gravitystorm
Member
For the HS2 station (I can't comment on NPR), I'd like to see it built underground, with the continuation heading north to rejoin the WCML. On the micro-level, it would allow higher approach speeds being through platforms, and also has the option of trains being serviced / restocked / turned around / service recovery somewhere out of town. The UK habit of leaving large numbers of stationary trains in prime city-centre real-estate is maddening, and drives terminal station land costs up. See Euston HS2, for an even worse example. The alternative approach, common in Germany, of moving trains out of the stations between services works better, since it makes better usage of scare platform space. Through central stations also allow the trick of having semi-surburban starting points (e.g. Berlin Sudkreuz) before hitting the main space constrained city-centre station (e.g. Berlin Hbf), and that works well too.
At the macro-level, a through station would allow more city-via-city service patterns on HS2, like Birmingham-Manchester-Glasgow, in this case bypassing the crawls through surburban Manchester. I know that HS2 has been designed and optimised for only the currently planned services, but the repeated use of terminal stations makes it harder to build future service patterns around future needs and future extensions, since the current patterns are literally set in concrete. For example, Glasgow to Bristol / South Wales direct services aren't viable, but they could be if they called at Manchester and Birmingham along the way. Each future extension to HS2 could be incrementally useful, but only if HS2 is designed as a backbone for a wider network, rather than a closed system. HS2 (assuming a Golbourne link, or similar) also repeats the fundamental flaw found in the WCML, by connecting all the cities each with London, but bypassing each of them along the way.