HS2 station will serve ‘whole country’ when line finally built, says rail minister

The beleaguered HS2 rail project will serve “most of northern England” when the line to and from London Euston is finally completed, the rail minister has said.

Lord Hendy was speaking at a ceremony marking the start of the final part of tunnelling for HS2. Two tunnel boring machines, named Karen and Madeleine, have begun inching their way from Old Oak Common – a station under construction in west London – to Euston station at the centre of the capital.

The cost of the HS2 project has ballooned at the same time as the planned Y-shaped network has shrunk to a stump between London and Birmingham, with plans to serve Manchester and Yorkshire shelved by the previous government.

The final design for the terminus in the capital, as well as the multi-billion-pound financing for the station is still uncertain.

But Lord Hendy pledged the trains will run from Euston far beyond Birmingham.

“We do want to connect this railway with the rest of the railways in Britain,” he said.

“One of the failures in its [original] design was to consider it as a completely separate entity.

“It will have to be connected to the railways of the UK and I would certainly envisage trains leaving Euston for most of northern England when that connection’s built.

“Birmingham is the first stage, but thereafter it’s got to serve the rest of the nation.”

The most recent plan for the London end of HS2 envisages a six-platform station – reduced from the original 11-platform design.

But the minister said it would be built with room for more: “The current design is six, but the spatial plan that we're looking at will leave space for more because it's inconceivable that you would build this railway at this level of expense without filling it full of trains to go everywhere in Britain.

“The spatial plan will allow for Euston to play its proper role in the full use of this railway for the railways of this country.

“We're more thoughtful than the previous government who not only didn't build these tunnels, but seemed determined if there had been a station in Euston, it wasn't big enough to cope with what HS2 could actually service for the country.”

Last year the Public Accounts Committee said: “Thirteen years since HS2 was given the go-ahead by government, it is not known what it will cost, what the final scope will be, when it will be completed, and what benefits it will deliver.”

The HS2 project is undergoing a “fundamental reset” under a new chief executive, Mark Wild, after years of chaos.

The final bill for a much-reduced railway is likely to be at least £100bn, and the opening date even for the first section – between Old Oak Common and Birmingham – has been pushed back to the mid- to late-2030s.

The CEO said: “We’ve already said we can't deliver it before 2033. We just can't make it. We've lost too much ground in the civil engineering.”

In 2018, Mr Wild was brought in to overhaul the botched Crossrail project in London, which was running years late and way over budget. It opened nearly four years late as the Elizabeth line.

“The key lesson from Crossrail is the idea of trying to land these projects on a pinhead is really never likely, so the key is to produce a range of cost, a range of time and explain what the determinants on those ranges are,” he said.

The tunnel boring machines will take between a year and 18 months to reach London Euston. Work on the terminus in the capital was suspended by the previous government.

Read more: How the HS2 shambles could have been avoided – if we’d copied the Swiss