> As someone who spent a lot of time in London I hope he is correct about the track capacity released for local trains once the intercity move to the new lines.

Well of course there is. There's currently 10 trains an hour in each direction that run non-stop through Milton Keynes.

There could easily be an initial service along the lines of

Slow lines

  6tph London-Harrow-Watford-Stations to MKC
  6tph London-Watford-Hemel-Leighton-Bletchley-MKC

Fast lines

  6tph London-Watford-MKC-Northampton
  4pth London-Watford-MKC-Rugby-All_stops_TrentValley-Stafford
  4pth London-Watford-MKC-Rugby-Coventry-Airport-Birmingham

And I suspect stops at OOC will come too.

He's correct that there will be more track capacity. The question is whether it'll be used if a significant chunk of passenger traffic ends up getting moved to HS2. It might be that because the loss of traffic makes it less economically viable to operate trains on the existing routes, some stations actually end up getting served less frequently.

I don’t see how HS2 can move significant amounts of local traffic off local lines.

It’s a high speed intercity line that only has a few stops (compared to a local or commuter service). It can’t provide local services, it doesn’t have the stations or the track to do so. It also won’t be high speed of it stopped every 10miles.

As I understand it, it's because there often aren't 'local lines' per se. For instance, if you want to go from Doncaster to Retford (about a ten-fifteen minute journey)[1], you're either on the East Coast Main Line (which runs Edinburgh-London) or the Hull line (which runs Hull-London). The necessity to runs express/intercity services on the same line reduces the ability to schedule local services - a slow moving/frequently stopping local service would block express trains.

It's less about moving local traffic off current lines, and more about freeing them up to provide local services. You could potentially see something like Bawtry station[2], which is between the two, brought back into service if there is demand, whereas it might not currently make sense to do so as the line's primary purpose is intercity travel.

[1] Not necessarily something that might be affected by HS2 - just a set of stations I know as an example.

[2] Closed in 1959, but Wikipedia notes: "land near the station has been protected should the site be required as a new station, with car parking facilities, in the future as the town grows". The line initially went Doncaster-Rossington-Bawtry-Scrooby-Ranskill-Barnby-Retford, but now only Doncaster and Retford remain.