Euston. What to do about Euston? Recent years have seen various proposals to rebuild the station for High Speed 2. The latest came a little over a year ago when HS2 revealed that it had ditched its ‘big bang’ approach to rebuilding its planned southern terminus in favour of a phased approach that would add £250 million to its bill. At the same time, Network Rail said it was “at a very early stage of looking at options for potential redevelopment of the current station at Euston”. Since then, there’s been silence from the national network owner.
Meanwhile, Camden Council has continued to argue for a joined-up approach that accounts for HS2 and ordinary services and doesn’t wreak havoc on local streets and residents. HS2 reckons the cost of rebuilding Euston will be £2.25 billion. Construction will take place in two phases, the first over 2017-2026 and the second over 2027-2033. That’s 16 years. HS2 estimate that construction could generate 367,000 lorry loads of materials with daily lorry movements reaching peaks of 700 in 2022.
Using rail could cut the total number of trips by 60,000 and bring that peak down by 130 lorries a day. However, HS2 admits that it’s not possible to guarantee the rail paths to and from the station that it would need.
There’s no easy way to shift the volume of materials that HS2 expects to generate. They don’t just come from rebuilding the station but also from the major work HS2 plans to Euston’s approaches. That work is every bit as massive as the deep, walled cutting built back when picks and shovels were the tools of choice for a railway construction company.
Today that cutting is lined with some rather elegant houses through Park Village. Tomorrow those houses will be facing a construction site that will doubtless fascinate a civil engineer but may do less for a local resident.
HS2 is ambitious. It plans to bring its tunnel from Old Oak Common as close as possible to Euston. That means portals at the top of Camden Bank, just a mile from the station. This differs from the way SNCF built its high-speed lines into Paris. Catch a Eurostar into Gare du Nord and you’ll clattter onto classic tracks in the suburbs for the final run to your terminus. SNCF took the easier and cheaper option. HS2 is determined to deliver the best that money can possibly buy.
There is an alternative. Its promoters claim that their Euston Express will be quicker to build (taking only nine years), cheaper (saving £1.8bn from HS2’s estimate of £5.6bn for the work all the way to Old Oak Common) and provide a new station for HS2 and ordinary passengers.
The House of Lords committee examining the bill to grant permission to build HS2 heard more details on October 11. In essence, Euston Express would create a station no wider than today’s with 11 platforms for HS2 and 12 for West Coast Main Line. The platforms would be made long enough by extending them southwards towards Euston Road, taking the space used today by office blocks, including the ‘Black Tower’ – the old Railtrack House.
Shifting the platforms southwards saves a few minutes for passengers walking from their HS2 train to London Underground’s station. According to Euston Express, this saving more than counters the loss of time caused by running on classic lines from Queen’s Park.
The new station would have a deck above the platforms for passengers and underpasses beneath them to give access to London Underground and Crossrail 2 (should that be built). The tunnel from Old Oak Common would emerge a little west of Queen’s Park station (making it around one-third of the length of HS2’s proposed tunnel).
From there three pairs of lines would serve Euston: one pair for HS2, one for WCML fast and one for WCML slow and Overground. Euston Express proposes building flying junctions between its revised fast and slow lines but it claims that they will be nothing as compared with HS2’s Park Village diveunder that descends 25 metres underground.
Euston Express will need to rebore the single-track tunnels used today by London Overground’s DC services to make them suitable to AC electrification so they can carry outer-suburban and freight traffic. Its plans will need to acquire some land to create space for flying junctions (for example the builder’s yard that sits between the DC and slow lines west of Queen’s Park) but with Euston station no wider than it is today, there should not be the need to turf residents from their homes.
The Euston Express plans would force another change on HS2. They would restrict trains to be ‘classic-compatible’ throughout. With Euston approached on ordinary lines for roughly the final four miles, HS2 could not run trains build to the bigger European gauge. HS2 always planned to run classic-compatible trains for its services that extended beyond the confines of its dedicated network, those running on towards Scotland from the Manchester or Leeds branches of the eventual Y network.
HS2 originally planned to procure 16 trains to European gauge and 45 to classic UK gauge. Having also changed the route through South Yorkshire to run through Sheffield Midland station (creating a loop from the main route), HS2 will need to use classic-compatible sets on any services that call at Sheffield so perhaps it’s time to ditch the 16 wide trains and just buy a single fleet sized to fit Britain (as Eurostar’s fleet does). Perhaps it already has, for Euston Express told the House of Lords that the HS2 described the role of its rolling stock procurement officer in a job ad as “a single procurement of a single fleet of classic compatible trains with a capital value of around £2bn”.
That’s not to say that HS2 should not build its network to European gauge. Current regulations insist that it is. There’s also sense in doing so. If HS2 makes provision at Old Oak Common for a tunnelled link to HS1, Britain could see through trains to the the Continent from Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, calling at Old Oak Common and Stratford for connections into Central London. These would not serve Euston but even today there are TGVs in France that go round Paris rather than into it.
HS2 has shown itself capable of changing its plans. It shifted position on Sheffield and South Yorkshire, it’s changed its mind about Crewe. With Network Rail seemingly no nearer reaching a conclusion for classic services, perhaps it’s time for HS2 to think again. Banish the blight over Camden. Cut the chaos at Euston.
This article first appeared in RAIL 812, published on October 26 2016.