Jabird
a. You just can't shove high speed trains down tunnels with lots of stoppers in them.
b. They HAVE published detailed maps of the whole damned route!
c. the PRIME role of high speed rail is to link city centres to each other, serving airports is a bonus.
d. Or you'd need to stop & split. Quite messy I think - remember the LHR Exp only has 4 cars per train.
e. Yes, the Eurostar trains do, but they are, iirc, 17 cars long - not viable north of London for international services.
f. For starters, Eurostar and SE HS use St Pancras - to the WEST of King's Cross. I've done Euston from there in about 5 mins, but with bags allow 10. Or build a travelator.
g. There is no point in having a swanky airport without a properly connected rail hub to link it in to.
a. You can run local and express trains if you have station sidings. Standard practice all over the world. Local train waits for the express to speed through.
b. They have not explicity published the two routes (HS2 and Crossrail) combined and anotated, so one can see the grand plan (if such a thing exists). Does Crossrail appear on that map-link you gave? If it does, it is not obvious.
c. Not necessarily. When ever I travel on TGV, the main northern hub in France appears to be CDG - I have not been linked through Gard du Nord once. If you want to go to Paris you take a Paris train, while everything else goes via CDG.
d. Nearly every TGV I have been on has stopped and split, and it takes less than 5 mins. Besides, if Silver-Boris Island is planned as a rail hub (as is CDG), rather than a lonely spur (as we seem to be planning here), then trains much longer than 4 cars can go there. I would imagine a 17-car train splitting at Silver-Boris, with 5 going to London and the remaining 12 carriages carring on to the North of England.
e. Since the northern England tracks will be new, they can make the stations as large as they wish, just as they did in France. All 17 carriages, if there is the traffic to support them. Ever been to Lyon station - the dinosaur carcass??
f. St Pancras and King's Cross are one and the same (300m between them), and I call it Kings Cross as that is the name of the tube stop.
And surely you cannot be serious that a 2km gap between HS2 and HS1 (the Birmingham line and the Chunnel line) is acceptable. If travelling from Bordeaux to Brussels, do you have to get off (with all your bags) and catch the metro for 2km in Paris, to rejoin your train?? So why should you do so when travelling from Paris to Manchester??
Such a stupid gap in the line will completely undermine the logic of high speed rail in N Western Europe, and make the nation a laughing-stock. UK TGV, the only high speed rail network where you have to catch a taxi (with all your bags and screaming children) in the middle of your journey. And what is so difficult, about joining HS1and HS2, that we will actively encourage ridicule from across the world??
g. And the emphasis here is on 'HUB'. CDG TGV is not simply an airport station, it is the northern hub for the TGV system.