I understand you now!
All services between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds will be on dedicated HS2 tracks end-to-end. None of these services will run on classic old mainline routes.
HS2 services to:
- Liverpool will come off HS2 at Crewe and run on the existing Crewe-to-Liverpool Line (27km). Plans (Northern Powerhouse Rail/HS3) are being developed for a new high-speed line connecting Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds which would involve a spur off HS2.
- Glasgow and Edinburgh will converge on the WCML south of Wigan. A report by HS2 noted that to deliver a London to Glasgow journey time below 3hrs would require an extensive amount of work for what is a lightly used route and sparsely populated. A likely outcome will be the odd bypass, tunnel, digital signalling and grade separation.
- Sheffield will be served by a loop spur coming off HS2 onto the MML. The actual eastern route of HS2 is being revised and this could change, but in all likelihood Sheffield will remain on the classic network; the geography is simply not accommodative.
- Newcastle will arrive via a new spur south of Leeds heading towards York where it will join the ECML which is a quad-track straight railway up to Darlington. The ECML is currently undergoing a £1.2bn upgrade which will deliver an additional 4tph into London King’s Cross and bring London-to-Edinburgh journey times (pre-HS2) down to sub-4hrs. The issue for HS2 services to Newcastle is that beyond Darlington (58km to Newcastle) the ECML reduces to 2-tracks between and incorporates a silly number of winding speed reducing curves, as well as passing through multiple urban areas with significant engineering obstacles (e.g. Durham viaduct). To my knowledge there aren’t any plans to create a bypass between Darlington and Newcastle (which would then leave the corridor for more local services), but it certainly could become a possibility and bypasses for the ECML have happened previously.