Congestion on the West Coast Main Line could reach crisis point when a plans to run 16 major new freight services every day come into effect, Birmingham City Council has warned.
Giving evidence to MPs, Birmingham’s senior transport official said a planned new high speed rail line was “vital for growth and jobs”.
Chris Tunstall, the council’s interim director of sustainablity, transportation and environment, highlighted construction currently taking place on a major new port on the north bank of the River Thames in Essex called the London Gateway - which is expected to lead to a major increase in rail and road freight.
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Warning that existing rail services would not be able to cope, he said: “The West Coast Main Line is ready to fall over. By the mid-2020s, it will be at full capacity, and that is before taking account of the freight issues.”
He added: “The London Gateway is proposing to have some 16 750-metre trains running on the West Coast each day when it is fully operational. There simply is not the capacity on the West Coast to take that and passenger transport.”
Mr Tunstall was speaking at Westminster to MPs scrutinising the Government’s High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill, the first of two Bills which will allow construction of the new line known as HS2 to proceed.
He also spoke about plans for a major high speed rail station near Curzon Street in Digbeth, central Birmingham, and revealed the authority is planning a “one station” approach linking the high speed facility with New Street and Moor Street stations.
This would include redeveloping the current pathway between Moor Street and New Street, which follows a tunnel beneath the Bullring shopping centre, so that commuters walked past shops instead.
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He said: “We are already looking at a one-station concept, which is more about connectivity between the stations and operating them as one station. We have a scheme that has been developed.”
However, he said the council was continuing to work with HS2, the state-owned business overseeing construction of the new line, on the design.
Mr Tunstall added: “We want footfall within Birmingham. We do not want people to come through a tunnel and straight out of Birmingham again. We want to show them the delights of what they could get if they came into Birmingham, so we are looking at the possibility of linking the station with the shopping complex... which we understand is now the desired line for pedestrians. They want to walk through the shopping complex.”
And Mr Tunstall revealed that an ongoing row over plans to build a maintenance depot for high speed trains in Washwood Heath had finally been resolved.
Birmingham City Council had opposed the plans because it hoped to build a business park on the site, and Birmingham MP Liam Byrne (Lab Hodge Hill) has also criticised the depot proposals.
But Mr Tunstall told MPs: “We have seen where the other options are and accepted that there are no viable options other than the Washwood Heath site. We accept now that we have to make the best use of that site from what is left of it.”
MPs also heard from opponents of the project, including Emma Crane, Campaign Director of the HS2 Action Alliance.
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She said: “If you are going to do something that creates such a huge environmental impact on people’s homes and livelihoods as this does - the environmental impact of this has not been recognised at all - the Government have to be able to show that it is in the national interest.
“And to date, the hard evidence does not show that. It keeps coming back to that. The business case is extremely flawed, the cost keeps going up and up, and I would just say to anyone who supports HS2 . . . at what point do you say, ‘We’ve got to look at the cost,’ and that cost becomes unsustainable?”
But critics came under fire from Birmingham MP Khalid Mahmood (Lab Perry Barr) who said major rail projects had always had critics.
Referring to Victorian civic engineer George Stephenson, who built the first public inter-city railway line in the world to use steam locomotives, Mr Mahmood said: “I am probably getting a feeling of how Mr Stephenson felt when he came to the House for the first Bill for the line from Manchester to Liverpool.
“I bet that he had critics like yourselves - the witnesses here today - and he had to put up with that.”