Building HS2 speed-first from Euston would bring central Birmingham into London’s one-hour rail commuter catchment, increasing London’s domination of the UK economy and worsening the North South Divide. Plan B instead puts a Northern Cities Crossrail first, to run east-west through Manchester Victoria and Leeds, with high-speed connectors south to Birmingham and to Sheffield, north to Newcastle.
A northern cities crossrail
The 40-mile first stage of Plan B would halve today’s Manchester to Leeds rail times, breaking through the economic barrier of the Pennine Moors and drawing the rail systems and economies of East Lancs and West Yorks time-nearer each other. It would take half an hour out of today’s cross-Pennine rail times from as far east as Hull, York and Newcastle to as far west as Liverpool, Wigan, Preston and Bolton.
HS2 will not do this.
Bradford-to-Sheffield next
Adding Bradford and Sheffield to this Northern Cities Crossrail, with a 40-mile next stage, would fast-connect an urban grouping half as populous again as Birmingham. It would have the city centre resources, SME groupings, research, design and technology skills and commuter catchments needed to power-up the Northern Powerhouse economy.
HS2 will not do this.
An extended Midland Main Line (MML)
Extending Northern Cities Crossrail services south through Sheffield Midland (not via Meadowhall) would allow MML services from London St Pancras to stop in Sheffield and continue north to Manchester Victoria or to Bradford and Leeds: extending and upgrading the MML so it relieved and competed with the WCML and ECML.
Plan B’s new fast lines are shown in heavy red on the map. They have been optioneered to follow existing motorway and railway corridors where possible. HS2 does not do this. Regional main routes where Plan B trains would run on through the major stations are shown in thin red.
The 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
Plan B in London
Plan B trains’ destination in London would be St Pancras International with its Eurostar, Kent HS1 and Midland Main Line interchange and, one level down, through-running further south via its Thameslink platforms to interchanges with the London Crossrail at Farringdon, with the District and Circle Lines at Blackfriars and with the Kent, South London, Gatwick and Sussex rail network at London Bridge. But the lines into London Bridge are far more congested than those into Euston, so Plan B proposes:
A Canary Wharf fast-connector
Plan B includes a Thames tunnel route to connect the Brighton, Gatwick and Croydon line with the Lea Valley, Stansted and Cambridge line via rail-rail interchanges at Lewisham, Canary Wharf East and Stratford. It would relieve the commuter congestion at and approaching London Bridge station and the associated overcrowding on the Jubilee Line between London Bridge and Canary Wharf.
The idea of a direct Gatwick-Lewisham-Canary Wharf-Stratford-Stansted link first appeared in the BML2 project (Brighton Main Line 2). See: http://www.bml2.co.uk/
Local connectivity: The Plan B main line has scope for connector chords off into the town centre stations at Huddersfield, Wakefield with scope for rail/rail interchanges at M1 Jn.37 (Barnsley W), at Mirfield (Huddersfield-Halifax-Dewsbury) and at Rochdale.
See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_395
And see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_3#Class_406
HS2 Plan B journey times (See ‘Miles and Mins’ page) are based on the Class 395 speeds between St Pancras and Ashford in Kent. More recent, faster versions of this type of electric train are in use elsewhere in the EU. The Plan B main line curvatures have been drafted to suit these. As a result, Plan B’s St Pancras to Birmingham rail times would be minutes slower than HS2 but still time-competitive with WCML services from Euston.
See below: The risk of HS2’s Euston-first start and its dash to Birmingham.
Northern jobs
Plan B’s North-first start is aimed to attract and anchor railway design and construction, rock-tunnel, power supply, steel-working, signalling system and smart-train skills and jobs well to the north of the North South Divide.
This next map shows the original NorthStart map of 2011. Line HS62 is still its high speed link between Manchester Victoria and Leeds, tracking the M62 Motorway eastwards from Rochdale through the Pennine Moors. It would involve rock-tunnel and surface sections between Rochdale and Halifax, with scope for a commuter stop at Rochdale and another at Jn.24 of the M62 for Halifax-Huddersfield North. Line HS21 on the map remains the scheme’s Stage 2. It extends the Midland Main Line north from Sheffield Midland. Plan B still includes a new Bradford Central station to replace the existing Bradford Interchange and Bradford Foster Square stations, but Plan B no longer has a main line extension north via Leeds Bradford Airport and Harrogate: too costly.
Plan B and the West Coast and East Coast Main Lines
Plan B’s position in the market would be that of a much-extended and much enhanced Midland Main Line: a new fast rail spine in the middle of England between the West Coast and East Coast main line routes; competing with both.
West Coast Main Line seating capacity
The quickest improvement to seat capacity on the WCML’s Euston-Birmingham-Manchester Piccadilly route would be to change one car in each 9 car set to Standard Class from First Class. Medium term capacity shortfalls on the WCML would be eased by track and signalling upgrades; later by introducing 12 car trains instead of the current 9 car sets, with platform extensions needed only where 12 car sets would stop.
See Chris Stokes in ‘Quotes’.
The risk of HS2’s Euston-first start and the dash to Birmingham
London is the UK’s great economic and political powerhouse. It has four international airports. Its commuter arteries fan out across the south of England to access a skills catchment and spending power twice that of Birmingham and Manchester put together. If HS2 is launched Euston-first it will give London a big new economic artery and put Birmingham within an hour’s commute of London’s vastly bigger business sector. London would grow into an even bigger business draw than it is now. Birmingham and cities further north of the North South Divide would lose more ground and the chance to change the shape of the UK economy and give the North a one-off (but lasting) boost from fast connectivity first will be lost.
See Lord Digby Jones in ‘Quotes’.
The NorthStart scheme map was updated with the HS2 Plan B route on 17 Sept 2013. The Stratford-Canary Wharf-Lewisham tunnel route was added 3 July 2013. Further updates to map and text 24 Sept 2013. The east-west Crossrails map was added 22 April 2014 and the Northern Cities Crossrail notation and detail were added 29 October 2014. A further main map update and text revisions were added 8 October 2015 and 25 November 2016. More text revisions 12 June 2017.
HS2 Plan B: 
The plan B is an excellent proposal to rebuild the Northern economy. The North-South divide in England is equivalent to the East-West divide in Germany before unification. If Germany can reconstruct it’s Eastern provinces, surely the UK can reconfigure its cross country freight infrastructure to serve modern commuter and container traffic. In Europe and Asia provincial cities are being provided with modern underground Metros. Why should Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool be any different?
It’s all very well people advocating electric traction for its cleanliness and acceleration capabilities. What is generally ignored is the amount of power required, and where will it come from? A single Pendelino outputs (consumes more?) 6MW during acceleration – that’s 500,000 light bulbs, or the power needed to run a small town. Britain is closing coal-fired power stations, with Hinkley Nuclear a distant vision. The Government is burying its head, heaving a sigh of relief each spring that a heavy winter, with zero wind for its turbines, has not caused power cuts. We can’t rely on the French 4GW link to Kent: when the Germans run short (they are heavily wind fed) that might dry up as well.
Maybe that’s why the MML electrification has been “paused”.
The official HS2 plan is flawed on most points. Firstly, there is the objective of what it is supposed to achieve in serving regions and cities and boosting their economies, in which it fails miserably. Secondly, the technical aspect of its construction. HSR is supposed to be a backbone, with trains that can also run on existing high-speed classic tracks. Common sense would have new HSR track north-south and east west in the country and use the existing short sections of high-speed classic track to run into cities. Of course the cost would be greatly reduced. There would be no disruption to urban areas in large construction projects. Of course no such thing was ever done. They decided to run full 250mph track into a few city centres, track in which no train would reach 250mph as the train would be slowing up to stop. You couldn’t make this up.
HS2 is changing for sure by stealth. High Speed UK’s plan is better and they may loosely adopt their overall plan. Government people are meeting with High Speed UK people. It is much better than the official HS2 taking in the whole of Britain and using some existing disused trackbeds.
http://www.highspeeduk.co.uk/
The .. Crewe Hub .. is an after thought. Recently the spur to Heathrow airport has been dropped and a spur to Wigan, which is between Liverpool and Manchester. This all points that the full dedicated spur to Manchester will be dropped.. (it).. is a legacy of the initial silly HS2 plan of only considering four cities for HS2 and damn the rest.
The mood has changed.
You might like to see the High Speed UK web site http://www.highspeeduk.co.uk .
It mirrors much of your thinking. It offers a fully mapped alternative to HS2+3, which we believe is so much better and £20bn cheaper.
We have presented it to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Select Committee and were very well received. It was a private session so there is no record on the parliament website. We thought that a shame but it was not our call.
Our Submission to the HoL committee is on our website and is a 20 page read.
As Colin and I both live in Yorkshire, it won’t surprise any of you to know that a Trans-Pennine link is an essential part of HSUK, and we agree it should be built first. However, we do not go over next to the M62 but reopen the Woodhead Tunnels and the associated Great Central route.
Quentin Macdonald, HSUK Systems Engineering Principal
Thanks Quentin. The key difference between our schemes is that the HSUK Pennine crossing would not “go over next to the M62 but would reopen the Woodhead Tunnels and the associated Great Central route.”
Plan B’s Pennine crossing instead uses the M62 corridor route east beyond Rochdale, to connect the North’s two biggest through-stations, Manchester Victoria and Leeds. It aims to halve the current rail time between the two city centres and put in the key connector in a Northern Cities Crossrail. Add to this a 40-mile connector between Bradford and Sheffield, Plan B’s first north-south section, and Mr Osborne would have a fast-connected northern economy half as big again as Birmingham.
Perhaps an engineer can post a comment on the practicalities and benefits of HSUK’s aim of re-opening and putting OHLE into the Woodhead Tunnel/s.
You have some very good ideas here. The real purpose of high speed rail is to serve city centres, rather than out of-town parkways that HS2 Ltd. promote with such perverse prejudice. Glad to seen you include Bradford, and a through station (very important for connectivity). But you still miss out the Liverpool – Stoke – Derby – Nottingham corridor that currently has the slowest end to end speed between two of England’s ‘core cities’. And Stoke would be a much better interchange on HS2 between Birmingham and Manchester than Crewe. Its large population could add up to 5 million extra journeys by better connectivity by the time HS2 is built compared with an interchange at Crewe. And also a lot more jobs as Stoke already has service industries to help new businesses to grow. But the proposed ‘Crewe hub’ is surely a white elephant that is ‘all hype and no new passengers’ and certainly not a destination.
Your problem, and that of many other expert people with serious knowledge of railways, is that HS2 Ltd does not have the objectivity that is needed to take high speed rail forward with public support.
Thanks Graham. As my target audience is seriously time-short, I need to keep my ‘build an HS3-first’ argument and Northern Cities Crossrail route and map as simple (and as northern) as possible.
That said, the Stoke conundrum seems to be that whichever rail route Stoke is on, it is only midway to somewhere else. It is not a must-stop stop and (see Doncaster) faster route speeds alone will not change that.
Really, really good ideas here. I’d been thinking along similar lines of an ‘HS62’ myself. The importance of enabling progress in the north first is paramount.
Relocating Leeds Bradford makes so much sense too.
I would hope your ideas get increasingly national exposure.
Stu
Thanks Stu.
Your ideas are broadly right but you seem to have underestimated the need to embed the Liverpool conurbation (population 2.2 million) in your proposals. Current services between Liverpool and Manchester are poor and neither of the existing routes are fit for purpose. It is worth pointing out (although everyone including George Osborne seems to have overlooked this) that passenger numbers between Liverpool and Manchester far exceed those between Manchester and Leeds despite a slower and less frequent service. An obsession with “KIBS jobs” has blinded planners to the fact that Liverpool complements Manchester’s economy in a way that Leeds probably does not – hence the paucity of trans-pennine traffic.
Thanks Matthew. Plan B has from the outset started with an HS3 between Man Victoria and Leeds because it would join up something even bigger, a Northern Cities Crossrail from Liverpool in the west to Hull in the east. As some of its much-needed east-west line electrifications are already in programme, I can’t do much more to embed Liverpool in my proposals. Cue Ged FitzGerald, the City of Liverpool Chief Executive, in the Liverpool Echo of July 3rd, who said that ‘despite the popular perception of major rivalries between cities they were, in fact, already working closely together to accelerate economic growth’. And that ‘the transport connectivity across the North of England was absolutely crucial’.
http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/business/big-feature-time-northern-cities-7360694
If you take a “north south” divide the west midlands is in the “north” but the east midlands is in the “south”. Yet you seem hell bent on connecting the east midlands in preference to the west midlands. totally contrary to your stated aims , or do they only count when it suits you?
On the map, the line of the North South Divide (produced by Prof. Danny Dorling and Sheffield U colleagues) shows the West Midlands and Coventry to the north of the Divide, ditto Derby and Nottingham, but not Leicester.
This website’s fourth paragraph, above, says Plan B’s Midlands Crossrail, its fast connector from Birmingham and Coventry, would join the scheme’s north-south main line by Jn.19 of the M1. And, a bit later, it says Plan B trains would be able to run on west of Birmingham and Wolverhampton.
The aim of Plan B in the West Midlands is to keep Birmingham from becoming a satellite of the London super-economy. Plan B’s Midlands Crossrail and spurs off would instead concentrate the Birmingham city centre economy, its groupings of creative and technology SMEs, centres of research and extend its rail commuter access. Its the sort of critical mass, seen by BBC2’s recent ‘Mind The Gap’ two-parter, with Evan Davies reporting, as essential if a UK region is to compete with London’s world-city attractions to the south and with the wider world. Plan B has the same aim, for the same reason, for the three East Midlands cities, with East Midlands Airport as the regional economic driver.
Here’s the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03y3y8k
I like this idea a lot. Was just wondering if this could encompass a spur to Heathrow (maybe via Old Oak Common) and also what speed (i.e. how many miles per hour) these trains would run at? Is it the same 250 mph of HS2 or that of HS1?
I’d favour being really bold, and going Stansted – Stratford – Boris Island.
HS2 is likely to run at 300 kph (same as HS1) or maybe 320 kph when it opens. The’re worried about the effect of Rayleigh waves at higher speeds, and want to give the track a chance to bed in before trying them.
Too bold and no volume fare-box destination in central London.
Thanks, Jacob. HS2 Plan B’s first trains would be inter-operable successors to the 150mph Class 395s now running on HS1 between St Pancras and the big North and East Kent commuter towns. They would reach 150-170mph on Plan B’s north-south main line, branching off from the main line station stops to join the east-west regional lines east and west of them.
The line has been drafted to 4.5km radius or better, so uber-speed trains could operate on it if they made platform-fit, capacity and return on cost etc sense.
I’ve not tried to add a spur to Heathrow. For the minority of arrivals at St Pancras who would want Heathrow access, a proportion of Plan B trains would continue south via the Thameslink platforms to interchange onto the westbound London Crossrail at Farringdon and its promised spur into Heathrow: http://www.crossrail.co.uk/route/surface/western-section/.
Or, passengers could continue south to Gatwick without changing.
Thank you for your response Michael. Even though this plan does not go at super speed like the HS2 the government has proposed I actually think it is better if the real aim is to provide cities with better connectivity and increased capacity on rail.
I don’t think I made my question on a spur to Heathrow clear as having trains running through Farringdon and onto Heathrow is essentially the type of direct spur I was alluding too, although there is still the problem of an over centralised London (perhaps this is unavoidable).
Looking at your map yet again you show manchester as a massive city compaird with other city. Please take Bolton and Rochdale and all other town away from the map of manchester. And see how small manchester Is to liverpool and Leeds
Well, if you followed the same logic in the south east England, you could take the London boroughs away from London’s massive urban area and argue that London is not at all big.
Why has Liverpool been left off? It is obvious to extend the line from Manchester making Liverpool a terminal. This idea appears to be as ill-thought out as HS2.
Plan B trains Miles and Mins west of Manchester Victoria would look like:
Man Vic to Liverpool: 35 miles in 30 mins (less after a track upgrade)
Man Vic to Leeds: 40 miles in 30 mins (30 miles all-new track)
Liverpool to Leeds: 76 miles in 60 mins (via Man Vic)
So, Plan B via Man Vic could halve the current Liverpool-Leeds time via Man Picc.
But, WCML would still be the shorter, faster route from London to Liverpool:
London to L’pool: 245 miles in 155 mins via Plan B
London to L’pool: 194 miles in 128 mins via WCML
So Man to London is 8 minutes faster than Liverpool. The problem with HS2 was that Liverpool is at a clear economic disadvantage to Manchester (KPMG report), this evens it up a little. The WCML can be diverted onto London’s Crossrail at Willesden. This would improve matters for the Liverpool and Chester trains accessing Central London and beyond.
Also, how can Liverpool have trains directly to the Continent? Only High-speed trains will give that and the WCML will not run them. They only reach 100mph on classic tracks. Virgin have pushed for tilting high-speed trains but to deaf ears. Then these can use then WCML at 140mph using in-cab signalling and run onto the Continent
Liverpool needs a “direct” express route to Leeds by-passing a Man Vic stop to improve times and link these economic regions. A high-speed line from Liverpool to Hull is desperately needed to link up all the economic regions along its route – and it should be built first.
The website map is due for an update to show HS2 Plan B’s main run-through routes east of Leeds and West of Manchester Victoria. These would open a fast-connector route, a Northern Cities Crossrail, from Liverpool (and to Bolton, Preston, Blackpool, Wigan, Southport and St Helens) to Hull (and to York, Selby, Malton, Goole and Scarborough) and, with Plan B Stage Two, north via Bradford, Leeds-Bradford Airport and Harrogate to the Tees and Tyne.
Work for the Northern Way pre-2011 found that a 20 minute improvement in rail journey time on the trans-Pennine corridor between Leeds and Manchester would result in a GVA uplift of £6.7bn across the North of which just £2.7bn is captured in the two city regions. I agree that it should be built first. HS2 cannot do this. Plan B could.
As to trains direct to the continent, Plan B’s cross-platform interchange with Eurostar services at St Pancras offers international access to and from all Plan B destinations.
Continent to anywhere beyond London won’t work unless UK Border Agency co-operate. When Eurostar tried Sheffield to Brussels they were allowed to carry passengers between Brussels and Lille but not between Sheffield and London, so the trains would be half-empty for that part of the journey, which is what makes it uneconomic.
Why does this stop in the Leeds area and not go all the way to Aberdeen?
Build from North and South……..
That would double the route length and its cost for much less revenue gain. See above para ‘Later Stages of Plan B’.
If the object of the exercise is solely to address the north-south divide, the priority should be a new, fast, high-capacity trans-Pennine link connecting Liverpool and Manchester to Yorkshire, and via there to the North-East and the East Midlands.
The most cost-effective way to do this will be via Woodhead, not the M62 corridor. One of its great advantages is the already-existing formerly four-track Great Central Route into Manchester Piccadilly.
Maybe the best plan would be to reopen the whole of the Great Central, and dig a tunnel from Marylebone to St Pancras. Though (as a Cambridgeshire resident) I like the idea of coming down via Stansted into Stratford — handier for Boris Island too.
As someone who supports High Speed Rail, I am not sure of the benefits of this scheme over HS2 proposed. People proposing alternatives get branded as objectors and that could count against getting anything. The one thing I would change about it is to deliver it earlier; by 2032 something may have happened that makes the whole thing outdated.
Sorry, same route as HS2
Can you tell me if the link between meadowhall and Leeds is on the same route as HS1,
If it is?
Then this is still a poor route?
It needs to go into Sheffield! And exit northbound on the old Oughtibridge/wood head pass route into Manchester.
Simples
No to Q1. The northbound Plan B line stays on the west side of the M1 until past Barnsley, then tracks the existing rail corridor round to the M62 corridor. That way, the travel time between the centres of Manchester and Leeds, Bradford and Sheffield gets halved. HS2 will not do this.
The chord into Sheffield gives the city centre its most direct connection from the main north-south line.
This is a much much better solution, and it includes Bradford for once. Nothing else does.Stuff Leeds, they already have everything they need.Bradford is over two thirds the size of Leeds and doesn’t have a station fit for a city. Its more like a Bus Stop. This proposal would share the load between the two cities. Also would benefit us up north as its supposed to do.
Michael
A very interesting proposal
I have a few questions:-
1) Are you proposing Manchester Victoria as the northern terminus or continuing the line to Liverpool ?
2) Are you proposing Telford as the “midlands” terminus, or could the line continue to Holyhead ?
2) Is this a passenger only railway, or would freight use it (maybe at night) ?
3) Are you proposing UK loading gauge (I assume W12) or Continental loading gauge (UIC-C) ?
many thanks
Richie
Thanks Richie
London St Pancras would be the scheme’s only buffers-stop station.
1. At Manchester Victoria, some London trains (Class 395-type) would continue to wherever in Lancashire or beyond made sense to Network Rail and the TOCs. But Man Vic would also see new traffic from the same territory continuing, via Rochdale, to West Yorkshire or beyond. The two streams of traffic would make Man Vic a much bigger interchange than it is now.
Work for the Northern Way found that a 20 minute improvement in rail journey time on the trans-Pennine corridor between Leeds and Manchester would result in a GVA uplift of £6.7bn across the North of which just £2.7bn is captured in the two city regions.
2. Similarly, some London trains would be able to continue west from Curzon Street to beyond Wolverhampton.
3. The issue with container trains is that the faster ones would still use up passenger paths in twos and threes during the day and the slower ones might chew track up at night. The Pennine crossing could, nevertheless, improve cross-Pennine freight times a lot and, looking south, the BML-2 passenger route from Stratford to Lewisham via Canary Wharf could be used to greatly shorten the route for freight crossing London to and from the Channel Tunnel.
4. The routes I have proposed are mainly to 6.0km minimum radius except through St Albans, so the eventual use of higher speed sets is possible. It would be daft not to build the railway clearances to allow for this.
Sorry to have been so slow replying, I couldn’t work out how to use this blogging system.
1) I am proposing to use Manchester, Victoria but not as a terminus. Only 2 platforms in the roofspace of Victoria will be required for a straight-through station. It would be easy enough to continue the line to Liverpool via Warrington or Newton le Willows, but what I have actually drawn in my map http://thornshapedroute.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/9/0/10902760/28_altricham__sale.jpg is that the route from Birmingham comes into Manchester via Altrincham.
continuing through Manchester see http://thornshapedroute.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/9/0/10902760/29_manchester_centre.jpg
and following the M62 “over the top”, see
and
See http://www.beaverbell.co.uk for discussion.
3) It stretches the imagination to think of HS2 running bi-modes from Holyhead into London on the High-Speed lines. For those nervous, or with children or baggage or who want to sleep, “direct” services, we might run 3 or 4 trains a day on the classic routes, for the rest it will be interchange. Whether interchange will be at Crewe, Stoke or Manchester doesn’t matter. Classic route will have to be extended eastwards to meet the new route.
2) HS2 seem to have given up the idea of UK loading gauge, I always thought it was a bad idea. I propose Channel tunnel shuttle – size trains, seating 3+3 on two decks. I propose that the seats can be motored out of the way and pallets of cargo put in their place as in some aircraft at off-peak periods.
Your scheme appears to complement BML2’s project to relieve the over-busy Brighton Main Line to London Bridge.
BML2 proposes a second main line from Brighton, using under-used routes and restored track, to join the routes into London Bridge at Lewisham:
http://www.bml2.co.uk/
But if there was also a rail tunnel from Lewisham to Canary Wharf and Stratford it would relieve these routes still further as well as the Jubilee Line east to Canary Wharf.
As BML2 can also connect Gatwick to Lewisham, there is scope for a fast Gatwick-CW-Stratford-Stansted link.
I’d be interested to have your views on this.
Brian Hart, Project Manager BML2
Thanks Brian,
A main line rail tunnel between Ladywell and Stratford, with interchange stations at Lewisham and Canary Wharf, would offer some valuable benefits. It would save Kent and Sussex commuters to Canary Wharf two sides of their twice-daily travel triangle via London Bridge, taking the twice-daily pressure off the Jubilee Line, too. Herts, Essex and Cambridge commuters could continue south to Canary Wharf direct without having to interchange at Stratford. More people could access Gatwick, London Crossrail and Stansted by rail. And the tunnel might perhaps be the first Thames crossing for Channel Tunnel container trains east of Putney. I’ve added it to HS2: Plan B with credits to BML2.
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 HS2: Plan B 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. Your Ringby scheme sets up a combined one.
I confirm that HS2: Plan B does not have a route section crossing Cheshire into Manchester Piccadilly. Instead, it starts with a direct Manchester Victoria to Leeds fast crossrail and connects this south, removing the need for a route into Manchester Piccadilly. As a result, its traffic would originate from the north side of central Manchester, from the east-side and south Thames catchment of London St Pancras and, of course, from West Yorks. With the connection of Birmingham to the route, I see this un-loading the capacity pressures on the WCML, especially between Euston and Birmingham .
Alas, there is still front bench consensus that HS2 (like Concorde) is the Right Thing to do; ditto starting with London-Birmingham.
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.
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.
Not convinced the Lee Valley has the capacity. There’s already fairly firm plans to put in a congestion relief third track 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.
North Start/HS2: Plan B is not a bad idea- but perhaps approaching London on the existing route, with the connection to London still being in via Old Oak Common to Euston.
Thanks for commenting.
If the BML2 scheme’s Lewisham-Canary Wharf-Stratford-Stansted 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.
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 Like this idea. You have my backing HS northstart. There would be a small change, that is, I would still use Birmingham Curzon Street and link Wolverhampton via BUSHBURY with two railway stations in Wolverhampton: one railway station at Bushbury Fordhouse Road and rebuild Wolverhampton railway station in the City Centre. It is just an idea
from Peter Jarai from Bushbury, Fordhouse road