Or put it this way: wikipedia has a list of the largest UK towns without rail service: “If one excludes towns located within conurbations, the largest British towns without direct access to a railway station are Blyth (36,000)…”

I’d say the geographical and infrastructural situation in the UK makes a compelling case for Maglev much more than anywhere else in Europe.
From my research on the subject I’m actually surprised that Maglev is ignored in the UK.

What is your opionion or attitude towards the UK Ultraspeed alternative?

PS:
For those positive towards maglev, please sign the online petition by the International Maglev Board at http://www.pro-maglev.net.
There is also a private petition for the maglev case in the UK at http://www.gopetition.com/petition/39755.html

DBX: Doesn’t Euston have a few extremely long platforms to accommodate the sleeper services to Scotland? AFAIK, those are the longest passenger trainsets used in the UK.

In Scotland, they claim it brings money into Scotland (and away from England). :-) Different attitude I guess.

I imagine the Scottish Executive would demand control over the portion of the railways within Scotland, as they pretty much control the rest of the Scottish railways.

Second, I know Britain isn’t Japan. But it’s not France, either. Its cities aren’t scattered randomly in all directions relative to the capital. Most cities are located along two corridors, which could be combined into one if the previous HS2 proposal of crossing the Pennines before heading into Scotland is exercised. Furthermore, the two corridors are close to each other but without good connections from one to the other; this is a low-hanging fruit that France just doesn’t have. Another way in which Britain is neither France nor Japan is that many of its legacy rail lines are fairly straight, which means there are many ROWs for serving central cities. Just staring at Google Maps shows to me that there are ways of having HS2 roughly follow the WCML to Manchester but with a mainline stop in central Birmingham.

Third, I stand corrected on the four-track part. I meant to talk about incremental upgrades, and got confused with the legacy Tokyo-Osaka and Paris-Lyon lines, both of which are double-tracked, and both of which came with four-tracking proposals as alternatives to HSR. There’s no doubt British Rail invested a lot in incremental upgrades for its mainlines; other than the Acela and a few ICE lines, I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the world where trains run faster than 200 km/h on legacy track. The problem is that there’s only so much you can get out of a line built in the 19th century.

Another point of information; minimum headways on TGV-Nord are three minutes. Five is just the older line to Lyon.

Another point. Britain isn’t Japan. The geography is different. The cities aren’t all neatly joined up in a row along a narrow coastal plain and high mountain ranges don’t dictate routes. The existing rail networks — to which HSR will need to connect at major stations at the very least unless we’re to have more park-and-ride disasters like Ebbsfleet — don’t follow the same pattern either.

I suggest that in general you try to better inform yourself about current operating conditions on rail networks, and think a little more coherently about what you’d like to see.

Surely this is a pre-requisite to any proposed project?

2. If this were Japan, then all trains would stop in both Birmingham and Manchester. The Japanese way of running high-speed trains is that the express trains stop in all major cities, while the local trains stop also at smaller cities; despite this stopping pattern, express trains in Japan are no slower than in France. A Shinkansen-style service would have all trains stop in London, Birmingham, and Manchester – even trains headed for Scotland – and local trains also stop in Milton Keynes, Coventry, Stoke-on-Trent, and Preston.

3. Low-speed lines have higher capacity than high-speed lines, because their stopping distances are much smaller. A well-run low-speed two-track line can achieve 30 tph with cutting edge signaling, and 24 without. High-speed lines are limited to about 12, assuming either identical stopping patterns or perfect scheduling: the Tokaido Shinkansen runs 13 tph, but it’s limited to 270 km/h due to its age.

4. Where British Rail stagnated was in its decision to quad-track the WCML instead of build a new HSR line paralleling it. Both the LGV Sud-Est and the Tokaido Shinkansen were conceived as not just speed enhancers, but also relief lines for overloaded two-track rail lines.