One of the most popular arguments against HS2 is that billions would be better spent on a new Transpennine rail line called Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR), as well as local transport upgrades – if the government’s goal is to “level up” the country and close the gap between London and everywhere else.
It is an idea Steve Rotheram, the mayor of the Liverpool city region, might be expected to back – not least because Liverpool was snubbed by HS2 and yet would be properly plugged into NPR, creating a crucial freight route between the ports of Liverpool and Hull. Currently it is quicker to get the train from London to Paris than between those two maritime cities (2hr 16min versus 2hr 37min with one change).
But Rotheram insists you cannot have one without the other. Not only would NPR use 50 miles (80km) of HS2 track, including a costly tunnel from Manchester airport to an upgraded Manchester Piccadilly station, but its whole economic case relies on a substantial piggyback from HS2 and its links to the south. It is also at least six years from being “shovel-ready”, unlike the London to Birmingham phase of HS2, with the painful process of negotiating with landowners and environmentalists still to come.
“Our business case shows quite clearly that if we were to get HS2, Northern Powerhouse Rail is a far more attractive proposition to put to the Treasury,” said Rotheram. He believes HS2 has been mis-sold to the public on speed rather than capacity: “It was all couched very poorly … The people I speak to, ordinary people if you like, not politicians, they go, ‘But I’m not interested in getting to London 20 minutes early’.”
Not only is that wrong – they would arrive at Euston 40 minutes earlier than today– but an undersold benefit to “ordinary” people in the north of England is that fast intercity services to London and Birmingham will be removed from the existing mainlines, freeing up space for far more local stopping services, as well as freight.
To understand how dysfunctional the north’s railways are, Winsford provides a good example. About 33,000 people live in this working-class Cheshire town, built on top of a huge salt mine that provides 50% of the grit used on UK roads each winter. Situated right on the west coast mainline, the busiest mixed-use railway in Europe, Winsford is approximately 30 miles from both Manchester and Liverpool.
But there are no direct trains to Manchester from Winsford. And even during the morning rush-hour there are just two services you would realistically take to get to work for 9am in Liverpool. For most of the day there is one solitary train in each direction per hour – and that’s if they turn up (15% of trains from Winsford were cancelled last month). Compare that with Twyford, a village in Berkshire that has a population of 7,000 but has nine trains between 7am and 8am to take commuters 30 miles into London.
But Winsford is not a ghost station. Holding a conversation is difficult on either of the two platforms because so many trains pass through. Fifteen whoosh by without stopping each day between 7am and 8am, one every four minutes, including fast services between Scotland and London or Birmingham along the west coast mainline. Some of these would almost certainly transfer to HS2 – which is set to cut through fields to the east of Winsford, prompting consternation about the stability of the salt mines below – were it built in full.
There are at least 100 stations across the north and Midlands that would benefit from released capacity, according to Network Rail, which owns and manages Britain’s railways.
The real winners from HS2 would be passengers on local services, according to Gareth Dennis, a writer and railway engineer who has worked on Crossrail and the Midland Mainline electrification. “Arguably they are the people who will notice it most,” he said. “The main benefit for HS2 is not on HS2 but very much about the existing railway network, particularly around Leeds and Manchester but also through the East Midlands and Birmingham.”
Britain’s railway network is a “jack-of-all-trades and a master of none”, Dennis argues, with 125mph intercity trains sharing the same track as Pacer trains, the much-derided “buses on rails” that screech along at half that speed on a good day.
Keith Swindell travels from Winsford to Liverpool each working day. He is so used to delays that the email address he contacts most often is West Midlands Railway’s refund department, he said, as he waited for the delayed 7.42am to Liverpool Lime Street one morning last week. “If I’m standing on a platform waiting with nothing better to do I might as well fill in another claim form.”
Alisha Nixon, a 30-year-old sales manager, has been suffering the Liverpool service for the last six months after moving back in with her parents in Winsford to save for a deposit on a house. “If it makes the railway better, I’m all for [HS2] because at the moment trains are constantly getting cancelled,” she said. “The trains going through to London do sometimes hold the other trains up.” She drives a few times a week but said she would leave the car at home more often if the service was more regular.
If the north of England is to thrive, particularly outside the major cities, public transport must be drastically improved, argues Philip Cox, the chief executive of the Cheshire and Warrington Local Enterprise Partnership. Only 2% of journeys in his region are by rail and the same proportion by bus, he said, which is a worry, given fewer young people than ever are learning to drive. According to government research, the number of 20- to 29-year-olds with driving licences dropped to 63% in 2014, from 75% in 1994.
“From our perspective, if that carries through the age range … then unless we put decent public transport in place as an economy we are going to be in some trouble, because anyone who thinks about living and working here can’t, because they don’t drive,” he said.
