No speedy solution for UK’s choked-up rail line

Good morning. I am filling in for Stephen while he takes a break from the by-election dramas fast enveloping February’s politics.

You won’t be getting any by-election intrigue from me though, as I am returning to the national transport headache that rail passengers from Glasgow to London love to hate: the West Coast Main Line. 

Nowhere fast

Ever since Rishi Sunak announced the cancellation of HS2’s northern leg as the centrepiece to his October party conference speech in Manchester, of all places, a glaring question has remained.  

How will the capacity that HS2 would have created — by alleviating the choked up West Coast Main Line between Birmingham and Manchester — be freed up instead?

The government has cited the drop-off in passenger numbers during Covid-19 as a get-out-of-jail-free card where this is concerned. “We don’t really know what the future will look like,” runs the argument, “so [blankface emoji]”.

Here I would like to present a graph of the government’s projections around future rail capacity on the West Coast Main Line north of Birmingham, but I can’t.

I asked the Department for Transport for these workings. I was yesterday (again) simply told that south of Birmingham, capacity will be nearly doubling — albeit they don’t say whether they mean seats or services — thanks to the bit of HS2 that’s still being built.

So, imagine a graph here. Perhaps also imagine yourself sitting on the floor next to a broken Avanti toilet somewhere near Stoke in 2044. 

Rail industry experts take a somewhat different view to the government. 

Professor Andrew McNaughton, former chief engineer of Network Rail and subsequently HS2’s technical director between its inception and 2017, addressed the capacity issue in a transport select committee hearing shortly after Sunak’s announcement.

When the HS2 network was being planned in 2009, he said, there was an expectation that the West Coast Main Line would run out of capacity “by around the mid-2020s”. The same would be true of motorway capacity on the same route.

The growth subsequently through the 2010s far exceeded what we had originally modelled. We modelled on a growth of around 2%. 

The reality for long-distance travel was between 5% and 6% per year. 

Clearly, Covid has put a shock into that, but it is a shock in a rising graph of both road and rail traffic. 

That shock has effectively bought three or four years of capacity, through to about 2030, but 2030 is now rapidly approaching. After 2030, capacity will need to be rationed without HS2.

Or, to put it in the words of another rail industry figure: “Doing nothing will have that part of the network collapse and the M6 alongside it.”

Rail against the system

The day-to-day operation of the existing West Coast Main Line is its own bone of contention that I don’t have space to get into, although if the service was more reliable and less consistently hellish, perhaps whatever passenger projections that do exist within the DfT might look rosier.

Addressing the capacity question, however, is now at the heart of a mayoral collaboration hatched outside of London in the aftermath of Sunak’s announcement.

At the Birmingham end of HS2’s axed 2a and 2b phases, Conservative mayor Andy Street; at the Manchester end, Labour’s Andy Burnham.

It is an unlikely political allegiance but in reality, neither is competing with the other. And both happen to be up for re-election in a few weeks.

The Street-led gambit has been to draw together a collection of big companies — EY, Mace, Arup, Arcadis — to look at what you do now, in the absence of HS2, and how you would fund it. They are currently just over halfway through their review.

Importantly, their work includes assessing the economic cost of doing nothing, traditionally the favoured option where northern infrastructure is concerned.

It is also looking at other options all the way through to a new line between Handsacre, north of Birmingham, and High Legh, just south of Manchester airport — alleviating some of the existing line’s most congested sections. (This was a stretch of HS2 that would have helped the financial case for the southern leg stack up, which it no longer does, as the public accounts committee noted last week.)

If you’re going to do that, though, one might reasonably ask why you would reinvent the wheel.

David Shirres, a former Network Rail engineer and editor of Rail Engineer magazine, notes that the Birmingham to Crewe section of HS2 that was originally designed to address that capacity problem is already on the statute books.

“Anything else would add at least five years’ delay to get to that stage, at significant cost,” he adds of any mayoral alternative.

Politically, however, “HS2” as we knew it has been comprehensively killed off by both main political parties (Keir Starmer following in Sunak’s footsteps a few weeks ago and choosing, because apparently it’s obligatory, to also rule out its return while in Manchester).

The aim is rather to keep the premise of something in this space alive so that under the next government, there are options.

That includes public-private financial models intended to keep costs off the national books — although in reality, some form of state expenditure would be inevitable.

One figure close to the work says their feeling is “a degree of optimism peppered with realism”, complicated by the need to come up with a model that gets buy-in from Network Rail and HS2 Ltd without having access to either’s data, because the government has not sanctioned it.

Perhaps, they concede, they are on a hiding to nothing, but it’s at least worth a try. As a second figure familiar with the project notes: “I don’t think there’s anybody else who’s doing anything about this.”

Now try this

Much as I’d like to recommend yet another rash of trash TV, for once I won’t. Having said that, my more cultural offerings are currently in the future.

I’m excited about Ian McKellan’s appearance as Falstaff, a role he has never previously played, in Player Kings at Manchester Opera House next month.

And for Withnail and I fans, you can watch an open-air screening outside Uncle Monty’s house in Cumbria this summer. Drink the finest wines known to humanity, bore each other to death with Richard E Grant quotes. The original dates have sold out to nerds like me who are signed up to the mailing list, but they’ve added more.

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