Imagine spending upwards of £50bn on a new high speed rail line which ends up cutting capacity and leading to slower journey times. Good news! You don't have to. It is a reasonable description of the impact of axing HS2 north of Birmingham, via a properly jaw-dropping report by the National Audit Office (NAO).
You may recall that last October, Rishi Sunak announced at Conservative Party conference – in Manchester – that plans to extend HS2 between Birmingham and Manchester were to be shelved. Instead, the Department for Transport (DfT) revealed that trains would run north of Birmingham on the existing West Coast Main Line.
In its report, the NAO says this means that HS2 services will have *fewer* seats than those currently operating, estimating a 17 per cent reduction in capacity between Birmingham and Manchester. This is because HS2 trains, using existing track, are both smaller than the current Pendolinos and would likely run slower "due to current lower speed limits for non-tilting trains on the West Coast Main Line." But this isn't even the best bit.
That is the suggestion from the public spending watchdog that one option for the government would involve "managing demand" by, wait for it, “incentivising people to travel at different times or to not travel by rail”. The italics are mine, but well earned, I think. As rail expert Mark Smith, better known as The Man in Seat 61, pithily puts it: "Basically, HS2 Ph2 [phase 2] is needed to make sense of Ph1, end of."
And this is before we even get to the never-ending psychodrama that is the Old Oak Common/Euston London terminus. Speaking to The Standard, new transport secretary Louise Haigh described the Tory plans as "an absolute mess" and announced that the future of Euston as the terminus for HS2 would undergo a review.
At present, the proposed HS2 station and wider redevelopment of the Euston area – which locals know has been a construction site for years – will only go ahead with private sector investment. As a result, Old Oak Common is set to be the southern terminus when the line finally opens in around 2030 and may well be indefinitely.
Alright, Sunak was in a tough spot. The costs of HS2 were spiralling, driven in part by tunnelling and a need for the track to be as straight as possible in order to facilitate high speeds. But this feels wholly unsatisfactory. For years, train geeks have been not so patiently explaining to anyone who would listen that HS2 was not really about increasing speeds, but boosting capacity. We may end up doing neither.
