Comments on: Reconsidering the Airport Connection: As a Through Station on a Bypass Line

By: TunnelTalk

TunnelTalk — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:42:18 +0000

UK reconsiders High-Speed 2 tunnel alignment @ http://www.tunneltalk.com/High-speed-rail-Dec11-UK-considers-new-HS2-tunnel-alignment.php

By: Wellington

Wellington — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 12:25:37 +0000

does anyone know what the latest on this situation regarding Heathrow is? Especially with regards to Terminal 5? I use this site below a lot for information and couldn’t find a thing on the TfL website.

http://www.heathrowterminal5.com/

Cheers,

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:53:39 +0000

I’m dying to know quite how that would work. If I understand you correctly you’re proposing that the line travels north of Birmingham to somewhere near Warrington, then veers west into Liverpool? So any continuation of the line north the Scotland would have to reverse in Liverpool and then travel east back to an alignment parallel to the M6?

Doesn’t sound very easy or indeed sensible to me.

By: Alon Levy

Alon Levy — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:31:04 +0000

The point of crossing the Pennines is to provide fast service from the WCML to the ECML. Not every trip served has to involve London.

By: James D

James D — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:25:28 +0000

I’d go for Liverpool in the first phase rather than Manchester — it would make for an easier northward connection to the conventional network. Manchester can cope for a while with the conventional line via Macclesfield.

By: James D

James D — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:23:21 +0000

The existing train does Birmingham to Bristol in 87 minutes every half hour. That may not be great, but you aren’t going to beat that with a 200+ mile trip with a change.

By: James D

James D — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:19:47 +0000

Ridership levels. Remember that they rejected a two-track line, branching for Birmingham and the North West and for Nottingham and the North East because they wouldn’t be able to run enough trains to meet demand. The logical solution is to make the common section four tracks, rather than trying to create two non-stop from London to the Midlands. Running via Manchester to York isn’t likely to gain much over the fairly direct 19th Century East Coast Main Line — the average speed is already about 100mph — and if it did save any time from London, you’d run into overloading once more.

As for the Great Western and the South Western, both suffer from the same problem, namely stretch-commuter trains eating up capacity on the fast lines. Neither route is likely to justify a high-speed corridor on its own. The best route for that is therefore London-Basingstoke (branch for Southampton and Portsmouth)-Bristol (with trains continuing to South Wales, or joining the Berks & Hants to Taunton before Bristol).

But to address the original post, it would be difficult to justify any reasonable frequency of trains from HSR-NW/HS2 to Heathrow. It’s really not on the way, and it would add about 20 minutes to do it that way. Doing it as a tangential isn’t as simple as it looks: any reasonably direct route would involve massive tunnelling under west London (which in turn would worsen journey times for the Great Western and South Western Main Lines for those trains routed that way). It would gain far more riders to tunnel under central London and have HSR stations at each of Euston, Liverpool St, and Poplar (Canary Wharf), with trains running into yard space in the eastern docklands, where land is cheap, or alternatively continuing on to Europe. I’m not surprised that Ferrovial/BAA/Heathrow are trying their hardest to sabotage HSR, but really it naturally points to aviation capacity expansion at BHX at the expense of Heathrow.

By: BruceMcF

BruceMcF — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:16:05 +0000

What Jim said … a “right angle” route that allows connecting to an HSR can often make sense, if the longer trip distance involves a shorter time added to the HSR-line run in exchange for a longer time saved on the express interurban line.

But running 100 miles to reach a point further away from your destination than you started, its hard to work out how the arithmetic of that works out. Might be the New Maths, but.

By: BruceMcF

BruceMcF — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:11:52 +0000

Since the mainline-only trains do not need it, and the HSR-only trains do not need it … and given the distances that are involved (no multi-day treks with a train from origin to destination like Amtrak) … twice the cost for the rolling stock to allow specific services to run from HSR-NE and HSE-NW to the southeast is quite likely a good deal.

By: nick uk

nick uk — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:43:41 +0000

the distance by road from London Euston to Birmingham international where the line is likely to go is 109 miles direct or about 121 miles via Heathrow.This is not anything like the detour the tgv nord takes to go via Lille, although a shorter cut off via Amiens for direct London Paris trains has been suggested by SNCF.

Even though the trains may not be able to reach their full speed by heathrow, 12 miles at over 200 mph is not of much consequence, particularly as the route will probably follow the m40 motorway/chiltern railway anyway.

it would be silly to not include Heathrow if the proposed route passes near it anyway.