High Speed 2 Phase Two
planned UK high speed railway

High Speed 2 (HS2) is a new high-speed railway line in England. It was originally planned to connect London with the city centres of Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds directly on new high speed track. East Midlands Airport was also to have been served.
Phase 2 was planned for completion in 2032–2033. However, it was finally cancelled on 4 October 2023.
Phase two was split into two sub-phases:
Phase 2a: the section from Birmingham to Crewe, which was to be built simultaneously with phase 1, effectively merging with phase 1
Phase 2b: the eastern leg of phase 2 which was scrapped in 2021.
The concept of HS2 was that all major cities covered would have a city centre HS2 station. Liverpool, along with London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, was envisaged to have a city centre HS2 station. The scheme was cut down to only three provincial city centres served directly by HS2, two being on phase 2. The preliminary route for Phase Two was announced on 28 January 2013.
“High Speed 2 Phase Two” enters the record as planned UK high speed railway. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what High, Speed and Phase can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “High Speed 2 Phase Two” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.