This is a scheme to give Manchester Victoria, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Birmingham and Coventry a high-speed main line to each other, to two regional airports, to Cambridge, to Stansted Airport and to a London terminus. More and sooner than HS2, it would help the cities of the North and Midlands grow and the UK economy become less London-centric.
The London terminus would not be Euston but Stratford, with its many tube and surface rail line connections to the financial districts and commuter suburbs east of London Bridge and the Stratford section of London’s east-west-Heathrow distributor, Crossrail, in-build.
NorthStart’s first trains would be similar to the Class 395 high speed commuter units operating on the HS1 route between St Pancras, Stratford and Ashford in Kent. The journey times are based on these trains, but faster EMUs are now on the market.
TGV-speed trains perform best on journeys of at least 60 miles between stops. They would appear once the Stratford to Birmingham half of the scheme reached East Midlands Airport and connected to the completed northern half of the scheme. The travel time savings of TGV-speed trains could then make ticket cost sense.
The Birmingham-Coventry-Corby-Cambridge-Stansted-Stratford route was added to the NorthStart scheme on 6 January 2013. The map-line for the North-South Divide, from the Severn Estuary to The Wash, was calculated by Prof Dorling and colleagues in 2010. See The Economic Geography of the UK: www.sagepublications.com
London Stratford to Birmingham
NorthStart’s high speed London-Birmingham route would connect Cambridge to the financial power of London and the manufacturing companies of the Midlands. It would use the Lea Valley line corridor north from Stratford, turning onto high speed track to cross the M11 into Stansted Airport, then tracking the motorway north to Duxford Air Museum. Leaving Cambridge westwards, it would run with the A14 upgrade west towards Corby-Kettering, the M6 and Coventry; using the last few miles of the safeguarded HS2 route into Birmingham. The scheme would create added economic benefit if it ran on west to Telford.
HS62 would be the high speed Crossrail between Manchester Victoria and Leeds. It would track the M62 Motorway east from Rochdale through the Pennine Moors. It has scope for commuter stops at Rochdale and at Jn.24 of the M62 for Halifax and Huddersfield. HS21 on the map would be the scheme’s north-south main line.
West Coast Main Line upgrade still needed
Rail traffic in the UK is still growing. The NorthStart scheme assumes that the interim capacity shortfalls on the WCML would be met if the rail route between London Euston and Manchester Piccadilly were upgraded to take 12 carriage trains, with one car in each changing to Standard Class from First Class. See Chris Stokes in Quotes. NorthStart’s high speed main line from London Stratford to Manchester Victoria would follow.
Rail miles between NorthStart-1 and NorthStart-2 stations
|
Miles |
Man Vic | Bradford | Leeds | Meadowhall | Sheffield | E Mid Airp |
| E Mid Airp | 105 | 85 | 89 | 51 | 55 | - |
| Leics-SW | 123 | 103 | 107 | 69 | 73 | 18 |
| Corby | 153 | 133 | 137 | 99 | 103 | 48 |
| Cambridge | 193 | 173 | 177 | 139 | 143 | 88 |
| Stansted | 219 | 199 | 203 | 165 | 169 | 114 |
| Stratford | 248 | 228 | 232 | 194 | 198 | 143 |
Visible engineering and northern jobs
A North-first start on UK high speed rail would be an opportunity to anchor design, civil engineering, tunnel work, power supply, steel making, component supply and train making skills and jobs north of the North South Divide. In particular, it should be used as an opportunity for more visible engineering by Team GB and less cut-and-cover coyness.
So, what’s wrong with a London-first, Euston-Birmingham start ?
London is the UK’s great economic powerhouse. It has four international airports. Its commuter arteries fan out across the south of England to access a catchment population and spending power twice that of Birmingham and Manchester put together.
If HS2 is launched South-first and reaches out to bring Birmingham within an hour’s commute of London’s vastly bigger business sector, London will grow into an even bigger business draw than it is now. Birmingham and other cities north of the North South Divide will lose more ground and the chance to give the Northern economy a one-off (but lasting) boost from fast connectivity will be lost.
See Quotes: Lord Digby Jones.
Updates to follow
- A scheme for the rail links between Leeds, Bradford and Leeds-Bradford Airport.
- How the NorthStart scheme would put the heart back into Bradford
- Can the NorthStart scheme be extended to Liverpool St after Crossrail opens?
Not convinced the Lee Valley has the capacity. There’s already fairly form plans to put in a congestion relief third north of Tottenham Hale- possibly to Brimsdown- whilst proposals for Crossrail 2 may see it rebuilt as four-track from just south of Tottenham Hale to Broxbourne. It is a seriously congested line already, forecast to get much busier (especially if Crossrail 2 happens- though this at least would take pressure off Liverpool Street).
At Stratford, the Lee Valley platforms are currently quite short- only eight carriages worth. Extension would have to be out and over the HS1 station box. Between Stratford and Liverpool Street, whilst Crossrail 1 will take pressure off the four track section, it will still be busy- without the addition of however many trains per hour this HS plan would merit.
North Start is not a bad idea- but perhaps on the existing route, with the connection to London still being in via Old Oak Common to Euston.
Thanks for commenting.
If the scheme’s Stratford-Birmingham route went ahead I would expect the Crossrail 2 and route-rebuild etc options to respond to it, not the other way round.
The scheme’s route options from Stansted Airport to Stratford could mean a tight squeeze at points along the Lea Valley route, despite inter-operability. However, to take these pinch-points out would involve a lot less urban property-take than for HS2′s high-speed-only tracks into Euston 2.
You are right about the Lea Valley line’s platform lengths (and widths) at Stratford. Whether that means an at-grade or a high-level station within the Stratford LOD, or one out on the Legacy lands, I don’t know. I’d first like to know if the route could bridge the Great Eastern and join the Electrics-side tracks into Liverpool Street, once Crossrail is open.
Isn’t there already a plan for a completely new line from London to Stansted Airport? Stratford offers a much better connection to HS1 than Euston.
Would there be an interchange with ECML at Huntingdon? The A14 viaduct goes quite close to the station. Might be useful for folks who want to get to central London, though Javelin or Crossrail might be just as quick.
Seems the plan is an architects’ idea for a Heathrow-Stansted ‘dual hub’ with a Crossrail extension from Stratford to Stansted. See FT of 28.10.2012 and RTM of 23.11.2012.
The NorthStart route crosses the KX-KL line at Cambridge, the ECML at Huntingdon, the MML at Kettering-Corby and the WCML at Coventry NE. Each offers scope for an interchange. But each stop would delay arrival at the next stop on the high speed route; ditto on the route crossed. If not matched by mutual ticket gains, no interchange.
Michael Bell comment:
“My own ideas (www.beaverbell.co.uk) have some similarities to your NorthStart scheme, based on linking the four cities of the North with a high speed ring and more able to create wealth and grow the Northern economy. There is an easy analogy, the Dutch “Randstad”: the circle of cities of Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht. It has no “centre”, but is still made one place by its transport links. Taken as a whole it is the chief city of the Netherlands. With the speeds which HS2 plan for, you would be able to go anywhere in a rail-linked ring of Northern cities, do something useful and get back in an afternoon. A working, personal or business relationship can be built up when the parties are so near. That makes it a single city. I’ve called the Northern ring city “Ringby”.
http://thornshapedroute.weebly.com/bringing-prosperity-to-the-north.html
The official reason for building HS2 is to increase capacity on the London-Birmingham leg, and “to spread London’s wealth to the North”, working on the theory that faster journey times to London increase a town’s wealth. If that were true, Birmingham would be wealthier than Manchester which would be wealthier than Leeds, which would be wealthier than Newcastle. But official statistics show that that is not so, it is a mixture of self-deception and cynical misleading – “this will solve the north’s problems” – but the Y-shaped route and its likely extension to Scotland won’t. It has no clothes.”
Thanks Michael.
We appear to be saying the same sort of thing: that a straight-line dash from Euston to Birmingham would grow London rather than Brum. To lessen the economic tilt towards London, the NorthStart scheme sets up two critical-mass centres beyond the North South Divide, more able to grow beyond the huge gravitational pull of the London region. Ringby sets up a combined one.
NorthStart does not have a route section into Manchester Piccadilly, because most of its traffic would originate from the spread of tube and surface lines into London Stratford (with Crossrail in-build there), from the stations at Stansted Airport and Cambridge and from Sheffield, Leeds and Bradford. This east-side London, east-side Pennines catchment complements that of Euston and un-loads capacity pressures on the WCML.
Alas, there is front bench consensus that HS2 (like Concorde) is the Right Thing to do; ditto starting with London-Birmingham.