High Speed 2 Railway Line

(asked on 13th March 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon on 9 March (HL5562), how, assuming that signalling is designed appropriately for the relevant speed, operating at a speed of 320km/h rather than 360km/h would reduce capacity on the high speed line.


Answered by
 Portrait
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
Minister of State (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
This question was answered on 23rd March 2017

Reducing the maximum speed of trains from 360km/h to 320km/h would result in trains taking longer to complete their overall journey. This means that, unless we buy more train sets, we will not able to run as many train services on HS2 and therefore capacity will be reduced.

In my previous answer [HL5562], reduced capacity was also in the context of running tilting trains at 300km/h on the HS2 network. Mixing tilting trains running at 300km/h on HS2 with non-tilting trains running at 360km/h would also reduce capacity because it would reduce the number of train paths available per hour. Furthermore, the response to our market sounding of rolling stock manufacturers has indicated that tilting trains offer reduced seating capacity per train set compared with non-tilt.

Reticulating Splines