Tuesday 24 May 2011

Fast track to communal poverty

The consultation document has a subtitle The Fast Track to Prosperity. However upon examination of available data, "High Speed" rail will, in fact almost certainly mean slower journey times for more rail users than it speeds up.

Up to 750 trains every day with destinations not on the proposed new HS line are likely to be slowed or scrapped – this is according to HS2 documents. These rail changes will impact on a quarter of the country.

Close to 40 million passenger journeys each year will be affected with no HS alternative available to them.

The first group to be effected will be existing fast trains between London the West Midlands and the North West. These – according to the documents will "be recast with reduced frequency".

Annexes to HS2 documents last year state that the current 120 fast trains per day between London and Birmingham will be reduced to around 80.

Coventry are set to lose two-thirds of its fast trains to London with the remaining trains slowed by 10 minutes. The existing Manchester and Liverpool service will have a cut of around 50 trains. Stoke-on-Trent will loses half of its London service and also be slowed.

The rail traffic database MOIRA has Coventry as the fourth busiest intercity destination from Euston carrying 976,000 passengers last year. Passenger travelling between the smaller Midland cities and London total a million per year greater than the number from Birmingham to London.

The next affected group is in the London area. The prospectus says that the local stopping service to Watford could be "removed" or diverted to help free up platform space at Euston. This line runs 130 trains per day and carries 5 million passengers per year – twice as many as currently travel from Euston to Birmingham,



The largest group affected are, according to HS2 prospectus, trains arriving into Paddington which will be slowed to a stop at a new HS2 interchange at Old Oak Common. The idea is to improve connectivity of the new route. In reality, this alone will slow down London-bound rail services of about a fifth of the country including the whole of the Thames Valley, western England and South Wales. Around 500 trains per day currently run in and out of Paddington carrying more than 29 million passengers per year.

The consultation document sates that the Birmingham to London journey will be 49 minutes against a claimed time of 1 hour 24 minutes.

However, the fastest journey on the existing line is 1 hour 12 minutes – so the true saving is now only 23 minutes. Also as HS2 will not serve New Street but dump passengers on a new-build station some 10 to 15 minute walk away then the time saving is now down to a negligible 10 minutes.

The talk of the "80 minute" journey time to Liverpool and Manchester requires 60 miles or so of HS track that as yet has not been decided on. Under current plans HS trains for the North West would leave their dedicate line somewhere near Lichfield and continue on existing track. Sadly the prospectus admits that HS2 trains – unlike current Pendolinos – will not tilt so on this 60 miles of track the speed will be even slower than the current trains.

The journey time from Manchester to London will therefore be 1 hour 40 minutes – a mere 18 minutes quicker than existing trains and Liverpool 1 hour 50 minutes – only 11 minutes faster.

The economic case is dependent upon quite staggering assumptions of long-term demand growth. Even the basis of calculating the growth is now being questioned.

As for creating thousands of jobs – the small print does concede that 73% of the "regenerative benefit" jobs will actually be….in London.

Rail Package 2 hits all of the government requirement and more if – in addition - 2 of the existing 1
Rail usage is already falling back from the record highs in France and Germany also. Fares are being increased with a further planned increase of 3% above inflation for the next 2 years. With inflation at around 5% this would mean an increase of 8%!!

Our current rail network would be more efficient and more in line with France and Germany if ownership was not spread over so many different companies all with their own board of directors, management, lawyers and accountants all adding up to a vast amount of money with no inter relationship and working practices.

Send HS2 to its correct destination - the bin!
st class carriages are configured to standard class.

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