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Gilligan has absolutely no idea what he is talking about, as usual.
HS2 was (and is) sensible.
Fast trains on a roughly East – West alignment between Liverpool and Leeds are sensible.
The point I would agree with in the Manchester context is that a tunnel that links the lines to the South of Piccadilly and the lines to the East of Victoria with an underground station at Piccadilly is a good start and stands on its own merits irrespective of further track building.
Gilligan doesn’t seem to see the value in speed.
But you need both speed and capacity to leverage a railway to get people out of cars and lubricate the economy; without improving journey times there’s no pull factor and without increasing capacity there’s no space.
The railway needs to compete on journey times to get people out of cars, and the time considered needs to include getting to a station and waiting for a train.
Manchester: a tunnel would be incredible, but there’s an easier way –
* Use disused parts of the viaducts, moving Metrolink tracks as required, to get grade separation at Castlefield junction
* 4 track elevated from Castlefield through Deansgate to Oxford Road is feasible if needed
* Deliver the extra through platforms at Piccadilly
* Connect the through platforms at Piccadilly to a new bridge over the main lines to reach the disused Ardwick viaduct curve to the East. Other connections here (eg from the East towards the airport) are also possible.
* Add stations at Ashton Old Road, Etihad Campus, Miles Platting, Clayton Bridge and more
* Deploy ETCS to run as intensively as the Thameslink core
* You have two East-West railways via Piccadilly and via Victoria, connected to form a flexible circular route around the city
Not a cheap package, but much more affordable than a tunnel with underground stations
Paul
“Manchester” – short-term, the twice-rejected (Too expensive”!) proposal for two extra platforms on the S side of “Piccadilly”, giving two for each E-W direction, & thus removing a large chunk of the Castlefield Corridor bottleneck.
Whilst doing other improvements long-term, as you suggest.
As for Gillingan, he seems to have a swarm of confused bees in his bonnet, again.
A further thought on speed vs capacity – whilst it’s important to recognise the primary benefit, and the main reason for building HSR projects like HS2 and NPR is rail capacity, it’s speed that delivers transformational economic boosts to stops on the route.
Lille and Zaragoza didn’t really benefit from simply having more rail capacity – they may not even have needed it – but they did benefit from being temporally closer to larger centres. In the UK Ashford (HS2) and on a smaller scale Woolwich (EL) have both gained economically from shorter journey times to Central London. Woolwich is a great example of where the station was originally not considered needed at all, but the economic boost has been such that it’s now overwhelmed. Adding equivalent capacity to the North Kent line or DLR without the journey time improvement would never have had the same effect.
*Obvs I meant Ashford (HS1)