Ah, but it's about capacity we hear. I found the time on MML perfectly ok for a leisure trip to London.
Commuter traffic is all about reaching your destination as quickly as possible, so the view doesn't matter. With leisure travel by train, the view does matter. Travelling at any speed in a long tunnel is really grim and not my idea of a day out to London. People will point to Channel tunnel as being acceptable, but the obvious alternative of a sea crossing is far worse.
I guess less tunnelling would be the answer.
The reason stored is important is that HS2 could have eased congestion on the WCML, MML and ECML by being at least a little faster (so people would be more inclined to swap to them).
Therefore to get people to do to them if it's slower the price had to be lower. Therefore we'd need to look at the costs to see if we can get those down.
Given staff costs are 1/3 of TOC costs, of wet can reduce those by ~30% you'd be able to reduce TOC costs by 10%. Given we've just ruled out running the trains faster, we can't use that to reduce start time, so it's then down to getting more seats per staff member. You'd need to run trains of at least 840 seats to get that 10%.
However that then means you'll need more rolling stock (and again without it being shorter, you'll not be able to make savings that way). Given that rolling stock is 1/3 of TOC costs and we've just increased train lengths from 11 to 12 (+9%) you've just written off most of the staff savings. At that would require (5 hour round trip currently) 180 coaches to run.
Compare that with the original plan for HS2 for about 3:20 round trip London/Leeds at 3tph which would require 160 coaches (so less coaches than the above).
It would also require less staff time, as r existing services would require 225 hours of driving time, this compares with 150 hours under HS2.
We've also massively increased the number of seats (80x has max of 650 seats vs HS2 being 1,100).
It's difficult to sometimes understand what this means, so if we apply a staff cost of 100 to each seat currently each step provides us with these values:
Only reduced staff hours 66.66
Only extra seats per member of staff 59.09
Both combined 40
Then if we apply the same cost of 100 for rolling stock:
Only the reduced journey times 88.89
The other cost of 100 for the other costs we could leave the same, however as there extra energy costs and possibly extra track access charges due to the extra 10% in construction costs we'll increase it to 125 for a fair comparison (others may disagree with this value, but I needed to set something and it felt a suitable value without being overly optimistic or pessimistic).
Therefore rather than the cost being 300 (maybe a little less) under HS2 it would cost 253.89, that allows HS2 to be cheaper (by about 15% on a per seat basis) and faster.
That's going to make it more attractive than driving and flying if your can get the price level right, however with the potential to offer cheaper tickets than you currently can to cover your costs that's going to be easier to deliver.
With regard to Southampton/Manchester - the overall time would be quicker compared to the current ~4h 15 but, you end up with two changes. Not too bad as a solo traveller, it is when you have wife and children and luggage to do the changes that staying on the through train is easier/better. For Southampton/Birmingham you would certainly stay on. I am sure similar or identical points have been mentioned before! Occasional XC services not calling at Reading........... unlikely, probably, but always worth a thought.
Indeed, I never said that everyone would use HS2, just that it would be faster.
However even if only a few use HS2 over XC, that frees up "capacity" (well a few less standing!!!!) on XC for more people to use XC for journeys between intermediate stations.
Personally Southampton/Birmingham isn't really going to be that attractive. Southampton/Manchester is, not least due to the increased frequency on the Reading/Manchester section. Therefore rather than either changing at New Street or waiting an hour between services you'll have two trains an hour which are faster (with the potential to use the GWR stoppers between Reading and Basingstoke if a XC services is cancelled/late and it still being just about faster).
Even if you miss one train at OOC (in either direction) there's a good chance you'll not be overly delayed to the point that it's the same journey time as it is currently.
