Rail experts say train drivers will have to 'sprint' the 200m length of a train in order to leave the station on time if services are forced into a cut-price surface turnback HS2 hub at Manchester Piccadilly. The Government’s plan for an above-ground terminus next to the existing station, with no platforms running through, means trains will have to turn around to depart.
This might work for HS2 services between London, the Midlands and Manchester. But when east-west links between Manchester and other northern cities including Leeds are added to the timetable, industry experts say the proposed ‘short-sighted’ design means time and space will be so tight that drivers will have to ‘dash’ the equivalent of half an Olympic track to get passengers away on time.
It’s one of a number of issues identified, by leaders across the north and industry experts more widely, with building a surface terminus as opposed to an underground through station at Piccadilly.
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The HS2 Crewe-Manchester bill had its second reading in parliament last week, with objections to be considered by a Select Committee next month. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has so far rejected, on cost grounds, northern leaders' pleas for an underground solution to save vaulable land, jobs and future potential for the east-west links so desperately needed by passengers in the region.
But critics of the design featured in the Integrated Rail Plan (IRP) have found other major faults, including the need for drivers to leave their cabs and negotiate busy platforms by foot in order to take passengers out of Manchester.
Andrew Dixon, High Speed Rail programme co-ordinator for Manchester City Council, said: "With the underground option we are arguing for, you could run through services via the new Manchester Piccadilly station between Liverpool and Leeds. But because the overground option being proposed by government is a terminus station, trains would come in one way and passengers have to wait while the driver legged it to the other end of the train just so they could drive them back out the other way.
"The overground option leaves so little slack that once the station is running at capacity the punctuality and reliability of services could be partly dependent on the speed at which a driver can run along a crowded platform. You have to ask yourself whether this sounds like a sensible and efficient way to run a 21st Century railway."
Industry insiders say drivers arriving into the station will have to turn off the engine and let passengers off before sprinting to the other side of the train to carry out safety procedures and heading onwards. One insider told the Manchester Evening News : “Trains will have to be turned off when they arrive then turned back on again - they are more likely to break down if this keeps happening, what happens then to the five-minute dwell time. This is a 21st century high-tech train service reliant on a bloke from Stoke running the length of a train."
Critics of the plan for an overground station, including Manchester City Council leader Coun Bev Craig and Mayor Andy Burnham, claim it will not only blight valuable land and create a ‘concrete jungle’ of viaducts and concrete structures in the city centre but will also stymie the east-west links needed to connect northern cities. In turn, this will dash hopes still harboured by passengers and leaders that a true Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) will be built in the future, despite the Government’s downgraded plans for east-west links, which in November shaved £18bn off the proposed scheme.
Crucially, a surface station means the Government’s previous plans could not be brought back to life in the future as the hub will hit full capacity from day one.
A report by technical consultants Bechtel, hired by Manchester City Council in 2019 to look at potential options or Piccadilly, concluded that pre-existing plans for an HS2 station were now simply having NPR tacked on to them as an ‘add-on’, rather than a fundamental reworking of the designs to ensure the most sensible solution
“It was far from clear to the team that HS2 Limited’s preference for two additional platforms in its surface station would provide a satisfactory solution for NPR, with through services required to reverse and loss of additional development land, both in the immediate vicinity of the station and along its approaches,” it found, adding that it had managed to find ‘very little’ in the way of detailed technical designs or costings, suggesting they either hadn’t been prepared or hadn’t been shared.
Bechtel concluded a six-platform underground ‘box’ solution, aligned at a better angle for services to continue on through to Leeds, would be a more sensible alternative. It also pointed out that this solution was already happening just to the west of London, in Old Oak Common, where an underground HS2 station is in the process of being built.
This London 'super hub’ will be an 850-metre station with 14 platforms, six underground high-speed ones and eight conventional ones above ground, four of which will serve Crossrail. There will be no unsightly viaducts here; twin tunnels will take high speed trains east to the southern terminus at Euston and west to the outskirts of London.
The Council’s own analysis has found that the cheaper station option will mean building on 500,000sq metres of prime development land, severing east Manchester communities, cutting off Metrolink lines, and blighting the city centre by turning swathes of land into a building site. They believe the loss of land for development alone could cost 14,000 jobs and £333m to the economy a year by 2050.
With HS2 alone running through the overground station, it’s understood there will be six trains an hour, with each staying in the station for around 20 minutes between journeys. However, when NPR trains between, for example, Liverpool and Leeds, are added, timetabling becomes more complicated. According to planners, NPR would require 14 trains an hour. Four trains between London and Manchester for HS2, two between Birmingham and Leeds for NPR, four between Liverpool and Leeds for NPR, and four empty coach and stock HS2 trains.
Rail engineer Gareth Dennis branded the Government’s proposed solution for Piccadilly as ‘spiteful' adding: “With a turnback station trains will pull into the platform facing the buffers and the driver will indeed have to get out and travel the full length of the trin. This is not the way to design a modern railway.
“It’s a Victorian train operation. It’s a ridiculous constraint to put on that service. There is no benefit to this station in terms of how it’s going to look and it’s baffling, incredible short-termism. It makes the idea of levelling up a joke.”
In the IRP, published last Year and including the downgraded NPR, it states that ‘turnback’ stations are common on high speed rail networks across Europe - including at Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Zurich, Milan and Rome. However, Gareth added: “The Stuttgart21 project to reverse precisely this mistake is costing billions more than planned and is causing years more upheaval that initially envisaged, and the IRP proposes to bake in this failure from new?”
He argues that similar projects to make through stations have already been completed at Berlin Hbf and Wien Hbf, and are proposed for Frankfurt Main Hauptbahnhof and Budapest Nyugati, while the LGV Est interconnexion was built specifically to avoid having to reverse TGV trains in central Paris. The Government has dismissed the underground option on the basis that it will cost, according to High Speed rail director general Clive Maxwell, £5bn more. Yet no evidence of this costing has been provided.
A Department for Transport spokesman said: “Northern Powerhouse Rail is set not only to improve journey times and increase capacity, but could also help increase growth and economic opportunities across Manchester and the North.
“Development of Manchester Piccadilly station is at an early stage of design, and we continue to evaluate options to deliver the best solution for the city and wider region, including several options for the turnaround of trains.”
As background, they said development was at an early stage and operational needs are still to be confirmed, with the continued exploration of a range of timetable scenarios. They said there would be scope for future service growth should it be needed, adding that their analysis found an underground station at Manchester Piccadilly would cause major disruption during construction and take passengers longer to reach platforms, cancelling out the benefits of faster journeys, all at an additional cost of up to £5 billion while significantly delaying the introduction of full HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail services.
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