The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC)’s Rail Needs Assessment – published last week – “puts the onus” on High Speed 2 Ltd (HS2 Ltd) and Transport for the North (TfN) to “rethink their station designs” in places like Manchester and Leeds, according to Expedition Engineering director Alistair Lenczner.
Current plans are for terminus stations in both cities, but the report says that through stations offer better “connectivity, capacity and operational efficiency in city centres”. According to Lenczner this is “basically pointing a finger” at the Manchester and Leeds plans.
He said that building terminus stations in both cities would repeat problems caused by 19th century railway planning – both Manchester and Leeds originally had terminus stations that were either replaced by new through stations or modified to allow some through running.
And they’re not the only ones. Other cities with terminus stations eventually replaced by through stations include York, Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh and Newcastle.
To take Manchester as an example, the city had terminus stations at Liverpool Road (now closed), London Road (now Piccadilly), Oldham Road (now closed) and Victoria. This made it difficult to travel from north to south. While the Ordsall Chord was built recently to connect Victoria to Piccadilly stations, the resulting Castlefield Corridor is already a railway bottleneck, according to Lenczner.