely fall because of this altered mix, and because of the loss of WCML platforms at Euston.

The HS2 July 2017 strategic case indicated that

• many (most?) of the paths on the fast lines north of Euston would continue to be occupied by long distance intercity trains,
• but the proportion of [slower] commuter trains running on those fast lines would increase.

The government has also indicated that HS2 would increase the quantum of West Coast freight paths. But introducing [much slower] diurnal goods trains onto the fast lines north of Willesden would further reduce their throughput.

Increased commingling of different types of train on the fast lines would reduce overall capacity, but these consequences are not set out in the HS2 strategic case.

On top of all this, the HS2 project entails permanently removing five platforms from Euston WCML (a theoretical capacity loss of ~10 trains per hour).