HS2

[snoozeofreason]

Just anecdata, I know, but I am a moderately frequent traveller on the Chiltern Line London-Birmingham route, getting on at an intermediate station, and I was, at one point a regular commuter. I have never really been aware of the frequency of the services being much of an issue. I suspect that the factors that determine whether people use it have more to do with price, parking at stations, connectivity with local buses, etc.

[IvanV]

Ivan, it's not about taking people off of the trains, it's about taking trains off of the tracks, so more local services can run. You can't look at current local services and assume that they will stay the same.

This is only relevant to the point I was making about the Chiltern Line.

If you think that HS2 will release capacity on the Chiltern Line, why would that be?

Will the government tell Chiltern to stop selling people cheap tickets to Birmingham? Even HS1 (domestic) charges a premium to travel on it. So I imagine HS2 will too. Even the French do things like that. But the British Government continues, bizarrely, to have little enthusiasm for continental-style fares systems.

Would the government just tell Chiltern just to run fewer trains to Birmingham? Why would they do that? They make money by taking trains to Birmingham. They spent a bunch of money increasing capacity on the line to do it.

No, it's likely relevant to all the lines. Removing the long distance trains, even from just near the terminus stations, allows new services, or services that run at different times.

If some services were underused, it may be because the timing of them was bad - e.g. commuter trains that arrive at destinations only a few minutes before 9am, or that leave to return too close to standard work ending times - or that they were a little too unreliable due to other rail traffic.

I think we are at cross-purposes.

I have assumed that HS2 will free up capacity on the WCML and allow more local and medium distance services, and allow more medium distance services to use the fast line, etc.

The point I was making is that is not much of a thing to try and buy Bucks CC's cooperation over. They might be interested if they got much better services at High Wycombe or Aylesbury, etc, where most of Bucks CC's population lives. But they won't. Some potential improvement Leighton Buzzard or Tring, where doubtless a few Bucks residents drive to, isn't enough to recruit their interest, in comparison to what they see as the costs of hosting HS2.

Let us remember, this comes from a discussion where I complained of Bucks CC being such a..eholes about it. Someone said, they ought to see their own interest in it. Unfortunately, I am trying to point out, they really just don't have much interest in it. The release of capacity on the WCML is not of much interest to Bucks CC, even if it is huge.

We really do have to reinvent our systems of governance so that the likes of Bucks CC can't act as such antagonists driving up the cost and time of major infrastructure projects, whether I agreed or disagreed with them in the first place.