It's not even about freight! HS2 will increase passenger capacity. The existing trains are completely full at peak time and run at the maximum frequency. Building a whole new line will allow a lot more people to travel. The demand is clearly there despite the price, because it's also pretty congested to drive anywhere inside the M25.
If we wanted to address the freight situation it would be along the route of the A428/A14 from Folkstone (where much of the freight is landed) to the Midlands. That road already has a cheery sign on it pointing out how high the accident rate is.
Felixstowe, not Folkestone? The latter is where the channel tunnel is, which does account for a lot of freight but you probably meant the container port at Felixstowe. I used to drive on the A14 daily and you could tell when a ship had recently arrived by the number of containers on the roads. The road also suffered badly from "tram tracks" due to large numbers of heavy good vehicles. Crazy when you realise a lorry can take one container while a single train can take a hundred or more.
A problem with this argument is that it actually doesn't help most people on the HS2 route. If you live in a village on the outskirts of Aylesbury say, it's not much good to you personally that there's more local services on the WCML, because it's a 40-50 minute drive to the nearest WCML station; your local line will see no improvement. Freeing up space on the M1 has no impact either for the same reason.
It would of perhaps been an easier sell if we could of built it much closer to the WCML and told people, look this is to get rid of those horrible fast trains that wizz though your local station at 125mph.We'll use the space for more services so your commute to London from say Leighton buzzard is faster and less busy.
The reason you can't run as many other trains on WCML and other lines is because high-speed non-stop trains take so much capacity. Once you remove them, you can run many more local/regional trains with more stops and higher frequency.
The whole way HS2 is designed is to maximally reduce the amount of fast trains going north south on the existing network. Leading to a massive capacity upgrade on the existing lines. You can still run some express lines but likely much more lines that stop at more station, making it fast for you to go to next HS2 stop and from there to the further distance destination.
HS2 connection to Leeds was designed to help the ECML, the whole HS2 system was designed by experts to help with WCML and ECML.
Of course now that the former car brained fucking moron of a prime minister in his last attempt to safe himself canceled most of HS2 all those benefits are gone. And labor is to cowardly and ignorant to bring it back.
This video is interesting on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtVJ7Zjy-DE
> if we could of built it much closer to the WCML
Knocking down half the towns that the WCML runs through to build more tracks carrying trains that aren't going to stop there would be neither easier nor cheaper than HS2.
There is a huge amount of countryside between the WCML and the current HS2 route. I'm not saying it should be literally parallel.
Do you think the people who designed HS2 have not considered these aspects?
You analysis is very narrow and only considered the benefits to a certain set of people.
HS2 actually follows reasonably closely to the old GCML. And for the same reason, its the best route to build a fast rail-line along.
I think your proposal complete ignores the additional cost of such a route change. And the cost alone, aside from anything else would make it unreasonable.
Many things go into selecting a route and in most cases where I think they made the wrong choice its usually because of cost concerns, like not building the needed tunnels into cities.
I actually don't think that's true.
The reason HS2 route cost so much money is because so much is tunneled. Why is so much tunnelled? Because rich people live there and won't accept a blot on the landscape, partially because they don't see a personal benefit.
If you can remove the tunnels it doesn't really matter that the route is slightly longer or has slowly less optimal geometry.
That not totally true. Yes, HS2 spend additional billions on tunneling. But even without that you don't magically solve all the issues and in some places where they do tunneling its actually not completely stupid. Tunneling accounts for a few billions, not many 10s of billions.
And you don't get magically rid of all issues with people complaining, because guess what, other people live on that other imaginary route that lives in your head, and they would demand tunnels too.
And its really the politicians fault, a few people who don't like the look of the train should not have the power to stop it, specially not in a place as centralized as England.