A taster from
today's Times, the rest of which is probably behind a paywall.
Birmingham HS2▸ station to be completed with four unused platforms
More than half of Curzon Street’s high-speed platforms will be redundant, but it would cost more to pare back the scheme than to finish it
Ben Clatworthy, Transport Correspondent
Friday July 26 2024, 7.45pm, The Times
Birmingham will be left with a vast “white elephant” station after Rishi Sunak’s decision to scrap large swathes of the HS2 project.
Sunak announced in October that the second phase of the project, connecting Birmingham and the north of England, would be axed.
However, work on the new seven-platform Birmingham Curzon Street station was so far progressed by the time the decision was made that it will be cheaper to continue as originally planned than to pare back the scheme.
To precis, Curzon Street was scheduled to have seven platforms, but only three will now be needed. The contract to build was signed in 2021. It makes no sense to build all seven, but even less sense to pay the company to do nothing. So all seven platforms will be built, but four will not have rails or signalling or anything else that hadn't been cast in granite. Similarly, the magnificent viaduct between tunnel and station will be built as planned, branching into 3 double and one single track sub-viaducts, two of which will have no track. The viaduct could be redesigned, but that would take 18 months, cost millions, and have a knock-on effect for everything else. The design for the rolling stock is also to remain as-is, even though they will now be running on the
WCML▸ . They are 60 metres shorted than a Pendolino and a lot less tilty, meaning they will carry fewer passengers at a slower speed than existing traffic. This apparently translates into 17% fewer seats for passengers heading north of Birmingham.
I can offer a possible use for the four spare platforms, to house the new Sunak Museum of Chaotic Government. That would be a logical adjunct to the planned Johnson Museum of Chaotic Government, to be sited in a now-derelict former off-licence near Downing Street. We could use some of the money he saved by cancelling the bit heading for the Unlevelled Lands north of the bullring. And if someone decided it was worth doing one day, it would be easy enough to convert it into the midway call of a high-speed rail link from London to Manchester.
