It also means that the smaller trips in the midlands and north don't need to get out of the way of a direct line from Manchester->London.

There is a lot of North north of Manchester and Leeds

As someone from the North who considers themself ‘British’ rather than Scottish or English, I've always viewed Yorkshire as the ‘midlands’ :)

Joking aside, if Britain is every to grow beyond being quite so London-centric, we do really have to focus on the belt from Manchester to Hull more, North East too.

The question is to what extent increasing capacity like this will actually be useful. Trains from regional cities to/from London at non-peak times usually don't run at capacity in my experience, so they shouldn't be affected. For peak times, I'm not sure there are many people who would travel at approximately the current prices (this may be changed by HS2 but not immediately). Therefore assuming an efficient market I would expect the main benefit of increasing supply to be a drop in price at peak times. But assuming anything about British public transport is efficient is a risky bet.

I’m not convinced that there would be any decrease in price - why would there be?

HS2 is probably going to be £300+ for a peak return from London to Leeds - yes, I pulled that from my backside, but given when it’s due to launch and the ever-ratcheting fares, I think it’s perfectly realistic.

As to supply and demand influencing pricing - yes and no. While there will be more capacity, existing operators and franchises may or may not take advantage of it, and even if they do, what possible motivation would they have for reducing their prices? They won’t be competing with HS2 on price - if anything, the inevitability high fares for HS2 will provide an anchor for a price increase on the old mainline. The only others trains running on the same route will be theirs, as that’s how the rail franchise system works, so their only competition will be themselves - i.e. none.

The West Coast Main Line is easily at capacity. There are upper limits (as dictated by the government) on maximum fares, but we can still expect fares to decrease at peak times if there is open space on trains. Likewise with off-peak; empty carriages don't pay the bills, and if they're running twice as many trains then either (a) twice as many people will travel, or (b) fares will decrease until they start filling up.

The problem at the moment in off-peak times is that they dare not reduce the price because there are trains that run during the day which fill up, and there's no good way of differentiating fares between the ones which do and the ones which don't.

> The problem at the moment in off-peak times is that they dare not reduce the price because there are trains that run during the day which fill up, and there's no good way of differentiating fares between the ones which do and the ones which don't.

Isn't there? Travelling from Leeds to London at 7-9am Monday costs several times as much as at 2pm Sunday, and I assume that's because the operators can differentiate which journeys are popular (and furthermore which ones carry large numbers of business people who can afford/expense higher fares).

Currently the process is that tickets are sold in tiers - the closer to sold out, the closer to maximum price. The only control over maximum price is whether it's peak or off peak hours. So there are actually two confounding factors

OK, so I'm not a regular traveller (perhaps twice a year) but every time I go North via train it's rammed.

imho, to prepare for the long-term we should be building infrastructure on the ground to reduce short haul flights.