Earliest High-Speed Rail in the UK?

[Callan]

To steer things back to the original topic, one thing I am wondering is what an earlier high-speed railway would entail for London's railway terminals, and indeed the same for other cities' main stations. Let's assume the proto-HS1 of the 70s is built like what @Callan suggested. How feasible is the plan for a Kensington (Olympia) rail hub? It seems like it'd still get pushed to St. Pancras or another northern station. If they were intent on a cross-city connection it seems easier to shift the works east to run trains through a revamped Snow Hill Tunnel.

Very feasible IMO. The Olympia site was a bit north of Kensington at White City close to the site of the OTL under-construction Old Oak Common station, almost adjacent to the West Coast mainline. Even now the Old Oak Common site is very undeveloped, in the 1970s the whole area was pretty much desolate.

This is a good overview of the contemporary plans.

 

[Bonniecanuck]

Very feasible IMO. The Olympia site was a bit north of Kensington at White City close to the site of the OTL under-construction Old Oak Common station, almost adjacent to the West Coast mainline. Even now the Old Oak Common site is very undeveloped, in the 1970s the whole area was pretty much desolate.

This is a good overview of the contemporary plans.

Ah, that's egg on my face for not brushing up on my London geography and putting two and two together. I wonder what would come of the central London terminals in that case.

 

[Geordie]

Old Oak Common? How ironic, seeing as that's where Sunak is proposing to neuter HS2, half a century later.

OOC is a good site for onward links in time, as careful planning will allow services onto both the GWML and WCML. Imagine Paris-OOC-Bristol (Parkway)-Cardiff trains on the GWML, even without a new line. Or Brussels to Manchester.

Obviously, there's unlikely to be the appetite or will to fund High Speed Rail to Brum, Manchester or Bristol in the seventies (there still isn't from half tof the Commons today), but if what essentially became OTL's HS1 exists from the coast to OOC before 1979, I can see an HS2 reaching Birmingham at some point in the next quarter century, followed by the North West in the decade after that. When exactly depends on butterflies.

A giant vat of insecticide would see me predict Birmingham opening under New Labour, with Manchester too far along for Cameron to cancel, so he adopts it as a Tory commitment to the North or some bollocks.

 

[SinghSong]

Earliest? Would the age of steam count? After all, the definition of 'high speed rail' here in the UK, is cited as "train speeds up to 125 mph (200 km/h)". By which definition, the LNER Class A4 did historically provide high speed rail services in the UK, from their introduction in 1935 to their retirement in the 1960s. We already had it- it already existed IOTL, with services like the Silver Jubliee's high-speed service between London and Newcastle having been introduced in 1933 by LNER, in response to the Fliegender Hamburger service between Berlin and Hamburg introduced by Deutsche Reichsbahn in 1933, and continuing all the way until the outbreak of WW2, never to run again.

However, in an ATL where Otto von Bismarck had successfully managed to purchase the main state railway lines in Germany for the German Empire from their respective sovereigns in the 1870s as he'd tried in vain to do IOTL? Or had simply expanded the Imperial German Railway network across Imperial Germany in competition with the other state-owned railway lines, to a higher standard predominantly for higher-speed non-stop services, rather than limiting the state-owned rail network exclusively to Alsace-Lorraine as IOTL? You could've easily had that 'race for high-speed rail' between Imperial Germany and the British Empire playing out over half a century eariler, and high-speed rail (i.e, up to 200kph) services running from London even before WW1 begins, before airports are even a thing.

 

[Guernsey Donkey]

First thing is probably to have the motorways built as toll roads. That should help keep inter city viable.

 

[IanBertram]

The rationale for OTL HS2 seems to have changed over time, from faster, which never really added up, to increased capacity. Capacity issues have dogged the network for some time and remedying them is costing a lot of money. In some cases, because of penny-pinching decisions initially.

Reading Station and London Bridge Station have, in the last decade or so, seen major redevelopment to increase capacity at a cost of £1bn each. Birmingham New Street cost around £750m and Tottenham Court Road station cost £500m, both again to increase capacity.

So, what have the government decided to do to keep down the cost of the rump we will be left with? That's right, reducing the length of the trains and building smaller stations. The tunnels from Old Oak Common to Euston haven't started, after a hold on that section put in place by our friend Mark Harper. Meanwhile, £40m worth of tunnelling equipment is buried unused. Oh, and Old Oak Common as planned has less capacity than would be available at Euston if it was built to the original spec. Euston station is apparently already over budget at £5bn, but without the HS2 extension to Manchester, the whole line ends up costing more than the benefits it creates. Obviously, building the section into Euston after the rest is open increases costs, because of the disruption and delays. They are apparently also considering reducing the capacity at Euston.

I went to Birmingham in 1966 as a student. New Street was being rebuilt then. The recent redevelopment is the second since then. I'm coming to the conclusion that even if by some miracle we had got something like HS2 in the 60s or 70s, it would still need rebuilding today and probably for similar costs to the one we are not getting...