In scale and speed of construction, Tianjin West seems almost impossible – especially when viewed from Britain. It is, therefore, the perfect embodiment of China’s high speed rail network, on which the station can be found. It is also, I am sorry to say, the antithesis of the development of high speed rail in Britain, which has proceeded in fits and starts and faces an uncertain future. What progress has been made seems entirely despite the UK government, rather than because of it. The latest nonsensical cut to HS2 seems like a good opportunity to look at a rather more successfully delivered high speed network. So, over to China.

Situated on a spur of the 820 mile-long Jinghu high speed line from Beijing to Shanghai, Tianjin West opened in 2011 and was designed by Hamburg-based architecture practice gmp Architekten (Gerkan, Marg and Partners). In 2007, job architects Meinhard von Gerkan and Stephan Schütz with Stephan Rewolle, won a competition held to find a design for the new station. It opened to passengers just four years later, in 2011.

If you have at all been following the depressing story of England’s HS2 (High Speed Two) railway, which the UK government somehow manages to keep reducing in length while simultaneously inflating the costs and extending the construction period of, this sounds borderline unbelievable. Yet in microcosm, this is the story of China’s high speed rail development: from almost nothing, to massive and overwhelming, in the railway blink-of-an-eye. During the four year period between Tianjin West’s design being unveiled and the station’s opening, China’s high speed rail network grew from 620 miles to 4,300 miles (1,000 to 7,000km), and that was just the start.

The scale of Tianjin West is stupendous. The massive barrel vault roof is 57m high and 400m long. To put that into a UK context and get some sense of its sheer scale, the original Victorian train shed which now forms part of St Pancras International is 30m high and 240m long.

The barrel vault at Tianjin West is of course a nod to the classic Victorian train sheds like that at St Pancras. And there is an echo too of Joseph Paxton’s 1851 Crystal Palace, an earlier demonstrator of the transformative potential of new technologies. In contrast with Victorian train sheds though, the barrel vault at Tianjin West runs transverse to the railway tracks rather than in line with them. It shelters a high-level concourse with 26 platforms located below, accessed by banks of stairs and escalators.

Pedestrian access is at both ends of the concourse with large open spaces outside setting the building in context. The orientation of the concourse is designed to allow pedestrian movement over the railway tracks, addressing urban severance issues. Its huge size simplifies its overall appearance; the station is more complicated than it looks. Just inside each entrance are escalators leading up to curving balconies which give access to station facilities at a higher level, but the sheer size of the building means that features like this disappear in the distance. Below the platforms the station has a whole additional subterranean level, just to add to the scale of the construction.

The round arches and radiating glass louvres between the diamond shaped interlacing of the barrel vault are designed to “express radiance, implying the bright prospects and glorious future of Tianjin’s urban development,” according to the Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Railway Company. To Western ears, that might come across as state-controlled spin, but in essence that is exactly what major railway station infrastructure development is always supposed to do, wherever it happens.

Two access roads curve in at either side of the concourse where side entrances allow people to be picked up or dropped off by motor vehicles. Although the highway immediately outside the side entrances is open to the sky (probably a good idea with all those idling vehicles), much of the length of the approach roads is protected by a gently undulating canopy which extends sideways from the main building, sheltering the platforms below over nearly their full length.

On the exterior of the station, the barrel vault projects forward as a hood, emphasising the main entrances although presumably not offering much in the way of shelter given its height off the ground. A colonnade of square columns runs across each end of the station building. It reminds me of somewhere else although I can’t recall exactly where – perhaps one of the Crossrail stations (Custom House also features square columns) but maybe somewhere different.

Tianjin West’s new station was built as part of the Beijing to Shanghai high speed line project. In just three years, from 2008-11, 819 miles of line were constructed to link the two cities. Tianjin West is actually just off the main line on a short spur; it is one of the northern termini of the line along with Beijing itself. The line was designed to support trains running at 217mph/350kph, and although it took until 2017 for 217mph services to run regularly, the journey between Beijing and Shanghai now takes about 4 hours 20 minutes.

Again, to put this into a domestic context, London to Glasgow is about 400 miles on the train, and currently takes about 5 hours 15 minutes; high speed rail is an absolute game changer when it comes to shrinking journey times. Or, if you want to look at it another way, in just three years China built a high speed line longer than HS1 (68 miles) plus the complete originally planned HS2 Y-shaped network (330 miles).

China didn’t stop there when it came to the development of high speed rail. It has been building lines ever since and now has over 24,000 miles (40,000km) of high speed railway. During that time it has moved from importing high speed train technology from western train manufacturers to the development of a much more self sufficient domestic capability for high speed trains. On the development of China’s high speed railway stations, however, western architects have remained much more closely involved for a far longer period. gmp is just one such architecture practice, following up its work designing Tianjin West with stations at Hangzhou South (2018) and Beijing Fentai (2022).

Here at home, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has just decided to junk another section of what was originally a planned HS2 network, cancelling everything other than the already well-under-construction London to Birmingham section. He also announced a “new approach” to the delivery of HS2’s Euston terminal, which the government has failed to agree a design for over the last decade or so. The answer to this problem? Make it as spacious and as wonderful as possible; it is going to be with us for 100 years or more. I would merely note that I’m not holding my breath for this outcome.

It’s been quite difficult to keep up with the government’s various decisions on the scope and specification of HS2 (apart from the fact that they trend downwards), because they change at the whim of whichever short-lived/short-skilled transport secretary is in post at the DfT at any particular moment, or whether the prime minister wants to be seen bashing railways in order to burnish their pro-motorist credentials. So, a (very) potted history looks something like this. Strap in, it’s quite the ride – and it’s all downhill.

The idea for a new north-south high speed line has been around for a long time (I can remember Virgin Trains proposing one up the east side of the country as part of its East Coast Main Line franchise bid in 2000), but in its current form, the concept for HS2 was developed after the opening of the Channel Tunnel-London St Pancras International HS1, which fully opened in 2007 (many years after the Channel Tunnel itself) with its grand total of 68 miles of route. Although very controversial during its construction, HS1 has settled down into regular and useful service, and no-one now really gives it a second thought. This tends to be forgotten in discussions about HS2.

The Labour government set up HS2 Ltd in 2009 to develop plans for, and then build, a high speed line from London to the north of England. HS2 (line and company) survived a change of political administration in 2010 and following a review by the incoming Conservative/Liberal Democrat government the final Y-shaped HS2 network (London to Birmingham and then a western leg to Manchester and an eastern leg to Leeds) was confirmed.

The Y-shaped network was designed to allow HS2 to intercept three separate main railway lines: the West Coast Main Line from London to Birmingham/Manchester/Liverpool/Glasgow, the Midland Main Line from London to Sheffield and Nottingham, and the East Coast Mainline from London to Leeds/Edinburgh. Long distance high speed trains would be diverted onto HS2 between London and the points where HS2 met those existing mainlines. This would free up capacity on those mainlines to run more frequent local and regional passenger services as well as rail freight. HS2 has always primarily been about creating capacity on main lines by removing track-hungry long distance inter-city services, though you would be daft not to build a new mainline at what is now the globally accepted standard of high speed rail (basically in the 186mph-225mph range).

And (a point often forgotten by those who suggest HS2 is just about getting to London quicker) there would be the potential for fast regional HS2 services in the Midlands and northwards. For instance, Birmingham to Leeds is a train journey which currently takes about 2 hours. HS2 would reduce that to 46 minutes. With the additional of Northern Powerhouse Rail (another high speed line, running east-west across the north of England) HS2 was the ultimate knitting together project for the Midlands and a lot of the north of England. You might even say it would level up the area. But we don’t talk a lot about levelling up and Northern Powerhouses these days…

By 2012, the decision had been taken to authorise HS2 via two separate parliamentary bills. The bill for Phase 1 (London to Birmingham) finally got royal assent in 2017 allowing construction to begin; not that any actual construction work started, mind. The same year, the bill for Phase 2 was introduced, complicatedly dividing the remaining HS2 network into two sub-phases: 2A from Birmingham to Crewe and 2B for Crewe to Manchester and Birmingham to Leeds. This always looked ominous because it was treating HS2, which only really makes sense as its complete Y-shaped network, as a series of discrete projects.

Because governments love nothing more than rail reviews which defer the need for actual decisions and expenditure, and which can then be safely ignored, HS2 non-executive chair Douglas Oakervee was called in during 2019 to undertake a full review of HS2. Possibly the DfT was hoping he might announce that having discovered reliable teleportation technology, we no longer needed to spend the money on HS2. Sadly for the government the Oakervee Review, published in 2020, found in favour of the full HS2 Y-shaped network. Then prime minister/dissembling con artist Boris Johnson promised (uh-oh) that HS2 would therefore go ahead in full, to the great relief of politicians and businesses in the Midlands and North for the reasons briefly outlined above.

Phase 2A then received royal assent in February 2021. As for Phase 2B – oh, wait, no, hang on a minute, progress on Phase 1 first.

In 2020, actual construction of Phase 1 was authorised. That’s 10 years after the HS2 network design was agreed, eight years after the legislative process was announced and three years after royal assent for Phase 1 was granted. It’s no wonder that costs for HS2 keep rising – when you spin out the processes you are paying people to work on those processes without actually building anything, and in the meantime actual construction costs keep rising. You try getting a quote for a house extension and then finding a builder 10 years later who will build it for that quote. HS2 Ltd comes in for a lot of criticism but frankly most of HS2’s construction/finance problems stem from a complete lack of consistent government support for an agreed final product. If you have ever watched an exasperated builder on Grand Designs try to complete a house as the client continually revises the design of that house around them, you will understand the problem all too well.

So it was that, embarrassingly (for us), in 2020 China offered to build HS2 in full in about five years. And given the speed with which the Chinese have developed and built their own high speed railway network, the idea has some superficial appeal. However, it wasn’t and isn’t a serious proposition – to match Chinese rates of high speed rail construction we’d have to accept the same level of environmental and labour protections that apply in China. These are a lot lower than those in the UK, and are one of the several reasons why it is sensible to be somewhat conflicted over the development of high speed rail in China. In fact, I suspect that part of the reason China made the offer was just to highlight the deficiencies of western democratic processes in getting anything done.

Nevertheless, while our higher labour and environmental standards mean that high speed rail construction will inevitably take longer in the UK than in China, there is absolutely no reason apart from a lack of political will, why HS2 should be taking as long to build as it currently is. One only has to look to mainland Europe to see other countries developing their high speed rail networks to prove this, though the current UK government is generally highly reluctant to even admit to the existence of mainland Europe, rendering such an exercise rather difficult. We have become, I’m afraid, a not very serious country.

Back to Phase 2 (sort of). In October 2021 the government cut the number of platforms planned at HS2’s Euston terminus from 11 to 10. This doesn’t sound much, and had the benefit of allowing the station to be built in a single phase rather than two, as originally planned. Except the 11th platform was vital in giving space for train services in the event of disruption. HS2 Ltd said that 10 platforms could handle the full timetable for the Y-shaped network, but the unspoken qualification was that this relied on the timetable performing perfectly at all times. And let’s face it, real life just isn’t that accommodating. Most rail industry experts seemed pretty sure this was the preparatory work for downsizing HS2’s ultimate network, and with the government seemingly much cooler on HS2’s eastern leg to Leeds than its western leg to Manchester, there was a sense of dread about what would happen next.

What happened, a month later, was the government’s Integrated Rail Plan for the North and Midlands. This was a posh name for a decision to scrap virtually all of HS2’s eastern leg, reducing it to a short stretch running from Birmingham to somewhere near East Midlands Parkway station now to be called HS2 East. You will remember Johnson’s 2020 promise that HS2 would be built in full, which turned out (of course) to be a promise with as much substance to it as anything else he has ever promised anybody anywhere at any time.

I think it’s fair to say that there was never a great deal of clarity about what services on this massively truncated eastern section were supposed to look like, but it meant that HS2 probably wouldn’t be taking intercity services off the Midland Main Line and East Coast Main Line in that scenario. At a stroke, the Integrated Rail Plan made HS2 about two-thirds less useful, destroying its network benefits. Following publication of the Integrated Rail Plan, HS2’s main function was re-imagined as a relief to the West Coast Main Line between London and Manchester; worthy in itself but hardly the visionary change in the way north of London railways operate that the full HS2 Y-shaped network would have delivered.

The Integrated Rail Plan promised, in lieu of HS2’s eastern leg, other rail network upgrades in recompense, including no less than three new stretches of high speed railway.

Surprisingly (not surprisingly), nothing has been heard of the latter since.

Back to Phase 1 again, where in March this year the government announced a two-year delay to completion to save money, although leaked government briefing documents said the delay would actually cost about £360m more in the long term. As a consequence of indecision about Euston station’s final design, in April work was paused on the tunnels leading from HS2’s west London station at Old Oak Common to Euston. Tunnelling machines have been buried at Old Oak Common in the hope that the government might decide to start them up at some point, what with there being a huge hole in the ground at Euston on which very little work is taking place, blighting the local area.

In summer, rumours started circulating that the DfT wanted to further reduce the number of platforms to Euston to seven, although without any obvious justification beyond saving money. In July, the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee issued a bleakly entertaining report (provided you are a fan of jet-black comedy) accusing the government of not knowing what it wants HS2’s Euston station to achieve after eight solid years of design reviews, and imposing as-yet-unknown costs and impacts on the local community and small businesses.

Current best guesstimates are that part of HS2 Phase 1 might open sometime between 2029 and 2033 with a limited train service capped by the ability of Old Oak Common station to act as a terminus rather than a through station as it has been designed, with Euston possibly opening in 2035, a mere 25 years after go ahead was given for the scheme and 15 years after construction of HS2 was authorised.

And that, as the expression has it, is all folks.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak spent the week leading up to the Conservative Party’s annual conference in October refusing to answer questions about whether HS2 Phases 2A and 2B to Manchester would definitely go ahead (apparently he was “not speculating on future things” which rather calls into question the whole purpose of government). Given that the annual conference was being held in Manchester this was a – brave – strategy.

Sure enough, Sunak used his keynote speech to the conference to announce that he was cancelling everything but the Birmingham-Manchester stretch of HS2; not just the Phases 2A and 2B to Crewe and Manchester, but the truncated HS2 East to East Midlands Parkway too, then.

Sunak’s announcement effectively turned HS2 into the expensive white elephant that critics have long (but wrongly, until now) suggested it was. Under Sunak’s plans, HS2 trains will use the London-Birmingham HS2 line and then switch to existing railway lines to meander up to Manchester. This is reminiscent of the way Eurostar trains used to come off Phase 1 of HS1 to dawdle their way along existing commuter railway lines to London Waterloo until HS1’s Phase 2 to St Pancras International opened several years later (no-one ever learns anything in transport planning, you see.)

Though Sunak grudgingly confirmed that HS2 would indeed terminate at Euston – incredibly it was seriously thought he might also scrap the Old Oak Common to Euston stretch – he said that the design for the Euston terminal would be taken forward in a new way, and would no longer be managed by HS2 Ltd. Forget the rumoured seven platform version too – now it’s down to just six platforms.

In recompense for scrapping HS2 except for Phase 1 from Birmingham to London, Sunak announced a suite of rail, bus and road schemes, using the money ‘saved’. Network North, as it is called, puzzlingly covers the whole of Britain, and as well as including some well-meaning rail projects also includes such revolutions in the sustainable transport network as motorway upgrades and filling potholes. Many of the schemes have been announced before.

The trouble with funding Network North from ‘savings’ made by scrapping HS2 is, that’s not how HS2’s finances work.

The funding for HS2 is borrowed against future fares income from the line. Scrapping HS2 doesn’t free up money to invest elsewhere on the railway. It just vanishes, because there is no future HS2 fares income to borrow against. So when the government says it is using money freed up from cancelling HS2 between Birmingham and Manchester, it is not being entirely honest. What it means is that it is spending money on other things to divert attention from the impact of cancelling HS2 Phases 2A and 2B. Road resurfacing and motorway improvements don’t generate direct revenues, so this is actual spending which will have to come from taxes, rather than borrowing which will be repaid.

In any case, if the experience of the Integrated Rail Plan is anything to go by (remember those three new high speed lines?), Network North‘s projects are very far from guaranteed to happen.

Meanwhile, failing to complete HS2 leaves the rail network north of London with same problem that HS2 was designed to solve. People want more trains running more regularly, especially local and regional services, but they can’t be delivered unless capacity-hungry long distance high speed trains are removed from the tracks that they share with them. You need somewhere to put the long distance high speed services, which is… HS2.

There really aren’t any alternatives to HS2 plus Northern Powerhouse Rail if a step change to rail services north of London is to be delivered (although I am willing to accept that the current government actually doesn’t want to see significant improvements to the railway network as part of its attempt to show it is on the side of car drivers).

So here we are. The country that invented railways and gifted them to the world, two years away from celebrating the 200th anniversary of the railway, finds itself apparently unable to build a new one. As I mentioned earlier, we are no longer a very serious country.

For what it’s worth, my long-term crystal ball-gazing prediction is that eventually, the full HS2 Y-shaped network will be built and its Euston terminal will probably have 11 platforms. The transport planning logic is basically unarguable, but as with HS1 (built years after the opening of the Channel Tunnel despite it being blindingly obvious that it was necessary from the outset as the French duly noted on their side of the Channel), we will be dragged to it kicking and screaming and very late, at much greater cost than need have been incurred, and probably after our coastal towns start disappearing under the rising seas. It will also happen after HS2 Euston has opened with too few platforms, necessitating a difficult and costly expansion around both an operational ‘traditional’ station and an operational high speed terminal, further increasing the cost. It is the modern British way. I also predict I will be long since retired, possibly deceased, by the time this happens, so I won’t be around to be proved wrong if it doesn’t.

All of the political nonsense that has permeated the delivery of HS2 makes it seem slightly eccentric to talk about the look of its stations. Yet somehow, despite everything, construction work on HS2 Phase 1 is progressing. We might not really know when the line is going to open, or how much of it will do so initially, but incredibly – given the complete political mismanagement of the project – it actually will happen one day, barring complete transport policy disaster. Construction work on its stations (Euston excepted) is happening right now, and the window for suddenly scaling them down (Euston excepted) is closing fast.

Next time, assuming the fallout of the most recent political developments hasn’t enraged me too much to write about Phase 1 at all, we will have a look at the station designs of HS2. ⯀

[Cover image: kele_jb1984, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

Further reading and bibliography

gmp’s project page for Tianjin West

Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Railway Company website

…and anything else linked to in the text above

How to find Tianjin West

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