The economic viability of a Parallel Cross Country Route for England

This paper is a contribution to the debate about the uses to which Britain's existing rail infrastructure should be put following the completion of High Speed 2. The provision of rapid high capacity rail services from London to Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham, Manchester and Birmingham will remove the principal long distance passenger flows from the East Coast Main Line (ECML), Midland Main Line (MML) and West Coast Main Line (WCML). Most of the suggestions for alternative uses of the released capacity on these routes have involved either increased connectivity between existing secondary stations, better connections from the principal population centres to off route destinations, or increased capacity for commuting in to London. This paper suggests an alternative proposal, namely that sections of the ECML, MML, WCML and Great Western Main Line (GWML) could be linked together to form a new long distance route running on a south west to north east axis; the route would provide a broadly parallel (but slower) alternative to the existing Cross Country Route between Bristol and York, as it would run via Swindon, Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton, Leicester, Nottingham and Doncaster. This paper will utilise various methods for estimating the capital expenditure required and passenger demand expected from the provision of this route and accompanying rail services (along with standard assumptions regarding operational expenditure), in order to gauge whether there may be a case for developing this proposal further.