High Speed Rail

Duncan Hames Excerpts

Monday 20th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

Because the capacity problem could not be dealt with by further investment in the west coast main line. [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman says that it could, but if he looks at the engineering reports that have been published, he will see that, in practice, it could not. We are going ahead with additional rail cars and additional train sets on the west coast main line, and the Network Rail route utilisation study published two weeks ago shows that by 2024 the line will be operating at capacity between London and Manchester, and London and Birmingham. It is not possible, because of the design of the infrastructure—we are not just talking about platform lengths—to put longer trains on a railway that is designed in the way that the west coast main line was designed. If he recalls the chaos that lasted for years when the west coast main line was upgraded a couple of years ago and if, on the back of that, he is seriously proposing that we should add two additional tracks to its entire length while resignalling the whole thing, he needs to think again.

[Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)]

I congratulate the Secretary of State on having the foresight to add a connection from High Speed 2 to High Speed 1. Can he tell me what the capacity will be for this link and so give this House an indication of the proportion of services from Birmingham that will be able to be through services to the continent?

[Mr Hammond]

The determining factor, of course, will be commercial considerations: how much passenger load there is and where interchanges might be made in the system between Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Old Oak Common and the route through the channel tunnel. However, the proposed single bore tunnel will have capacity for four trains per hour in each direction.