West Coast a-gigo

The case for the HS2 railway has always depended on wishful thinking, misrepresentation, and garbage assumptions. Upholding this decade-old tradition, the government made much of a claim in the October 2023 ‘Network North’ command paper (CP946) that the de-scoped HS2 phase one could enable West Coast corridor capacity to ‘almost double from 134,000 to 250,000 seats per day’, as if this would be some kind of valuable achievement.

Curiously, at the time of writing, the government has declined freedom of information requests to explain the basis of the calculation ‘West Coast Main Line & HS2 Phase 1’ in Figure 10 of the Network North paper.

In December 2023 the editor of ‘Rail Engineer’ magazine, David Shirres, stated the ‘250,000 seats’ claim was ‘not credible’ as it was ‘equivalent to eighteen 589-seat Pendolino trains each hour, running 24 hours per day’.

But in April 2024, Mr Shirres published an assumptions table that he himself had created, showing a one-way ‘WCML passengers per hour, With HS2 phase 1 – Minimum’ of 129,192 [daily]. Which represents a two-way capacity of 258,384, or 8,384 more than Mr Shirres said was ‘not credible’. For some reason, he assumed that the DfT used a 14-hour day in their mysterious capacity reckoning, but they haven’t said.

By the time of his April 2024 article, Mr Shirres had realised that 11-car Pendolinos had been upgraded to have more than 589 seats, but perhaps not that there are insufficient 11-car Pendolinos in existence to run the ‘average hourly service’ posited in his table.

What Mr Shirres seems to share with DfT is a love of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ factoids. The fact is, the rather pointless ‘250,000 intercity seats a day’ metric could be easily achieved without even building one yard of HS2, or extending a single existing platform.