Gibb plan provides a way forward for cancelled HS2

Chris Gibb’s proposal for an alternative to High Speed 2 north of Birmingham demonstrates the limits of rail planning under the current structures.

He’s acted on his own initiative, instructed by no one, in a situation where the railway’s major players have no remit.

It’s not Network Rail’s job to propose answers to fix the problem that government created last autumn by cancelling the northern half of High Speed 2.

Nor is it HS2 Ltd’s problem. Nor the West Coast Development Partnership, headed by First and Trenitalia as the operators of the Intercity West Coast passenger contract.

The problem clearly lands at the Department for Transport’s door. But, to date, it’s shown little visible ambition to solve it. Gibb told RAIL in mid-June that he expects Peter Wilkinson’s appointment within the DfT to make a difference.

The headlines of Gibb’s plan are simple. Upgrade the West Coast’s fleet of Class 390 Pendolino electric units to run on High Speed 2 at 155mph and build a matching ‘New Northern Line’ into Manchester to replace HS2’s cancelled Phase 2 (RAIL 1010).

The plan needs HS2 Ltd to complete its route into Euston, but Gibb reckons it will work under interim arrangements until that proposed line reaches Manchester. This line incorporates much of what Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham wants to see as Northern Powerhouse Rail, connecting (initially) Manchester with Liverpool via Manchester Airport and Warrington.

It would likely use the same geographical alignment as HS2 Phase 2 from Fradley to Manchester, but would be built more cheaply using ballasted track rather than concrete slab track. Gibb calls it a “fast conventional line” rather than a high-speed line.

Parliament has already granted legal powers to build the new line as far as Crewe, and was deep into assessing the second part into central Manchester when government pulled the plug last autumn.

Wielding this axe quickly caused problems, as it severed the links that integrated HS2’s overall plan. Most obvious were the trains. HS2 Ltd has ordered 54 eight-car, 200-metre trains. When run in pairs they provide around 1,000 seats but stretch to 400 metres, making them too long for Manchester’s conventional station.

Yet at 200 metres, they are shorter and have fewer seats than the 11-car Class 390s serving Manchester today. So, in axing HS2 Phase 2, government was cutting London-Manchester rail capacity. This from a project that was all about increasing capacity to tempt passengers off the roads and onto trains.

Changing the HS2 train order isn’t a good idea, according to Gibb. It would likely increase costs to rearrange the 432-vehicle order into ten-car formations rather than eight-car trains, for example. They would then each be 250 metres and could only ever run as single units, because HS2 Phase 1 platforms would be too short for 500-metre trains, having been designed around a maximum train length of 400 metres. Hence Gibb’s claim that changing the rolling stock order would be a “last minute knee-jerk reaction that would affect the railway for 40 years”.

Another reason not to change the order in this way is that HS2 has designed its Washwood Heath depot around 200-metre/400-metre stock.

Key to restoring the original HS2 idea of increasing capacity is 400-metre platforms. Birmingham will have them at Curzon Street and Interchange. Old Oak Common in west London (the interchange with Great Western Railway and Elizabeth line services) will have them. Gibb’s plan needs HS2 running into Euston, which government also suspended last autumn as it decided that private investment should deliver the vital final few miles into the capital.Gibb told RAIL that Euston needed a minimum of two 400-metre platforms to enable HS2 stock to run to Birmingham Curzon Street. Euston also needs four platforms fit for the 266-metre (11-car) Class 390s he would run on HS2 to serve Manchester, running on conventional West Coast Main Line tracks north of Handsacre until his 155mph New Northern Line opens.

These four would also serve Liverpool’s two trains per hour services (200-metre HS2 stock), Blackpool’s hourly service (also 200-metre HS2 stock), and Scotland’s twice-hourly, 11-car Class 390 service. This gives a minimum size for Euston’s HS2 station of six platforms. Crucially, Euston will need to include provision to lengthen those 266-metre platforms to 400 metres in the 2040s, when Gibb expects Manchester to have its own longer platforms.

Without NNL, the increased capacity HS2 brings is limited to routes south of Birmingham, although Gibb argues that this is still useful for places such as Milton Keynes, Hemel Hempstead and High Wycombe.

NNL removes the WCML’s constraints around Stafford. And with it, Gibb proposes three Class 390s per hour from Euston to Manchester (two via NNL and one via Stoke using the HS2 link at Handsacre) and a 2tph Birmingham Curzon Street-Manchester service using single 200-metre HS2 train sets running at 155mph. This potentially gives a journey time of 50 minutes, quicker than today’s fastest time of 88 minutes. It also gives more capacity than today, by replacing Voyagers (186-246 seats) with trains that seat 504. And should Northern Powerhouse Rail be built across the Pennines, this 2tph service could work forward to Leeds.

Today, the Birmingham-Manchester link comes courtesy of CrossCountry’s service from Bournemouth. In future, it might run to Liverpool instead, suggests Gibb.Crewe sits at the centre of NNL development.

Network Rail needs to renew junctions around this West Coast Main Line hub, with the work expected at the end of this decade. But the precise plan appears to be up in the air, with Gibb noting that he and former British Rail InterCity Director Chris Green reviewed NR’s plan last year, sending it back to ‘square one’ because it involved months of line closures.

NR and others need to decide how best to integrate high-speed services with the planned renewal. Gibb argues that this should produce the cheapest way of doing it. It might be new tracks under the existing station (as HS2 had proposed) or tracks running through, with platforms (perhaps 5 and 6) made fit for 400-metre trains that can be divided there.

For Gibb, Crewe is better than HS2’s proposal to split trains at Carlisle. Two main reasons prompt his argument.

One is that HS2 stock would be limited to 110mph on the northern half of the West Coast Main Line.

The other is HS2’s plan to timetable eight minutes to split trains. Taken together, this makes journeys only slightly quicker.

Gibb told RAIL that power supplies on WCML(N) would likely have 400-metre HS2 stock climbing Shap and Beattock more slowly than a Class 390, so there was a further penalty to running 400-metre trains all the way to Carlisle, in his opinion.

He argued that HS2’s plan to run services from Glasgow at 30-minute intervals would take out a freight path. In part, this even-interval timetable compensated for using only 200-metre trains, so in place of this, Gibb would run a 2tph service as now from Glasgow, but with one very fast service to reach London in 3hrs 45mins and the second train slower with more stops.

For Manchester, HS2’s plan had a six-platform station built on the surface alongside Network Rail’s Piccadilly station. It would be capable of receiving 4tph from London and 2tph from Curzon Street, as well as 4tph from Liverpool and 6tph from Leeds (both as part of Northern Powerhouse Rail). These NPR services would need to reverse in the terminus.Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham has been arguing that Manchester should have an underground station with through platforms for NPR services.

So too has Manchester City Council, with leader, Councillor Bev Craig, saying in June 2023 that an underground station would increase “capacity and connectivity for the whole of the North”.HS2 had said a year earlier that an underground station might speed through journeys by a couple of minutes, but could mean longer access times to platforms for passengers boarding or alighting at Manchester.

It also suggested longer interchange times between the underground station and Network Rail’s Piccadilly. It argued that building underground could be expected to cost another £5 billion.

Gibb wouldn’t be drawn on the merits of the surface and underground options, saying: “All I really want is a 400-metre platform,” although he admitted that he really needs two because one would be “too tight”. However, he noted the challenge of building 400-metre platforms underground in a city centre. To give a sense of scale, Manchester would need to build something the size of High Speed 1’s Stratford box under the centre of the city.

Longer platforms remain the only way he can see of accommodating more passengers between London and Manchester, according to Gibb. “We need to focus on longer trains,” he told RAIL.

Constraints south of Manchester limit the city’s service to and from London to 3tph each way. Without New Northern Line, this constraint remains, and so all HS2 Phase 1 delivers is faster journey times with the same capacity as today - provided services use 11-car Class 390s. Using 200-metre HS2 stock would cut capacity compared with today, albeit with quicker journeys.

With NNL in place, Gibb’s plan of three fast London trains (one via Stoke using the Handsacre link onto the WCML) plus a fourth service using the West Coast Main Line becomes possible. With 400-metre platforms at Manchester, the trains that run on NNL could run with full-length HS2 stock, providing a significant increase in capacity.

These stages are the essence of Gibb’s plan. For anywhere north of Birmingham, opening Phase 1 provides for faster journeys to and from London, but with reduced seating capacity because HS2’s 200-metre trains are shorter and have fewer seats than today’s Avanti West Coast 11-car ‘390s’.Gibb therefore proposes using those longer Class 390s, upgraded to 155mph to run on Phase 1. This maintains capacity and delivers a faster journey, albeit not as fast as HS2 stock could provide.

When NNL opens, this paves the way for further increases in capacity and cuts in journey times from Euston, by continuing to run Class 390s (the extra capacity comes from the remaining WCML service) or by switching to longer HS2 trains.

NNL builds on Northern Powerhouse Rail, which the last government continued to back between Manchester and High Legh (a little south of Manchester Airport), even as it cut the line from there southwards to Fradley/Handsacre where Phase 1 ends.

Alstom built the Class 390s for Virgin West Coast 20 years ago, designing them for 140mph running because that’s what Railtrack promised for the southern end of the West Coast Main Line. Gibb believes it’s possible to add an extra 15mph to that speed, to give 155mph running in non-tilt mode.

He told RAIL he had Tony Mercado’s assurance, noting that it was Mercado who brought the fleet into traffic as Alstom’s engineering director. And even if 155mph proves too difficult and the ‘390s’ can’t exceed their designed 140mph, Gibb suggests his plan could still work, but would not deliver the same cuts in journey times.

This would demand an increase in train and crew numbers, making for a slightly less efficient operation and some loss of revenue when compared with the original HS2 business case. But Gibb argues that even 140mph running is better than reducing seat numbers to key destinations such as Manchester.

The ‘390s’ are just through the final stages of an interior overhaul that has stripped back the trains to their bodywork, before rebuilding their insides in a project that also fits new seats. This work has shown the fleet to be in good condition, with (for example) their floors looking as good as new.

Gibb proposes that the 11-car Class 390s receive new bogies and traction electronics when they’re due overhaul in the late 2020s. He suggests that fleet owner Angel Trains fund the work and negotiate the programme with Alstom (thus no need to go through public sector procurement).

Gibb would confine the upgrade work to the longer 11-car units for Phase 1 and New Northern Line running, leaving the nine-car versions to work on the classic West Coast Main Line. The refurbished fleet might run until the mid-2040s.

To shift ‘390s’ onto HS2 requires not only changes to the trains, but also to HS2 station infrastructure, with Gibb suggesting that HS2 drop the requirement to fit platform edge doors at Old Oak Common and Interchange stations. They have less utility if every train is to stop at these stations, but they also provide a barrier to using ‘390s’ if the doors are spaced to suit only HS2 stock.

He dismisses fears that ‘390s’ would not fit with HS2’s platforms, which are around 200mm higher than Network Rail’s standard. Today’s passengers must step up into a ‘390’, which has a retractable step, so Gibb considers this to not be a problem.

The Class 390s would have European Train Control System (ETCS) cab signalling fitted. This is needed anyway, as Network Rail plans to replace the WCML’s conventional signalling, starting with the northern half of the route between Warrington and Quintinshill (just north of Carlisle) from Control Period 8 (2029-34).

This new signalling should (according to Gibb) allow ‘390s’ to run faster than 125mph because it removes the constraints of signal sighting and braking distances. Extending ETCS north to Rutherglen (south of Glasgow) would further cut journey times, with Gibb suggesting London-Glasgow in under four hours, even with stops at smaller stations such as Oxenholme along the way.

That leaves the fleet of 54 eight-car HS2 trains, which are being designed to run at up to 225mph. Gibb would have them running at 186mph (300kph, which is typical for continental high-speed trains) to cut maintenance costs and electricity consumption. This speed also brings them closer to the 155mph maximum for the ‘390s’, which should ease timetable capacity.

He would have them running a 3tph Euston-Curzon Street service using 16-coach pairs. This needs 16 sets in traffic with two spare and two on maintenance, giving a total of 20 sets.

His 2tph service between Curzon Street would take another seven sets, with five in traffic and one each as spare and on maintenance.

This leaves 27 sets to be deployed on HS2 or classic network services as eight-car, single-sets. They could replace the ten Class 807 electrics (453 seats) which Avanti West Coast is now bringing into traffic. Some of the 27 might work to and from North Wales if that route becomes electrified, or work into Liverpool. They could be doubled up to form London-Manchester services when Northern Powerhouse Rail provides 400-metre platforms in the city centre.

Gibb’s plan provides an interim answer to the West Coast capacity problems. As he told RAIL: “It’s not a long-term plan, but a ten-year plan until we get our act together.”

Yet ‘getting our act together’ is not something any single rail organisation can provide. It needs a directing or guiding focus, ideally from government - the Department for Transport - itself. That’s because it will need some financial decisions, and DfT is better placed to secure Treasury approval than an arm’s-length body such as the proposed Great British Railways.

Gibb’s plan largely uses existing or private funding (existing for the tunnels into central Manchester and private for the ‘390’ upgrade), or money that already needs to be spent (for example, Network Rail’s plan to renew with ETCS its signalling on the northern half of the West Coast Main Line).

What isn’t currently funded is HS2’s line between the West Midlands and Crewe (known as Phase 2a).

This was already one of the most cost-effective sections of HS2, and switching it to a conventional ballasted high-speed line could cut its costs further.

Then there’s the ‘missing’ section from Crewe to High Legh, where Northern Powerhouse Rail takes over. This section should also be cheaper with Gibb’s ballasted track.

In the absence of anything better, the DfT should compare Gibb’s plan with HS2’s and work out the best overall way of delivering more capacity into northern cities such as Manchester with reduced journey times.

Because, as Gibb says, rail’s competitor is the car - on motorways such as the crowded M1. By increasing rail’s attractiveness, it can attract people from cars. And by shifting inter-city services onto new lines, it can create space for inter-urban services and for freight, which takes lorries off the roads.