Eurostar Security Theater and French Station Size
Jon Worth has been doing a lot of good work lately pouring cold water on various press releases of new rail service in Europe. Yesterday he wrote a long post, reacting to some German rail discourse about the possibility of Eurostar service between London and Germany; he explained the difficulties of connecting Eurostar to new cities, discussing track and station capacity, signaling, and rolling stock.
Jon, whose background is in EU politics, wastes no time in identifying the ultimate problem: the UK demands passport controls, and this demand is unlikely to be waived in the near future due to concerns over Brexit and the need to have visible border control theater. In turn, the passport control and the accompanying security theater (not strictly required, but the UK insists for Channel Tunnel security) mean that boarding trains is a slow process since platforms must be kept sterile; thus, a Eurostar station requires dedicated platforms, and if it has significant rail traffic then it requires many of them, with low throughput per track. This particularly impacts the prospects of Eurostar service to Germany, because it would go via Belgium and Cologne, which has far from enough platforms for this operation.
What I’d like to add to this analysis is that Eurostar made a choice to engage in such controlled operations in the 1990s. The politics of Brexit can explain why there’s no reform that is acceptable to the British political system now; it cannot explain why this was chosen in the 1990s. The norm in Europe before Schengen was that border control officers would perform on-board checks while the train traveled between the last station in the origin country and the first station in the destination country; long nonstop trains between Paris and London or even Lille and London are ideal for such a system. Britain insists on the current system of border control before boarding because this way it can deny entry to people who otherwise would enjoy non-refoulement protections – but in the 2000s the politics in Britain was not significantly more anti-immigration than in, for example, Germany, or France.
Rather, the issue is that Britain insisted on some nebulous notion of separateness, and this interacted poorly with train station design in France compared with in Germany. Parisian train stations are huge, and have a large number of terminating tracks. Dedicating a few terminal tracks to sterile operations is possible at Gare du Nord, and would be possible at other Parisian terminals like Gare de Lyon if they pointed in the direction of a place that demanded them. SNCF has conceived of its operations, especially internationally, as airline-like, and this contributed to complacency about how the train stations are being treated like airports.
Germany developed different (and better) ways of conceiving of train operations. More to the point, Germany doesn’t really have Paris’s terminals with their surplus of tracks, except for Frankfurt and Munich. Cologne, the easiest place to get to London from, doesn’t have enough tracks for sterile operations. This is fine, because German domestic trains do not imitate airlines, even where there is room (instead, the surplus of tracks is used for timed connections between regional trains); this also cascades to international trains connecting to Germany, whether from countries that have more punctual rail networks like Switzerland or from countries that work by a completely different paradigm like Belgium or France.
And now Eurostar politically froze a system that was only workable at low throughput, at a handful of stations with more room for sterile operations than is typical. The system is still below its ridership projections from before opening; it was supposed to be part of a broader international rail network, but that never materialized, because of the burden of security theater, the high fares, and the indifference of Belgium to extending high-speed rail so that it would be useful for international travelers (the average speeds between Brussels-Midi and the German border are within the upper end of the range for upgraded classical lines, even though HSL 2 and 3 are new high-speed lines).
And now, with the knowledge of the 2010s, it’s clear that any future expansion of Eurostar requires forgoing the airline-like paradigm that led SNCF to stagnation in the same decade. This clashes with British political theater now, but there’s no other way forward.
And this even affects domestic British rail planning. London planners are fixated on Paris as their main comparison. This way, they are certain trains must turn slowly at city terminals, requiring additional tracks at Euston and other stations that are or until recently were part of High Speed 2, at a total cost of several billion pounds. In Germany and the Netherlands (at Utrecht) trains can move faster, down to turns of seven to eight minutes on German regional trains and four to five minutes on intercity trains pinching at terminal stations like Frankfurt. But planners in large cities look down on smaller cities; it’s no different from how planners in New York assume that because New York is bigger than Stockholm, Second Avenue Subway’s stations have higher ridership than the stations of Citybanan (in fact, Citybanan’s two stations, located in city center, are significantly busier).
This way, a particular feature of historic Parisian stations – they have a lot of tracks – got turned into something that every city’s train station is assumed to have. It means Eurostar can’t operate into other stations, because there is no surplus of platforms allowing segregating service to the UK away from all other traffic; it also means that planners in the UK that are trying to engineer stations assume British stations must be overbuilt to Parisian specs.
Pedestrian Observations 
While it is probably worth doing fixing the security theatre is definitely the most politically expensive thing to do to improve Eurostars service/passenger numbers.
The simplest and most obvious thing to allow more passengers to use Eurostar would be to start stopping the Eurostar trains at Stratford International.
The other longer term fix would be to run extra Eurostar trains to Brussels and Paris from either a new station at Calvert or from the Birmingham interchange HS2 stop – with some sort of through-running into HS1 – whether that would use the 4 track section of the north London line through Camden or a new tunnel is unclear to me.
In terms of increasing passenger usage further, white labelling Bahn.com and having it as a tab on nationalrail.co.uk would be a good step – as would improving high speed services from Brussels and Northern France to reach more destinations.
Allowing unreserved passengers on Thalys and the TGV like on the Shinkansen, ICE and the British classic high speed trains would be good too.
I agree that Stratford will be used sooner rather than later. Especially with it now served by the Elizabeth Line. Of course it will cost more to run because they would have to duplicate all the Customs & Immigration personnel … but that would be offset by being able to run more passengers overall (it is claimed the queues at St Pancras have reduced train pax loading by 30% to avoid timetable disruptions!)
For the German and rest-of-Europe issue, long-term the solution will be when the UK begs to be readmitted to the EU and finds it can only do that by agreeing to a lot of other things including Schengen. Actually it may be sooner than some believe, because I’d say most of those who matter in Europe, want it because of the economics and security issues. Of course we can’t rely upon the Germans for any pro-active role but Macron is in favour and I am guessing he will turn to Europolitics when he retires out of the French presidency … (Alon will be deelited as he can return to having Macron in his life 🙂
The other solution is to go back to an old practice that actually worked: on-train immigration clearance. The reason it doesn’t “work” for the UK at the moment is that it wasn’t good for Brussels & Lille because it would force unscheduled stopping at Calais to offload any non-EU types, refugees etc. But if on-train immigration control begins at the last-boarded station before Brussels or Lille, eg. Amsterdam or Munich etc, then there is both the time on the train to do the clearance and, crucially for the Brits, another scheduled stop at which they can offload those undesirables. Before Schengen they did on-train control between Brussels and Paris. I’m not sure today but they used to do immigration control on board the cross-channel ferries. So there is plenty of precedent.
Incidentally this also reduces the staff issue for the Brits in that they can retain what they have today, ie. staff are based at Brussels and Lille and can travel on-train to-and-fro from that base. No need to build any kind of support structure in other foreign cities. But it would mean more staff …
My understanding is that the current limitations are around space at St Pancras being limited, assuming you have the same amount of space available at Stratford International that would double capacity at the London end.
Maybe this is naive as railway costs are largely fixed, but I would expect security costs would scale with passengers, if you have 20 million passengers a year rather than 10 million, well you just hire more staff. But if you are getting double the ticket revenue that is very affordable.
As I understand it, and what is claimed by the government (not Eurostar), it is Brexit that has caused a slow-down in pax processing, and that is why Eurostar reduced the number of pax per train. Otherwise timetables get disrupted.
If it achieves 20m pa it will be more trains running so, it doesn’t necessarily involve more C&I staff.
…………..
Is it just me, or aren’t we all a bit worn out on thinking about how shit Anglosphere countries can solve problems they have entirely inflicted on themselves, and refuse to solve by obvious solutions? It has become way beyond tedious.
Yes Brexit has made the problem worse for sure.
I am pretty sure all of my suggestions made here would allow the French, Germans and Belgians to reduce their rail subsidies if they were enacted. So they make sense to do on a market basis.
The other issue is that the existing Kent stops aren’t easy to make viable as they are only good for Kent as you can’t get to them easily from East Anglia even. But Stratford is closer than St Pancras for Waterloo and London Bridge, and it is also on the line from East Anglia and of course Crossrail, so it is a very different proposition .
Also in terms of connecting services – I think the first step I would like to see is direct services from Brussels to Munich, Brussels to Geneva, Brussels to Nice etc with of course decent connections to the Eurostar at Brussels/Lille/Haute Picarde as appropriate.
The original Eurostar TMST TGV Trainsets do have unused on-board ‘detention facilities’ for those failing passport checks while en route. There clearly was thinking along the line of on-board checks at the design phase but this was dropped.
It is worth nothing that until COVID, both the Disneyland Paris and Eurostar Ski trains did NOT have pre-boarding passport controls like other Eurostar stations. Processing was completed on arrival in St. Pancras. Perhaps this option could be used by an operator willing to take the risk and relieve the departure station of the burden of permanent sterile platforms.
Is there even demand for more UK-EU rail travel post-Brexit?
Like EU should invest rail within EU and same for UK unless UK rejoins EU.
Yes, Eurostar ridership seems to have fully recovered from corona last year and may be above pre-corona numbers at this point.
If you got another 10m passengers a year between the UK and Europe at €100 each way average even with €7.50 a passenger of security costs that would mean pre Covid an extra €1bn of revenue for the railways.
You would also get extra continental passengers using any added services boosted by British passengers. Ifmthose extra services charged an average of €50 a ticket and you got 10m of them that would give you a total of €1.5bn of extra revenue for the railways.
Obviously that would be split multiple ways but pre-Covid it probably would have been enough to lead SNCF to profitability https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200228005403/en/SNCF-Group-2019-Annual-Results.
The profit rate is not 100%, though.
It isn’t. But certainly from a leisure perspective France is almost certainly the top destination for trains beyond Brussels/Paris, with perhaps Germany being top for the smaller share of business travel.
Also I believe that SNCF owns Eurostar so they’d get revenue from that too.
So, I’m not sure how the law and operations interact in Europe, but surely the simplest, (though not the best) solution would be to designate the train as Schengen territory, and have all border/ passport checks for both sides in London?No idea how it interplays with the need for security theatre though.I know Singapore and Malaysia were planning something like that for their HSR link.
Yes, but then if a refugee is on the train bound for the UK, then the UK can’t refoul them; the number of such cases is very low, but one is enough for the Daily Mail to yell about how Brussels and international human rights treaties are destroying Britain.
You already have to clear customs/passport control within British territory when you arrive by plane; this is no different.
But if they really have a problem with it, then they should just adopt an equivalent of the American-Canadian Safe Third Country Agreement with France. That makes doubly sure that no issues would arise (as they do not to any noteworthy degree at the Canadian border).
For airlines, the standard rule worldwide (except where special rules like Schengen or the Common Travel Area apply) is that if someone is refused entry (even if that takes a long time to go through appeals) and they didn’t arrive with a valid visa or applicable exemption the airline is liable for all the costs of getting the person back to the country they arrived from, along with processing costs. That’s why the airline staff check your travel documents when travelling internationally. For channel ferries, Britain got permission to put border guards in French ports under the Le Touquet Agreement by threatening to apply the same rules, with the added incentive that one of the largest shareholders in the affected companies was the French government.
France is quite happy to let asylum seekers travel on to Britain, where they’re not their problem anymore.
Any change to the location of the security checks would be politically expensive.
“This way, they are certain trains must turn slowly at city terminals, requiring additional tracks at Euston and other stations that are or until recently were part of High Speed 2, at a total cost of several billion pounds.”
To have through HS2 trains (allowing about 10% of HS2 passengers* to not get off the train if linked to HS1**), you’d need (at least) a 6-platform station, deep underground (unless you want to spend several billion pounds just on real-estate), with 400m-long platforms. Effectively you’re building a station with a footprint 6 times the size of a Crossrail station. It’s the same number of platforms as now proposed for Euston (and that this blog reckons is sufficient), but in a much more difficult and expensive location. It would cost more than the several billion pounds for the original extravagant 10- or 11-platform Euston extension, and would have little actual benefit above and beyond the termini options. A through link between HS2 and HS1 is a boondoggle.A ~£300m (expensive UK prices) moving walkway between a terminus at Euston and the existing terminus at St Pancras would do a lot to mitigate the issue of HS2 and HS1 not sharing a station for far less total price than other options. Plus has the benefit of improving interchange between all Euston (HS2/WCML/Overground/Northern line Charing Cross branch) services and all KXSP ones (HS1/MML/ECML/Thameslink/Piccadilly line), rather than making through services between a pair of lines where there is low demand for through services, just because they sound cool to have!
*Greengauges’ optimistic case for a low-cost (£3bn!) reverse-branching link using existing trackbed through Camden had 2tph (additional to the 18tph London service from HS2 as they didn’t want to touch the reverse-branch negatives) running fairly full between the two High Speed lines (and 1tph GWML-HS1). That case, which assumed no border/security theatre, relied heavily on nobody walking 500m between Euston and St Pancras, but also relied on people preferring to walk 400m between Stratford stations rather than use Crossrail and change twice (at Old Oak Common and Stratford). It also relied on a lot on a Milton Keynes branch of Crossrail routing traffic via Old Oak Common to get between local WCML destinations and Kent (a third of the traffic on the link was modelled as never leaving London & the South East, whereas only about half that number was wanting to merely pass through). In other words, 10% is rather optimistic – it’s more like half that!
**Assuming that somehow the trains provide origin-destination pairs with a direct service at good enough frequency that means that no passenger has to change trains somewhere in the London core. Unlikely given the diffuse destinations at both ends!
Why the fuck would reinstating two tracks along the existing track bed on the north London line and a link at Old Oak Common onto some of the tracks into Euston cost £3bn?
I mean the whole of HS2 should have been buildable for £30-35bn in todays money, and that’s based on HS1 costs in the London area and half that away from London which still seems generous.
(To be clear this criticism is largely aimed at Greengauges – I think in general changing trains in London is actually pretty good)
Because there is no existing track bed (not all the way from KX to OOC, anyway) and the NLL crosses HS2 at right angles. That’s a lot of expensive property acquisitions and heavy disruption to a busy commuter and freight line.
To be clear I am proposing a tunnel for the 3km or so from Old Oak Common to Queens Park, then using the DC line tracks to Camden road via the ex Primrose Hill station, and then using the 2 track space alongside the North London line to the connection with HS1.
The Primrose Hill line splits off the Watford DC lines much further east than Queens Park, so you’re looking at least 6.5km of new line unless you want to fit HSR services around even more stopping commuter trains than you already have to deal with with the level junctions to and from the NLL.
And either way that makes quadrupling 500m of track fairly pointless.
From Queens Park to the Primrose Hill junction there are only 4tph on the DC line, there’s plenty of capacity for a few express trains an hour as well.
And from where the Primrose Hill line joins the north London line there is clear space for 4 tracks as there looks to have been 4 tracks historically.
I’m not seeing the obstruction to Germany-UK service. The Eurostar only crosses the Schengen border in the Chunnel, so it can run un-sterile (septic?) to Calais, and then have border security sweep the train there. And the Chunnel entrance is surrounded by farmland, so it’s not too hard to build extra platforms there.
Okay, so then the train has to take an hour longer for a standing sweep.
The plane takes an hour or more longer for customs and immigration too.
And that is at least one reason why planes hardly fly between those city pairs anymore.
But yes, those flights have picked up since Brexit began crippling Eurostar! Monty Python is alive and well and living in Westminster.
Eurostars management has to take a fair amount of the blame for its poor operations. It certainly isn’t just Brexit.
I mean for starters Thalys runs all reserved on lines DB doesn’t. It could avoid that very easily and without much if any political capital cost.
Planes between the UK and Schengen do not have hour-long immigration lines. Try 10-20 minutes. That’s what those four-hour-plus-border-control-time Eurostars between London and Cologne would have to compete with.
Ignoring any specific instructions I would probably turn up 15 minutes before for a train, maybe a little less for a regional train, half an hour before for an all reserved train, 45 minutes before for a sleeper or security+all reserved train like Eurostar.
For a flight I would turn up 2 hours before, probably 2.5 with airport car parking or a car hire drop off.
Just me, fantasizing about a world where Canada-US international trains didn’t have Eurostar-boarding at Canadian stations while still having to stop at the boarder for customs control
Why is passport control theatre? When I fly from the US to Turkey I have to go through passport control and now the UK is out of Europe passport control is needed apparently. Brexit was massive self harm but still passport control is not theatre.
The UK wasn’t in the Schengen zone even when it was in the EU, while Switzerland, which is not in the EU, is in Schengen.
As is Norway, ie. not in EU but is in Schengen.
That’s why I said that when the time comes for the UK to ask for readmission it will have to accept Schengen, and probably the Euro too. Yeah, a bit much for many Brits who persist in fantasizing they can sneak back into just the single market without any of the other stuff …
We will be a net contributor. Yes there will be compromises against our previous offer, no we won’t have to join the euro and Schengen etc.
Then you won’t be rejoining.
Those will be the terms, and the EU won’t tolerate all the special let-outs bullshit they previously gave; and they have no intention of another Switzerland. They’ll insist that it goes to a referendum. Of course any governing party that proposes to take the UK back in, would have to hold a referendum but the terms will be set by the EU in which a yes will signify agreement to the whole package.
It’s true that this prognosis is contingent on continued implosion of the UK, economically and socially. So, ahead of schedule on those counts … which should therefore be seen as a good thing. Remember, no pain, no gain.
The reason for not joining Schengen was that the internal checks common on the continent (residency registration etc.) were considered unacceptable invasions of privacy, while the fairly limited points of large-scale entry to an island made a strong border more practical and (in theory) more cost-effective. In practice the border guards in all their various incarnations were too under-manned and ineffective to actually secure the borders and most of the internal checks have been implemented anyway (apart from compulsory ID cards, which are politically unacceptable despite the repeated attempts to introduce them).
The main problem with the requirement of pre boarding passport control for trains to the UK is that the prevents long distance trains to London to also serve more stations.
There is enough demand along the whole London – Brussels – Amsterdam corridor that you could run an hourly through service there, which would offer passengers a lot of flexibility, which offsets the longer travel time. But that is only possible of such a service also served the Brussels – Amsterdam, Brussels – Rotterdam, Antwerpen – Amsterdam etc… markets.You see the same elsewhere. There is a two hourly train from Zurich to Vienna that takes over 7 hours. That train exists not because there is such a big demand for train travel from Zurich to Vienna (even though I prefer it over flying). It exists mostly because of all the intermediate stations. If you were to impose a security and passport regime akin the Eurostar to that train it would not longer be able to stop in places like Bludenz or st. Anton, and would lose most of it reason for being. Eurostar style operation is only possible on routes where trains can live of end-to-end traffic alone. And those routes are few.
I’ve always been struck by the choice to spend an ungodly sum of money and still have a terminating station in Birmingham that’s only useful if you’re going to or from London. All those pounds spent on buying a railway in the middle of nowhere, and trying to run actual useful through trains isn’t even considered. The branching to a terminus felt very francophone like how you can’t ride a train that will go Paris ➡️ Lyon-Part-Dieu ➡️ Marseille
To be fair it is only a few hundred metres between Curzon street and New Street so it won’t be that bad. Assuming the HS2 trains run with high reliability even 15 minutes to change between Curzon Street and New Street might be OK in reality.
Really the interchange times need to be ripped up and started again with. The default should probably be 15 minutes not 5. Additionally at important stations or pairs of stations the times should be measured more carefully – probably with an option in the journey planner for slow, medium and fast speeds with walking speeds of 3 minutes per 100m, 90 seconds per 100m and 60 seconds per 100m. On top of that 95th percentile delays should be added on based on the average for the operator of the arriving train.
youre missing the whole point which is that you need to split frequency between central Birmingham and Manchester/glasgow/leeds. So instead of Birmingham getting a train every 10 minutes on the back of the combined demand for travel on London-Birmingham, London-Manchester, and Manchester-birmingham, it’s left with a frequency split making all those trips worse. Transferinf at new street does not solve this problem.
Having all trains pass through Birmingham might have blown out travel times to Manchester et al., since it is a bit of a deviation.
That said Curzon St is a big, expensive mistake. Birmingham already has a problem with dispersed termini and this is going to make it worse. They should have just streamlined services to New St. It has 12 platforms and four approach tracks coming from the south-east: that should be enough to accommodate local and mainline trains if they are all running through. HS2 trains could run through at New St and head out to a Gesundbrunnen-style far-side terminus somewhere in the Black Country (which would have been far cheaper to construct than Curzon St). The longest platforms at New St are only ca. 350m, but that just means running 12 or 14-car trains rather than 16-car trains, which is not a huge loss of capacity.
The same goes for Euston. Expediting Crossrail 2 and Crossrail 3 would have voided the need for extra terminal platforms, and in a worst case scenario the Caledonian Sleeper could have been moved to a less central location like OOC (it’s a couple of trains a day serving a few hundred passengers).
The savings from those two elements of the project alone would have significantly cut costs. Instead the line is going to be truncated north of Birmingham, and rendered fairly useless in the process (yes, CR2 and CR3 would cost a lot, but they have their own benefits in terms of regional London traffic).
The Caledonian Sleeper is challenging to move because the Scottish MPs like it.
@df1982
While I don’t know any of the details of Birmingham, I suspect you are exactly right. It is reminiscent of how they pushed the TGV thru ‘central’ Lyon, which someone else mentioned but in a negative sense. That is, it created the new La Part-Dieu station that allowed fast TGV thru-operation. But it is several km to the east of the old station (Perrache) and the then CBD which prima facie seemed disruptive. In fact it was a bit of master planning in that it shifted the axis of the city to the east and created a new and thriving CBD; it has the highest skyscraper in France (the phallus-envy types on this blog will be best pleased:-), the biggest shopping centre outside Ile-de-France and overall is the busiest train station in France outside Paris. This took development pressures off the old quarter which is highly constrained due to it being a presque-ile (peninsula formed by the Saone & Rhone junction). At the same time the old presque-ile has continued to thrive as brownfield sites are redeveloped eg. the Confluence arts district.
“Having all trains pass through Birmingham might have blown out travel times to Manchester et al., since it is a bit of a deviation.”
In reality it is the opposite. The proposed HS2 route causes deviations because of the desire to have trains run direct to London, instead of through running at Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds where all trains stop. There are three impacts:
Length of new track is longer because existing track is not used on approaches to cities
Length of new track is longer because the route zig zags to connections with services farther out
Expensive center city construction, and building new stations instead of using existing
Worse frequency serving major cities
Per 1), HS2’s route crosses the Birmingham-Coventry Line by Balsall Common. The B-C Line runs to Birmingham New St (current intercity hub with tracks north to Manchester). But HS2 plans to build ~26km of new track to reach Curzon St. Station. Follow the B-C line and the route is 3km shorter and 2 min faster than HS2 (much of the track to Curzon is not at high speed).
Per 2), after leaving Man. Airport, HS2 would turn *north west*, even though Birm. and London are *south east*. Why? To get close to the West Coast Main Line so Scotland trains can use HS2. After going through Crewe west of M6, it turns east of M6 to meet the WCML and the planned track to Leeds around Curdworth, again so Man/Liver/Leeds trains can take HS2 Phase 1 to London. The HS2 route ends up being ~22km longer than a more logical route Man Airport.-Crewe-Wolverhampton-Birm., which means even if you use legacy track speeds in the approach, you can do Man-Birm. at the same time HS2 planned.
Per 3) Building Birm. Curzon is unnecessary when New St. can be used, even if there were a cost to extend a few tracks/platforms at New St. to 400m. If capacity is an issue, Curzon could have been much smaller as regional station to make room at New St. A new Birmingham Interchange station with a new people mover to the airport is unnecessary if you use the existing Birm. Airport station on the B-C line.
Per 4) the plan was 5 tph leaving Man. but only 3 tph to Lon., 2 tph to Birm. and no service to Scotland despite 3tph passing by. With through routing 6 tph stopping at Man. could mean 2tph through to Scotland, and 6tph to both Birm. and Lon. Birm.-Scot. goes from 1tph to 2tph. 200-300% service with only 75% of cost. A whole train slot is used on a train to Macclesfield even though the market is so small, it could be a stop along of Man-Bir-Lon service with better frequency for Macclesfield (say 2tph of the 4tph Man.-Birm.-Lon.)
Similarly, Birm Interchange only used by 5 tph of 17(!) tph passing through, which means 70% of trips it don’t “interchange” to anything. If Birm. New St. were serviced by 12-16 tph it would be a fantastic interchange with every passenger on every train having a same platform connection from one branch to another with only a few minutes waiting.
End result is that stopping in Birm. would cost trains to Man. or beyond only ~10min, not at all a blowout when you can still make Lon-Man in 90 min.
@Onux, the problem with deviations is that they slow things down a lot. The direct train from London to Glasgow takes ~4h30 to complete the journey, or maybe a few minutes more. The service via Birmingham takes ~6 hours. And yeah there’s a 20 minute pause in Birmingham New Street, but the other stops are more reasonable.
Even assuming only a 5 minute stop in central Birmingham it is still 35 minutes from Wolverhampton to Birmingham International – and Wolverhampton isn’t quite at the edge of the urban area. That’s a huge amount of time given that even with just phase 1 of HS2 you will be able to do London to Manchester in 100 minutes.
The same applies in France, when it is running and the line isn’t blocked by a landslide the direct TGV from Paris to Turin that goes via the Lyon bypass line takes 5 and a half hours, the direct Italian train that goes via Lyon takes just over 6 hours.
@Matthew Hutton, no the problem is that the HS2 route has deviations that are slowing things down. From Birmingham Interchange to Curzon is ~19km of track that goes north THEN SOUTH AGAIN to reach the station, most of it in the city with very non-HSR curves, and as best I can tell without access to HS2 Ltd scheduling software it will take 11 min at only 83kph avg.
From Birmingham International Airport to New St is only ~13km and the fastest scheduled service takes 9 min, so 87kph. THE LEGACY ROUTE WITHOUT IMPROVEMENT GETS YOU TO BIRMINGHAM FASTER THAN HS2. The fastest non-stop Wolverhampton to New St is 16 min, so with a 2 min stop (why would you stop your HSR for 5 min? That’s how long slow Shinkansen stop for expresses to pass.) you are only looking at 27 min across Birmingham, not 35.
Similarly, a direct path to Manchester Airport from Wolverhampton would be ~130km, vs. the ~151 for HS2s, East-North-West-North-SouthEast-NorthWest meander from Curzon to Piccadilly. You should be able to do Birmingham-Manchester in exactly the same time as HS2 using legacy speed to Wolverhampton then HS track.
London-Manchester time would increase, but not by 30+min. Penalty is ~18min, but you could do Lon-Man in 90 min. This with a stop in Birmingham is far preferred than 71min Lon-Man direct, for a few reasons. One is that HSR ridership curves are not linear, you gain a lot of mode share reducing time from 5h to 2h, but little after that. 90min Lon-Man will beat flying, other trains, driving, anything but a personal helicopter (and for some helicopters it’s close!). There is no need to go much faster, you won’t gain much ridership.
Second is for takt. As the Swiss say, go as fast as necessary not as fast as possible. A 9:15 departure from London to Glasgow that becomes the 10:45 departure from Manchester to Glasgow is EXACTLY what you want. It leads to schedule consistency (good for planning), simple service patterns (good for passengers), fewer trains than separate Lon-Man and Lon-Glas service (saves operations money, and by freeing slots for non-HSR trains on on approach saves infrastructure money), and vastly improves frequency (with a 9:05/9:35 Lon-Man and a 9:15/9:45 Lon-Glas then everyone in Lon and Birm has four ways to get to Man each hour, compared to 3 or 2 tph per HS2’s plan.) Takt is key in Man. because it is a reasonable for an intercity “knot.” A future HS3 from Liverpool to Leeds/Newcastle would cross the Lon-Scot axis in Man. With 30min trips from Liv-Man and Man to Leeds, then trains leaving Liv and Leeds at 10:15 meet the 10:45 departure to Glas, allowing passengers to transfer to Scotland.
These advantages occur with the legacy speeds to Birmingham New St. With the billions saved by not building Curzon or an unneeded 40km of HS track, you can apply some of it to improving the Wolverhampton to airport route. Just giving the route to Wolv. the same avg speed as the Airport would save 5 min off the Birm-Man trip (and improving 16km of track to ~90kph is far less expensive than 40km of new 400kph track). As noted above you don’t need to get below 90min Lon-Man, but minutes saved give flexibility for schedule pad, additional stops or stop time for transfers, making a tough 400kph stretch somewhere else only 325kph, etc.
Birmingham New Street seems to take 3-5 minutes to process a Cross country train when it is running late – https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:G25003/2024-01-24/detailed#allox_id=0
https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:G25249/2024-01-24/detailed#allox_id=1
https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:G24821/2024-01-24/detailed#allox_id=1
Also its only 28 minutes at full speed from Rugby to Stafford on the existing Trent Valley lines which you have to compete with.
@Matthew Hutton
The time to process a train when the train is running late is not the standard to build around. I have been on British trains (not extensively) and I have been on higher-speed intercity services that pull into an intermediate station, have people get off and on, and leave a minute later. It is possible.
You don’t have to compete with the Trent Valley lines because the Trent Valley line are not connected to tracks that can do edge of London (Old Oak Common) to the edge of Birmingham (Bir. International) in ~30 min, like HS2 would. No one is arguing that a train that bypasses Birm. would have faster Man-Lon trip times. But as I showed the time penalty to stopping in Birm is not excessive (18 min using infrastructure exactly as it is today, 10-15 if you improve Birm. approaches. That is a perfectly acceptable penalty when your trip time is already under 2 hr and you gain the advantage of doubling or tripling frequency for Birm-Man, Birm.-Scotland, Man-Scotland and even Birm. and Man to London trips. Greater frequency means more riders.
I think the time when late to process a train is a good example of how long it actually takes to be fair.
I would agree that at the smaller stops such as Oxenholme or Flint taking 2 minutes to process a stopping train is excessive – and that does happen in real life – but not a major stop like Birmingham.
Yes Japan is quicker than that – but Japan is the only example and they have much less leisure travel.
Is it still common for passport inspection be done when train travel between border stations? If I recalled correctly, last time when I travelled to Denmark from Germany on night train, they inspected passport by stopping the train at station near border, and the train only continues after the procedure is done.
It doesn’t really make sense to talk about post-Schengen. If covid or refugee inundations caused temporary border controls what you described might happen. Also with night trains, disrupting the train’s travel is not much of an issue (has no meaningful impact on its timetable), and putting Immigration officials on such a train would be extreme.
A better question that I can’t answer is what happens today on trains crossing from Schengen to non-Schengen EU members like Romania, Bulgaria, the Balkans.
Its hardly “nebulous” its structural to how the British Imperial Nation State operates. You have to create clear demonstrations of an hostile outsider or failing that show that foreigners are there on sufferance. You can only justify a state based on legal discrimination of your majority nation on that basis (see Serbia, Turkey and Russia the other Imperial states in the EU’s orbit). The complete failure of 15 years of anti-immigration politics to “control” immigration reinforces the need for performative actions like the whole Rwanda thing*. The whole right can’t admit the main outcome of the last 15 years is the consolidation of a multi-racial society and the decline of the UK to an EU client state. And the left would rather manslaughter immigrants** and poor people forever than admit they legislated a constitutional settlement that makes the English 2nd class citizens.
*That failure is because 1. UK citizens are unusually likely to have foriegn spouses/family which means high family reconstitution rates 2. University students 3. A low regulation labour market which makes unusually accomodating to foreigners than the exclusionary European norm (hence UK has a much higher skill non-Euro immigrant flow) 4. Lack of state capacity on immigration to both process paperwork and plan policy. 5. Anti-immigration believing their own lies about foreigners being unskilled benefit scroungers and not realises that high bars still permit lots of people 6. Post-Brexit trade treaties mean visa relaxations. 7. The only thing keeping the economy, NHS and tax base afloat is immigration fueled population growth.
** This is explicit Inner City Labour party policy given the refusal to build much housing because all of them own houses worth millions. They have the power to leverage planning obligations to recapitalise the social housing sector, private rented sectors and generate funds for everything. Instead they send you material talking about how they love diversity and have heroically provided “affordable housing units” worth 500,000 pounds. Mr Starmer is perfectly happy with Camden’s explicit policy of preserving slum accommodation near Euston so it doesn’t ruin the view of allotments of Labour councillors. If some people commit suicide due to light denial or mold they don’t care so long as Labour people see capital appreciation and feel good about themselves.
So what’s the right amount of security on trains when there’s actual risk of terrorism? Is there some kind of standard formula for deriving this in the literature? I ask because I saw on some Youtube videos that the LRT in Manila has airport-style metal detectors at station entrances. However, the Philippines has actual bombings, kidnappings, gun battles, etc from various armed groups, so the chance of attack is probably higher than on the Chunnel. But from the video the line to get into the Manila LRT was pretty long and the efficiency of public transit has to be greatly lowered because of that.
There was never any security theater on trains in Europe even in the era of the Red Brigades. Israel, borrowing from Europe, has mild security theater at train stations and none on buses (I’m not sure about the Jerusalem Light Rail or Tel Aviv Subway).