"HS2 Back on Track" - front page of Sunday Express - private sector plan to build Birmingham to Manchester

[ABB125]

A question about Euston future proofing - it's been suggested that a 6 platform Euston would hobble the HS2 network indefinitely. I'm not about to disagree with that suggestion, but the question is which land would it be built on and what be removed from future possibilities?

Below is a screen grab from the HS2 website showing the layout of tracks at the station. Whilst I understand this may be somewhat figurative and not necessarily completely accurate, it does seem reasonable in terms of which tracks occupy "new" station land adjacent to the current station and which tracks occupy land within the existing station footprint, in that Cobourg St appears to be the boundary of the site. I note that the "new" land occupation, according to this drawing at least, shows space for 6 tracks.

So, if a 6 platform Euston were built on the new land, wouldn't it be reasonable to say this isn't necessarily game over in terms of future expansion, in that the remaining 5 platforms would then be coming out of the existing station anyway?



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That sounds remarkably like the original plan of a two phase build of the new station. Just without the second phase...

 

[NotATrainspott]

In the original 2010 plans, the six new HS2 platforms were going to be temporarily connected to and used for the WCML, so that other groups of platforms could be taken out of service and rebuilt in stages. This went out of the window once the plans for the full rebuild of Euston station went away.

It's all been a fair bit of a mess, to put it mildly. In the grand scheme of things, Euston isn't very technically complex. The station footprint has to expand, and the station (regardless of how much HS2 is built) is going to get much busier over time. Rebuilding it into a form that can handle more passengers is pretty much essential even if you don't handle more trains per hour. Even if the WCML platforms weren't going to be rebuilt at the same lower level as the HS2 ones so that the concourse can be level with the streets around, they'd still need a heavy rebuild in order to provide passenger circulation and service access from above and below to remove the buffer stop gateline bottleneck.

Even if HS2 weren't built as planned, having a whole bunch of straight 400m platforms at Euston for WCML services wouldn't be totally useless. No one has ever seriously proposed any other alternative way of adding more full-spec InterCity terminating platforms at a Zone 1 transport hub. Decisions about the form of HS2 further north were essentially immaterial, so connecting the scheme together with wrangling about Chiltern tunnels and the like just seems like a failure in retrospect. Decoupling station rebuilds is one of the reasons that high speed rail seems so much more affordable in other countries.

 

[chris2]

A lot of good points there. Certainly if HS2 were to be split into a bunch of smaller projects then the headlines would be less damaging.

The talk is now of building a six platform station. Is the plan to build this on the land adjacent to the existing station? Presumably this would be cheaper than demolishing the existing station?

If so, would any land that would be required for the full 11-platform station actually be rendered unusable?

 

[JamesT]

A lot of good points there. Certainly if HS2 were to be split into a bunch of smaller projects then the headlines would be less damaging.

The talk is now of building a six platform station. Is the plan to build this on the land adjacent to the existing station? Presumably this would be cheaper than demolishing the existing station?

If so, would any land that would be required for the full 11-platform station actually be rendered unusable?

My understanding was that the Government are looking for private investment for HS2 Euston. The suspicion is that the land that has been cleared for the full station but not required for the 6-platform version would be turned over to some other kind of development to produce the return on investment required.

 

[Peter Sarf]

My understanding was that the Government are looking for private investment for HS2 Euston. The suspicion is that the land that has been cleared for the full station but not required for the 6-platform version would be turned over to some other kind of development to produce the return on investment required.

That is my fear. It is likely as that is an obvious way to recoup costs. The result would be a six platform HS2 station hemmed in by developments on the Western five platforms worth of what was to be the 11 platform HS2 station.

A lot of good points there. Certainly if HS2 were to be split into a bunch of smaller projects then the headlines would be less damaging.

The talk is now of building a six platform station. Is the plan to build this on the land adjacent to the existing station? Presumably this would be cheaper than demolishing the existing station?

If so, would any land that would be required for the full 11-platform station actually be rendered unusable?

I think enough of the Western side of the existing Euston has already been demolished to fit in the HS2 platforms planned for there ?.