Once a rail route has been identified as being “congested”, then Network Rail is obliged to provide a solution to the Regulator, ORR – the Office of Rail and Road,
The latest Route Assessment Report was published in 2018 – but this was before HS2 Phase 2B – to Yorkshire and the Northwest – was scrapped. So it is now significantly out of date. These Assessments, however, have been historically valuable. Several projects were approved by Railtrack/Network Rail on the basis of assessments made in 1999 and their implementation successfully enabled 25 years of passenger traffic growth.
Along the East Coast Main Line route a major bottleneck was, and still is, the Welwyn Viaduct and two nearby tunnels which accomodate 2 tracks only. Unfortunately none of a succession of Business Cases for providing 4 tracks over this section – which would enable 30 trains an hour in each direction – has ever been accepted.. Traffic therefore remains limited to a maximum of 18 trains per hour each way in order to maintain safe separations between fast and slow passenger trains and freight trains.
Instead, over the years, improvements were made to a parallel loop via Hertford North station. In addition, half a dozen significant improvements were made along the main line from Kings Cross to Grantham. All of these were individually modest in national infrastucture terms however, but brought valuable and long-lasting benefits.
What a pity that the government decided to sink decades of planned infrastructure budgets into the overspecified HS2 rail project – and then cancel the northern branches, its main raison d’être
