Will HS2-and-a-Half work?

Forget the politics. Forget the broken promises. Never mind the U-turns. The only question that really needs to be answered in respect of the Government’s all-new Integrated Rail Plan is this: will it work? Will it do the business?  

HS2, the origins of which date back to 2009, when Gordon Brown was prime minister and Andrew Adonis (now Lord Adonis) was transport secretary, was never an obvious solution to a complex problem. Starting in London (where else?), the line was to head northwest, by way of Birmingham, en route to Manchester. But then, abruptly, it would veer off to the east, to somewhere called the East Midlands Hub, before ending up in downtown Leeds. Sheffield would have been included only tangentally while Nottingham and Leicester would have been left looking on from a distance.  

Now, only the western leg is to be built, with a stub branching off only as far as the still notional East Midlands Hub. In place of the missing link, Leeds will be served by a section of track (HS2-and-a-bit), suitably “upgraded” that – initially at least – will only allow high-speed traffic as far as Sheffield. 

Meanwhile, the much-vaunted Northern Powerhouse Line (NPL), intended over time to connect Liverpool, via Manchester and Leeds, to York and Hull, has been reduced to one line from Warrington to Manchester and another from Manchester to Huddersfield – a town with a magnificent Victorian station but a population of just 163,000, less than a quarter that of Leeds.

In the case of the NPL, not just Leeds, but Bradford, has vanished from the timetable. It is as if the only thing that matters in the end is that Manchester should have an improved commuter network. If we exclude Bristol and the West Country, England (and we are only talking England here, not the UK) is long and narrow. It is also densely populated, cramming 56 million people into an area one fifth the size of Texas. France, which is five times bigger, has only a third the number of people per square mile and is obligingly hexagonal in shape. Spain, more than four times larger than England, is similarly as wide as it is long, meaning that railway lines stretch in all directions across an empty landscape. 

All of Europe – not just France – will be shaking their heads in disbelief. In China, they will be laughing out loud.  

But, as I say, all that really matters is that whatever gets built should work and that the people of the North should not feel more than usually short-changed. 

The problem for railway planners in England is that its capital (population 9 million) is situated close to the south-east corner of the country, convenient for France and Belgium via HS1, less so for Manchester and Leeds (never mind Edinburgh and Cardiff).  

Ideally, the East Coast Main Line, heading to York and Newcastle, would boast dedicated high-speed track alongside conventional, or “classic,” track intended for local traffic. The same would apply to the West Coast Main Line, the modernisation of which, costed at some £10 billion, was completed as recently as 2008. Between the two coastal routes, a high-speed Central Line ought logically to be in place, running from London to Leeds, taking in Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield.  

In fact, none of these lines, allowing trains with as many as twenty carriages to travel at speeds of up to 205 mph, were ever built. There were simply too many towns and cities to be served, too many obstacles to be overcome and too many rural communities, backed by the environmental lobby, that could see only the disruption and the despoilation, not the benefits.  

HS2 was the belated response to a developing problem. It was always a compromise – a one-stop-fits-all solution that in the end was designed primarily for the convenience of London, Manchester and Birmingham, with Leeds and Sheffield as add-ons that were never more than pencilled in.  

So much for the history. What will we end up with if the Johnson/Shapps grand plan is ever built? The truth is, the HS2 part of it could work, providing that the link between the Midlands hub and Sheffield is genuinely upgraded and fully electrified. Fast trains, similar to France’s TGVs, would have to slow down in the stretch to Leeds, with space created for regional trains that would otherwise have to remain in sidings or stuck in stations while their long-distance counterparts thundered by.  

But the result, in all likelihood, would still be shorter journey times and an increased capacity – just not as much as promised. Given that no north-south journey starting in London and ending short of the Border is more than 340 miles (compared with 800 miles in France) and that a more typical run would be more like 200 miles, the margins are less than critical. What matters is that trains should run reliably (say at 140 mph) on electrified track, with digital signalling and all mod-cons, including functioning onboard wifi. And that, in fairness, is what Shapps and his advisers have tried to come up with.

Whether it is built as advertised, in the time allotted, at anything like the estimated cost, is another matter.  

The downgrading of the NPL is more serious. Not only does the revised plan make a mockery of the Tories’ levelling-up philosophy, it also undermines the whole concept of the North’s great cities being connected by fast, modern trains all the way from Liverpool in the west to Hull in the east.  

It was never going to be easy to build a high-speed line across the Pennines that would operate in parallel with existing track. For a start, Manchester, Huddersfield, Bradford and Leeds rather get in the way. What looks simple on a map is infinitely more complex in real life. Yet that is what was promised. Indeed, as with HS2, it was contained in the 2019 Conservative manifesto and in speeches since made by the prime minister and ministerial colleaues.  

What the North is likely to get instead is a series of incremental improvements. Even building a straight stretch of track from Manchester to Huddersfield is not without its engineering challenges. Where the French could simply join the dots between Paris and Bordeaux or Paris and Lyon, Britain is forced to negotiate tight corners, urban sprawl and a maze of existing track Even in open country, they have to cram four lines into a space barely big enough for two. My guess is that ten years from now – maybe fifteen – it will be a lot easier to travel by train from east to west, but the NPL will be nothing like London’s Crossrail project, stretching less than 65 miles, that has yet to be opened, years late, at a cost that in the end is expected to exceed £20 billion.

It may be worth pointing out that practically all high-speed rail services between cities in France are centred on Paris. It is spoke and wheel gone mad. If you want to take a TGV train from Toulouse to Lyon, or from Bordeaux to Nantes, or from Brest to Lille, you are out of luck. New, privately financed cross-country services have been mooted recently, but unless these bear fruit soon, the answer remains as ever: go to Paris, change stations and carry on to your destination two hours later.   

Something else to be borne in mind is that train technology is evolving and that the trains of tomorrow may well be hydrogen-powered, meaning that much of what is being built today will be obsolescent within 20 years. The tracks will almost certainly remain, but the overhead pantographs that supply power to the locomotives could become a thing of the past.  

Judging by the reporting in the Yorkshire Post and the Bradford Telegraph & Argus, opinion in the North divides into those (a majority) who feel betrayed by the latest announcement and those who feel almost relieved that they are not going to have to go through years of hell during the construction of the NPL. In Nottingham, I would imagine, they will be reassured that at least they will be no more left out than they were before. My own feeling, leaving the politics aside, is that rail links north-south and cross-Pennine will be significantly better in 2035 than they are today but will still fall well short of what was promised. So what else is new?