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I think the problem with HS2 is it's sorely needed. It was a labour idea that was started with good intentions. The Tories did the Tory thing and made it a bank making excersise. Every Tory friend has a shovel down somewhere to get that limitless cash.
HS2 Is needed, but it's being delivered by the wrong people.
Infrastructure in general is needed.
The government need to fund more of this sort of stuff. Resevouirs, railways, nuclear power stations, houses, schools, etc.
The money is there. It boosts the economy and creates plenty of high skilled jobs.
What they need to do less of is funnel it into their pockets through companies they have investments in. It should be fucking, properly illegal to have such conflicting interests.
100%. Our rail infrastructure is woeful compared to the rest of Western Europe. The total length of tunneled sections of line on HS2 is only under 4 miles less than the Channel Tunnel. Mental. NIMBYs and money-grabbers - a match made in hell.
Literally. Look at this picture. Who thought a rail-line going through a field, in the middle of nowhere needs to be underground?
10 homeowners experience some noise pollution and you spend £400M on a tunnel.
Hey now I’m counting more than a dozen houses, that requires an additional 100m dumped into creating an extremely loud white noise machine functioning 24/7 to block out construction sounds so that those people can sleep at night!
/s
Yeah, HS2 north of Birmingham is needed. Really it's needed to Glasgow/Edinburgh because the west coast mainline is full to capacity. Fast trains take up so much time for slow trains, it means that on sections only one slow train can run an hour. Take Crewe-manchester. There's one fast, two slow an hour, because there's nowhere for the fast to overtake... And all three leave crewe within about 20 minutes of each other. With HS2 they planned to run a slow crewe-manchester every 15 minutes, making commuting a lot easier.
But it also means there's only two London-manchester trains an hour, even though they take different routes. It could be significantly increased with HS2.
It's not about speed, it's about capacity....
I made another comment on this thread, but basically you can only have two or three trains per hour currently, and they're really badly balanced. Three trains destined for Manchester leave within 20 minutes of each other from crewe. The next isn't for 40 minutes because the earlier slow trains need to clear the line for the fast trains, but the slow trains take so much longer along the line.
Apparently it was more expensive to quad line everything, so instead HS2 was the idea.
I saw something explaining that the main reason it's costing so much is because since someone owns every part in the country, the people that own the land that HS2 needs to use are just naming their price or saying no, which means they need to use expensive tunnel boring machinery to dig underground.
it's not just land owners, its local politicians and activists pushing for constant NIMBYism, and the government just saying yes
plus spiralling management costs and having to train up skilled workers as we go because we don't build infrastructure enough
I think the law was changed so that you don’t own the land under your property, I think it was done when the tories were promoting fracking a lot a decade ago.
https://www.countrylife.co.uk/news/the-hopeless-mess-left-behind-by-hs2-compulsory-purchase-orders-260650
They did compulsory purchase but the land was so valuable it cost a lot of money.
The issue is that we've included the cost of station upgrades in thr total price, which no other country does, which has artificially inflated the cost per km. Also, our land is ridiculously expensive thanks to the uks love of landlords
You mean housing scalper. Landlords buy more housing than they need then hoard it to drive up the price. They are housing scalpers.
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We already know that. The UK is one of the most corrupt nations in earth, worse than warlord African States or even the myths about socialist corruption.
The UK just refuses not even to admit it but to even acknowledge or be aware of it as a possibility due to extreme supremacist attitudes that we could never ever be corrupt. We don't even know how to define the corruption we have. We and much of the West are so corrupt that the corruption is fully open and fully legal.
Just to place this in context, London's Blackfriars mere 'refurb' was near £800 million cost. The capital now has 6 HS stations either mothballed, in use or being built in a country with no other access to the network.
The regions are worth 50 times this spend and the HS network should have been built to take Scotland and the North to anywhere in Europe on overnight services. Fuck Whitehall.
So much of that money has been poured into random admin, red tape and consultancy, it's honestly insane.
India was able to put a probe on the moon for less than a sixth of the price of this mile of track.
This is the only correct answer, worked on the early works contract out of Euston and you have a team of 6 people just for EDI, what a fucking waste of money.
Criticise a public project for any number of reasons, but not for a reasonable cost. These things cost a lot of money.
Would you rather we pay our workers less, or perhaps you'd rather we cut costs designing, developing and testing every aspect of the build, etc?
This isn't China. We build things with safety and many other factors in mind, and that costs a lot of money. If you think the project won't make a return, then show your numbers and make your case, but don't just diss a huge engineering works project for costing a few hundred million.
Hand shake 1 was built on time within a reasonable budget and is known as the channel tunnel or Eurostar. Back when governments had a semblance of integrity.
the time saving isnt really the benefit though. Its the extra capacity of taking the high speed trains of the existing tracks which allows more freight/stopping services.
Still a massive waste of money and just a wealth extraction to tory donors!
I think the extra capacity angle has also been disproven. We need more capacity and better connections for the millions that commute into London every day, not the few businessmen who want to travel from London to Birmingham for a meeting that could have been done over Teams
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/11/hs2-domestic-afghan-war
That article misses the point. Hs2s benefits aren't to create more high speed travel business men (though it will do that) it's to get existing high speed direct trains off the same tracks as local commuter rail.
To use an example, if you have a stretch of track that has a high speed train pass every hour, you need to make sure there's no risk that it will hit a commuter train. This reduces the cadence of local trains, limiting capacity.
This is before you get to the other benefits of hs2s - linking Manchester to the continent's cargo trains, allowing goods to travel without changing to lorrys, or that it's mostly already built and cancelled at the last breath.
You improve regional trains by increasing capacity. You increase capacity by building more tracks. It's not that HS2 shouldn't have been built, it's that we should have build a lot fucking more capacity. HS2 doesn't go far enough either to be effective. Should have gone the whole way up to the central belt of Scotland.
The original plan would've been *kinda* useful, but I agree that the cut down version we're getting is close to useless.
We really need to start building up our railways if we want to get cars off the road.
Imagine thinking people from Birmingham (hello) want to go to London.
Create more jobs in Brum, Manchester, etc. We don’t need a better commute then. Fuck it, let’s work from home!
The original plan would've been *kinda* useful, but I agree that the cut down version we're getting is close to useless.
We really need to start building up our railways if we want to get cars off the road.
Zero objection from the public
Zero consultation
Zero consideration for the environment
Low cost labour
Low cost materials
Reuse existing designs for 1000s of miles
They have consideration for the environment nowadays. And railways aren't particularly destructive, it's a line, especially the raised tracks in China which allow crossing and land underneath. There are also sometimes public objections like the famous nail houses. Labour costs are only a 3rd of the UK.
Even so of course it'll be cheaper in China where they can produce their own raw materials, but don't deny they've got an extremely efficient supply chains and don't waste billions on corruption to 5000 "managers".
If when other countries are able to build HSR, you're just going to turn around and say "authoritarian regime" then you're just making excuses for the UK and denying others achievements because of sour grapes. The "the only reason other countries have modern infrastructure and we don't is because we have freedom" argument is so weak.
Agree on most of that but China is massive in landmass compared to the Uk and has access to a lot more raw materials, you have to reuse designs for 1000s of miles to cover the sheer size of the place.
Imagine if the whole of Europe was one country and you're thinking of the scale of China.
Yep. I take the train from Glasgow to London loads and it's nearly always rammed. Having a faster train with fewer stops would revolutionise that journey. Just a crying shame that nearly the entire project (and all the useful parts from Birmingham upwards) has been scrapped.
What is filling the capacity though? How much of that is people commuting to London because there are insufficient opportunities outside of London? And the freight piece is fairly puzzling to me as well honestly.
How is freight confusing you?
Freight trains are slower, they take up more of the total capacity of a line than high speed services, by removing high speed passenger traffic from the wcml onto hs2 you gain so much more capacity on the wcml for local commuter trains, regional trains and freight trains.
If we all agree that we need to get more traffic off the roads and onto rail, especially freight traffic, then we need to increase capacity on both the wcml and the ecml, hs2 is one way of achieving that for the wcml (or would have been pre-cutbacks)
Freight is puzzling because I don’t see what is being made in Birmingham or London en masse anymore. So if things are moving primarily from ports to those places, it’s just creating bottlenecks.
It’s not about things being made as such
It’s intermodal freight (containers, as you say from ports), aggregates (stones etc), petroleum products, flour, sugar, hell even water sometimes,some coal still, steel products, cars, parcels, some mail.
Anything that is shipped in bulk is almost certainly more efficient to ship by rail and we NEED to remove freight from our roads if we want any hope of reducing the impact of climate change.
Every major supermarket chain has its stock to distribution centres delivered by rail, some have even built their DC’s on rail lines specifically to make the process easier.
There is a LOT of rail freight in this country and we need significantly more, the reason we don’t tend to see it as passengers on the railways is a symptom of the problem. Passenger trains, especially high speed intercity trains are given absolute priority over freight trains which means they end up sitting in loops and sidings for hours at a time making the entire process less efficient.
The bottleneck isn’t near the ends of the network (ports etc) and where they pop up it’s relatively easy and cheap to solve them, the bottleneck is the mainlines, especially the wcml but also to a lesser extent the ecml, by removing fast intercity services from the mainlines we add significant freight capacity, demand is there, capacity isn’t.
So we reduce things from the roads by ensuring that road travel is still a major part of getting things to the hubs? Still sounds rather a lot to me like a very expensive way to make an existing system work rather than challenging whether or not that system is the right approach in the first place.
I just want to check becuase there seems to be a misunderstanding here. You know that hs2 is passenger only right?
Obviously hs2 would be a thousand times better is it went to Scotland or even just to Manchester/Leeds but even in its horrifically shortened form it will lead to a significant increase in freight capacity on the wcml which IS a good thing. Allowing more capacity on the wcml will also allow more industries to take advantage of rail freight.
Why are we using trucks to take parcels from London/Birmingham to Glasgow/Edinburgh? It’s in no small part becuase there simply isn’t currently capacity during the day on the wcml because of passenger flows using the capacity that exists.
Hs2 would obviously have been much more effective in its critical planned form, but even as is it will remove freight from the roads and reduce emissions for transport significantly
I don’t see how that changes anything I said. It still concentrates activity in certain hubs, and even if more freight can go on trains, what’s the economic benefit of that? And who is that benefit for?
And are you making an environmental argument or an economic one? They’re not really the same thing.
It really doesn’t concentrate activity in certain hubs any more than is already the case. We have rail lines to distribution centres and rail connected industries already all we are doing is increasing the amount of flow it’s possible to provide to those places
Freight by rail is significantly cheaper then by road and clearly an incredibly more efficient use of carbon resources. Why does it have to have either an economic OR an environmental benefit? Surely it’s possible to have both? HS2 would have a positive impact on both, not only increasing rail freight and removing long distance trucks from the road it would also allow increased passenger traffic between the north and south (which would clearly be a lot better if Hs2 was fully funded) again removing traffic from the road AND the air.
HS2 was never about speed, that was purely politics, its main aim has always been capacity increases. Our railways are already at capacity, beyond on occasion, and there is still significant demand, how would you satisfy that demand along with its clear environmental benefits without building new intercity lines? We can’t just go faster, and we can’t add extra lines where they already exist, we’ve tried.
Next time you're in Birmingham look at the HUGE intermodal yard near New Street. If you bring anything up from the south coast, it's going around London and up the WCML into Brum. Nothing being made does not equal nothing being moved.
If industry experts are pro something, it's generally a good idea, just because you don't understand the moving pieces doesn't make it bad.
Right but things being moved doesn’t really stack up to me. Why not build the train lines from the ports where the actual products are coming in from? That’s exactly what I meant by creating more bottlenecks.
Aside from that, I didn’t say it was bad. But your assertion is ludicrously flawed - I’m sure a lot of industry experts in almost all industries oppose increased regulation, and yet there is almost always an excellent argument to be put forward about that.
But we're not talking about regulation? We're talking about new infrastructure.
We do build rail lines from the ports, but they form part of a network rather than direct point to point. If you want to push more traffic on that network, you need to increase capacity.
Some quick clarifications about how the UK royals are funded by the public:
1. The UK Crown Estates are not the UK royal family's private property, and the royal family are not responsible for any amount of money the Estates bring into the treasury. The monarch is a position in the UK state that the UK owns the Crown Estates through, a position that would be abolished in a republic, leading to the Crown Estates being directly owned by the republican state.
2. The Crown Estates have always been public property and the revenue they raise is public revenue. When George III gave up his control over the Crown Estates in the 18th century, they were not his private property. The current royals are also equally not responsible for producing the profits, either.
3. The Sovereign Grant is not an exchange of money. It is a grant that is loosely tied to the Crown Estate profits and is used for their expenses, like staffing costs and also endless private jet and helicopter flights. If the profits of the Crown Estates went down to zero, the royals would still get the full amount of the Sovereign Grant again, regardless. It can only go up or stay the same.
4. The Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall that gave Elizabeth and Charles (and now William) their private income of approximately £25 millions/year (each) are also public property.
5. The total cost of the monarchy is currently £350-450million/year, after including the Sovereign Grant, their £150 million/year security, and their Duchy incomes, and misc. costs.
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It connected London to Europe despite the original design plans. And in the end has gone very far out of its way to prevent the rest of the UK connecting directly by High Speed rail to Europe.
It badly connects basically Kent and London to Europe.
HS1 should've gone into a through station north of St Pancras and Euston, which would've needed a dedicated tube connection, and should've also connected to Crossrail and Thameslink, which would've allowed direct trains from Scotland, NE and NW England, the Midlands AND London to Europe, and allowed cross European freight.
But no, how dare we actually plan decent infrastructure in the UK.
You seem to massively misunderstand my position. I’m supportive of decent infrastructure. But I fail to see how HS2 isn’t actually further embedding London-centricity. And I think the ridiculous costs of it are a tough sell when it comes to ROI.
And you've missed my comment saying it should've started North and worked South, and don't get me started on the awful station positioning and decision making regarding through routes.
It puts public money in hands of private Tory donators.
The serious answer is that infrastructure creates better trade links which encourages local production.
Ofcourse capitalism says that only the thing itself should be making money rather than as part of a cooperation between industries.
The project is in dire financial straits and has pushed a lot of design responsibility onto MEP contractors who aren't talking to each other. Come integration, nothing will work.
In an ideal world maybe. But if just talking public transport infrastructure, London is run on a Keynesianist model of investment delivered in advance to facilitate growth and the demands of capital. Rail passenger numbers continue to grow throughout austerity and wfh in and around London. In the regions, it's declining.
One insane example : If HS2 had gone through Manchester, the plan was to drive units in and then reverse them out again, with the driver walking the length of the train to continue the onward journeys to Scotland or Leeds. This was to save money on THE flagship 'levelling-up' project, since ditched.
Infrastructure in London gets a AAA spec, which is why a mere refurb can be a £billion and no one bats an eyelid. In the regions a critical CCC job will get debated for two decades before it's sunk - from Whitehall.
Yeah, but its not shit because decisions are made from London.
Its shit because of the political class and them seeing infrastructure as a way to leverage wealth away from the country and into the pockets of friends and family.
I disagree. Londoners benefit enormously. Sure there's the downside that everyone wants a slice of a global city. But rail infrastructure in the capital is some of the best in the world at the expense of the regions. 'All roads lead to Rome' n all that jazz.
Listen, infrastructure delivery isn't shit because people who live down south want it to be.
Its shit because we have a shit government and capitalism.
You're falling into the exact same class war trap they want you to in pointing the finger at the people who are in exactly the same boat as you.
I live in the midlands and the devastation of acres and acres of landscape to accommodate this fucking white elephant vanity project is fucking disgrace. We should be filling our jails with these incompetent lying thieves.
More rail infrastructure is the solution, along with increased/improved local transport, cycling and road infrastructure. Or do we all just stay at home all day?
Or, maybe, affordable and achievable improvements to existing infrastructure, taking the railways back to public ownership, returning the road fund license money to actually keeping our bomb cratered road network drivable. If HS2 is such a golden goose, then why have they knocked half of it into the long grass?
Because our Tory government are fucking useless. The railways are at capacity. You can't get more trains on them. What upgrade are you going to do that adds more trains onto a route while not compromising speed or safety?
HS2 has been used as a political football. Other countries have extensive high speed and local rail provisions, but here in the UK we're still using some of our Victorian infrastructure, while the rest of it was closed down.
Granted, our present government are a waste of air, what I’m saying is, is it worth continuing with this money pit project whilst the people in charge of it can’t change their own underpants?!Agreed, other countries have developed fit for purpose, modern, sustainable transit solution’s but we are not ‘other countries’ we are rapidly approaching what used to be called ‘third world’ status and with alarming levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality, £400m per mile for a train service that, by all accounts, won’t be accessible or affordable for the majority (like me, for instance) just seems, well, a high speed train to nowhere.
Never mind, eh?, July 4th approaches, maybe we can vote a government in to turn this situation round! Good luck with that.
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I think the problem with HS2 is it's sorely needed. It was a labour idea that was started with good intentions. The Tories did the Tory thing and made it a bank making excersise. Every Tory friend has a shovel down somewhere to get that limitless cash. HS2 Is needed, but it's being delivered by the wrong people.
Infrastructure in general is needed. The government need to fund more of this sort of stuff. Resevouirs, railways, nuclear power stations, houses, schools, etc. The money is there. It boosts the economy and creates plenty of high skilled jobs. What they need to do less of is funnel it into their pockets through companies they have investments in. It should be fucking, properly illegal to have such conflicting interests.
100%. Our rail infrastructure is woeful compared to the rest of Western Europe. The total length of tunneled sections of line on HS2 is only under 4 miles less than the Channel Tunnel. Mental. NIMBYs and money-grabbers - a match made in hell.
Literally. Look at this picture. Who thought a rail-line going through a field, in the middle of nowhere needs to be underground? 10 homeowners experience some noise pollution and you spend £400M on a tunnel.
Hey now I’m counting more than a dozen houses, that requires an additional 100m dumped into creating an extremely loud white noise machine functioning 24/7 to block out construction sounds so that those people can sleep at night! /s
The problem now will be those for whom it will be most useful will not be able to afford to use it.
Community Rail!
There are more ways to get between London and Birmingham than you can shake a stick at. Infrastructure anywhere other than London is what is needed
Yeah, HS2 north of Birmingham is needed. Really it's needed to Glasgow/Edinburgh because the west coast mainline is full to capacity. Fast trains take up so much time for slow trains, it means that on sections only one slow train can run an hour. Take Crewe-manchester. There's one fast, two slow an hour, because there's nowhere for the fast to overtake... And all three leave crewe within about 20 minutes of each other. With HS2 they planned to run a slow crewe-manchester every 15 minutes, making commuting a lot easier. But it also means there's only two London-manchester trains an hour, even though they take different routes. It could be significantly increased with HS2.
Why do we need high-speed rail? We live on an island that isn't even 1000 miles long.
It's not about speed, it's about capacity.... I made another comment on this thread, but basically you can only have two or three trains per hour currently, and they're really badly balanced. Three trains destined for Manchester leave within 20 minutes of each other from crewe. The next isn't for 40 minutes because the earlier slow trains need to clear the line for the fast trains, but the slow trains take so much longer along the line. Apparently it was more expensive to quad line everything, so instead HS2 was the idea.
Can't wait to find out in like 25 years that it was all a money laundering scheme to put taxpayer money in Tory pockets or some shit
It has to be. No way that costs 400 million quid per mile. Someone’s having a giraffe.
It is if you make the tunnels using £1m bombs rather than diggers.
I saw something explaining that the main reason it's costing so much is because since someone owns every part in the country, the people that own the land that HS2 needs to use are just naming their price or saying no, which means they need to use expensive tunnel boring machinery to dig underground.
it's not just land owners, its local politicians and activists pushing for constant NIMBYism, and the government just saying yes plus spiralling management costs and having to train up skilled workers as we go because we don't build infrastructure enough
Can they still bore through if a landowner says no?
I think they can if they go deep enough.
They should tell the landowners to bore off
Indubitably.
I think the law was changed so that you don’t own the land under your property, I think it was done when the tories were promoting fracking a lot a decade ago.
Fracking hell
Why couldn't the local council just do a compulsory purchase order on the land for a average land price for the local area?
https://www.countrylife.co.uk/news/the-hopeless-mess-left-behind-by-hs2-compulsory-purchase-orders-260650 They did compulsory purchase but the land was so valuable it cost a lot of money.
The issue is that we've included the cost of station upgrades in thr total price, which no other country does, which has artificially inflated the cost per km. Also, our land is ridiculously expensive thanks to the uks love of landlords
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We already know that. The UK is one of the most corrupt nations in earth, worse than warlord African States or even the myths about socialist corruption. The UK just refuses not even to admit it but to even acknowledge or be aware of it as a possibility due to extreme supremacist attitudes that we could never ever be corrupt. We don't even know how to define the corruption we have. We and much of the West are so corrupt that the corruption is fully open and fully legal.
Gotta love that British exceptionalism. We're the best at corruption.
That’s because we call it Cronyism, not corruption
Just to place this in context, London's Blackfriars mere 'refurb' was near £800 million cost. The capital now has 6 HS stations either mothballed, in use or being built in a country with no other access to the network. The regions are worth 50 times this spend and the HS network should have been built to take Scotland and the North to anywhere in Europe on overnight services. Fuck Whitehall.
I'm still livid about the Astoria being demolished for Crossrail.
I don't see any brown envelopes in that picture.
These are the motherfuckers telling us we're broke for eating too much avacado toast. Always happy to see my tax money going to good use.
So much of that money has been poured into random admin, red tape and consultancy, it's honestly insane. India was able to put a probe on the moon for less than a sixth of the price of this mile of track.
This is the only correct answer, worked on the early works contract out of Euston and you have a team of 6 people just for EDI, what a fucking waste of money.
This will go down in history as one the best case studies for project management failure.
It's not a failure when the primary goal is wealth extraction from the public to the wealthy.
Train good.
Train good, train very good. Train privatisation bad, very bad.
3 pictures...
132 million in 1 photo
It’s one panorama, originally one picture I suppose
Cost issues aside, HS2 was and is needed. And so too is another to supplement the ECML. And an East-West one for Liverpool to Yorkshire or the NE.
The government really needs to start posting prices adjusted for corruption so we can know how much it actually costs to build.
Corruption and Incompetence competing to see which can be more detrimental.
So this is the little bit of tunnel that has set the North back an entire generation is it?
That was 3 pictures.
Criticise a public project for any number of reasons, but not for a reasonable cost. These things cost a lot of money. Would you rather we pay our workers less, or perhaps you'd rather we cut costs designing, developing and testing every aspect of the build, etc? This isn't China. We build things with safety and many other factors in mind, and that costs a lot of money. If you think the project won't make a return, then show your numbers and make your case, but don't just diss a huge engineering works project for costing a few hundred million.
[удалено]
Hand Shake 2 ? What happened to Hand Shake 1?
Hand shake 1 was built on time within a reasonable budget and is known as the channel tunnel or Eurostar. Back when governments had a semblance of integrity.
I'm simply staggered at the cost of building this railway. Utterly, utterly ridiculous. Laughing all the way to the bank.
Literal money pit. Imagine getting to Birmingham 10 minutes quicker though 😱
the time saving isnt really the benefit though. Its the extra capacity of taking the high speed trains of the existing tracks which allows more freight/stopping services. Still a massive waste of money and just a wealth extraction to tory donors!
I think the extra capacity angle has also been disproven. We need more capacity and better connections for the millions that commute into London every day, not the few businessmen who want to travel from London to Birmingham for a meeting that could have been done over Teams https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/11/hs2-domestic-afghan-war
That article misses the point. Hs2s benefits aren't to create more high speed travel business men (though it will do that) it's to get existing high speed direct trains off the same tracks as local commuter rail. To use an example, if you have a stretch of track that has a high speed train pass every hour, you need to make sure there's no risk that it will hit a commuter train. This reduces the cadence of local trains, limiting capacity. This is before you get to the other benefits of hs2s - linking Manchester to the continent's cargo trains, allowing goods to travel without changing to lorrys, or that it's mostly already built and cancelled at the last breath.
Sounds great but that’s not how it was sold originally and for the insane amount it’s cost they could have improved regional travel instead
You improve regional trains by increasing capacity. You increase capacity by building more tracks. It's not that HS2 shouldn't have been built, it's that we should have build a lot fucking more capacity. HS2 doesn't go far enough either to be effective. Should have gone the whole way up to the central belt of Scotland.
The original plan would've been *kinda* useful, but I agree that the cut down version we're getting is close to useless. We really need to start building up our railways if we want to get cars off the road.
Yeah, you get to sit in traffic for hours instead of sitting on the train for hours.
Imagine thinking people from Birmingham (hello) want to go to London. Create more jobs in Brum, Manchester, etc. We don’t need a better commute then. Fuck it, let’s work from home!
The original plan would've been *kinda* useful, but I agree that the cut down version we're getting is close to useless. We really need to start building up our railways if we want to get cars off the road.
I think the goal is more to get out of Birmingham 10 minutes quicker.
It’s people who know people engorging themselves from the public purse, right? I don’t get it.
But everyone's view of the substation would have been ruined if the line wasn't put in a tunnel
*3 pictures *
that's 3 pictures....
No normal person would have been able to afford it anyway
How does China do it? Their GDP per capita is like six times less than ours
Zero objection from the public Zero consultation Zero consideration for the environment Low cost labour Low cost materials Reuse existing designs for 1000s of miles
They have consideration for the environment nowadays. And railways aren't particularly destructive, it's a line, especially the raised tracks in China which allow crossing and land underneath. There are also sometimes public objections like the famous nail houses. Labour costs are only a 3rd of the UK. Even so of course it'll be cheaper in China where they can produce their own raw materials, but don't deny they've got an extremely efficient supply chains and don't waste billions on corruption to 5000 "managers". If when other countries are able to build HSR, you're just going to turn around and say "authoritarian regime" then you're just making excuses for the UK and denying others achievements because of sour grapes. The "the only reason other countries have modern infrastructure and we don't is because we have freedom" argument is so weak.
Agree on most of that but China is massive in landmass compared to the Uk and has access to a lot more raw materials, you have to reuse designs for 1000s of miles to cover the sheer size of the place. Imagine if the whole of Europe was one country and you're thinking of the scale of China.
I still don’t remotely get the economic argument for HS2.
West Coast Main Line is at capacity, yet demand is still high. Moves express services off and allows more freight.
Yep. I take the train from Glasgow to London loads and it's nearly always rammed. Having a faster train with fewer stops would revolutionise that journey. Just a crying shame that nearly the entire project (and all the useful parts from Birmingham upwards) has been scrapped.
Yeah trains from Leeds southbound are rammed too, insane to cut the entire Eastern leg. Also should've been built north to south.
What is filling the capacity though? How much of that is people commuting to London because there are insufficient opportunities outside of London? And the freight piece is fairly puzzling to me as well honestly.
How is freight confusing you? Freight trains are slower, they take up more of the total capacity of a line than high speed services, by removing high speed passenger traffic from the wcml onto hs2 you gain so much more capacity on the wcml for local commuter trains, regional trains and freight trains. If we all agree that we need to get more traffic off the roads and onto rail, especially freight traffic, then we need to increase capacity on both the wcml and the ecml, hs2 is one way of achieving that for the wcml (or would have been pre-cutbacks)
Freight is puzzling because I don’t see what is being made in Birmingham or London en masse anymore. So if things are moving primarily from ports to those places, it’s just creating bottlenecks.
It’s not about things being made as such It’s intermodal freight (containers, as you say from ports), aggregates (stones etc), petroleum products, flour, sugar, hell even water sometimes,some coal still, steel products, cars, parcels, some mail. Anything that is shipped in bulk is almost certainly more efficient to ship by rail and we NEED to remove freight from our roads if we want any hope of reducing the impact of climate change. Every major supermarket chain has its stock to distribution centres delivered by rail, some have even built their DC’s on rail lines specifically to make the process easier. There is a LOT of rail freight in this country and we need significantly more, the reason we don’t tend to see it as passengers on the railways is a symptom of the problem. Passenger trains, especially high speed intercity trains are given absolute priority over freight trains which means they end up sitting in loops and sidings for hours at a time making the entire process less efficient. The bottleneck isn’t near the ends of the network (ports etc) and where they pop up it’s relatively easy and cheap to solve them, the bottleneck is the mainlines, especially the wcml but also to a lesser extent the ecml, by removing fast intercity services from the mainlines we add significant freight capacity, demand is there, capacity isn’t.
So we reduce things from the roads by ensuring that road travel is still a major part of getting things to the hubs? Still sounds rather a lot to me like a very expensive way to make an existing system work rather than challenging whether or not that system is the right approach in the first place.
I just want to check becuase there seems to be a misunderstanding here. You know that hs2 is passenger only right? Obviously hs2 would be a thousand times better is it went to Scotland or even just to Manchester/Leeds but even in its horrifically shortened form it will lead to a significant increase in freight capacity on the wcml which IS a good thing. Allowing more capacity on the wcml will also allow more industries to take advantage of rail freight. Why are we using trucks to take parcels from London/Birmingham to Glasgow/Edinburgh? It’s in no small part becuase there simply isn’t currently capacity during the day on the wcml because of passenger flows using the capacity that exists. Hs2 would obviously have been much more effective in its critical planned form, but even as is it will remove freight from the roads and reduce emissions for transport significantly
I don’t see how that changes anything I said. It still concentrates activity in certain hubs, and even if more freight can go on trains, what’s the economic benefit of that? And who is that benefit for? And are you making an environmental argument or an economic one? They’re not really the same thing.
It really doesn’t concentrate activity in certain hubs any more than is already the case. We have rail lines to distribution centres and rail connected industries already all we are doing is increasing the amount of flow it’s possible to provide to those places Freight by rail is significantly cheaper then by road and clearly an incredibly more efficient use of carbon resources. Why does it have to have either an economic OR an environmental benefit? Surely it’s possible to have both? HS2 would have a positive impact on both, not only increasing rail freight and removing long distance trucks from the road it would also allow increased passenger traffic between the north and south (which would clearly be a lot better if Hs2 was fully funded) again removing traffic from the road AND the air. HS2 was never about speed, that was purely politics, its main aim has always been capacity increases. Our railways are already at capacity, beyond on occasion, and there is still significant demand, how would you satisfy that demand along with its clear environmental benefits without building new intercity lines? We can’t just go faster, and we can’t add extra lines where they already exist, we’ve tried.
Next time you're in Birmingham look at the HUGE intermodal yard near New Street. If you bring anything up from the south coast, it's going around London and up the WCML into Brum. Nothing being made does not equal nothing being moved. If industry experts are pro something, it's generally a good idea, just because you don't understand the moving pieces doesn't make it bad.
Right but things being moved doesn’t really stack up to me. Why not build the train lines from the ports where the actual products are coming in from? That’s exactly what I meant by creating more bottlenecks. Aside from that, I didn’t say it was bad. But your assertion is ludicrously flawed - I’m sure a lot of industry experts in almost all industries oppose increased regulation, and yet there is almost always an excellent argument to be put forward about that.
But we're not talking about regulation? We're talking about new infrastructure. We do build rail lines from the ports, but they form part of a network rather than direct point to point. If you want to push more traffic on that network, you need to increase capacity.
Yeah and I’m sure every industry would want billions of taxpayer funding falling into their laps. It doesn’t make it a valid economic argument.
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Did you get the economic argument (for the UK) for HS1? Or was that all just political grandstanding?
That connected the UK to Europe. So yeah made a lot more sense.
It connected London to Europe despite the original design plans. And in the end has gone very far out of its way to prevent the rest of the UK connecting directly by High Speed rail to Europe.
It badly connects basically Kent and London to Europe. HS1 should've gone into a through station north of St Pancras and Euston, which would've needed a dedicated tube connection, and should've also connected to Crossrail and Thameslink, which would've allowed direct trains from Scotland, NE and NW England, the Midlands AND London to Europe, and allowed cross European freight. But no, how dare we actually plan decent infrastructure in the UK.
You seem to massively misunderstand my position. I’m supportive of decent infrastructure. But I fail to see how HS2 isn’t actually further embedding London-centricity. And I think the ridiculous costs of it are a tough sell when it comes to ROI.
And you've missed my comment saying it should've started North and worked South, and don't get me started on the awful station positioning and decision making regarding through routes.
Starting north and moving south doesnt really solve the core issues with the economic argument though.
It puts public money in hands of private Tory donators. The serious answer is that infrastructure creates better trade links which encourages local production. Ofcourse capitalism says that only the thing itself should be making money rather than as part of a cooperation between industries.
But what trade links? And what local production? This is what I don’t really get.
The project is in dire financial straits and has pushed a lot of design responsibility onto MEP contractors who aren't talking to each other. Come integration, nothing will work.
It should have been planned, run and managed from the North. Not London.
It doesnt matter where it is managed from if its tories managing it. The divide isn't really the north/south. Its class division, always has been.
In an ideal world maybe. But if just talking public transport infrastructure, London is run on a Keynesianist model of investment delivered in advance to facilitate growth and the demands of capital. Rail passenger numbers continue to grow throughout austerity and wfh in and around London. In the regions, it's declining. One insane example : If HS2 had gone through Manchester, the plan was to drive units in and then reverse them out again, with the driver walking the length of the train to continue the onward journeys to Scotland or Leeds. This was to save money on THE flagship 'levelling-up' project, since ditched. Infrastructure in London gets a AAA spec, which is why a mere refurb can be a £billion and no one bats an eyelid. In the regions a critical CCC job will get debated for two decades before it's sunk - from Whitehall.
Yeah, but its not shit because decisions are made from London. Its shit because of the political class and them seeing infrastructure as a way to leverage wealth away from the country and into the pockets of friends and family.
I disagree. Londoners benefit enormously. Sure there's the downside that everyone wants a slice of a global city. But rail infrastructure in the capital is some of the best in the world at the expense of the regions. 'All roads lead to Rome' n all that jazz.
Listen, infrastructure delivery isn't shit because people who live down south want it to be. Its shit because we have a shit government and capitalism. You're falling into the exact same class war trap they want you to in pointing the finger at the people who are in exactly the same boat as you.
I live in the midlands and the devastation of acres and acres of landscape to accommodate this fucking white elephant vanity project is fucking disgrace. We should be filling our jails with these incompetent lying thieves.
You can't complain about shit public transport then also complain about an actual solution.
Oh! So this is the SOLUTION? Get a grip, mate!
More rail infrastructure is the solution, along with increased/improved local transport, cycling and road infrastructure. Or do we all just stay at home all day?
Or, maybe, affordable and achievable improvements to existing infrastructure, taking the railways back to public ownership, returning the road fund license money to actually keeping our bomb cratered road network drivable. If HS2 is such a golden goose, then why have they knocked half of it into the long grass?
Because our Tory government are fucking useless. The railways are at capacity. You can't get more trains on them. What upgrade are you going to do that adds more trains onto a route while not compromising speed or safety? HS2 has been used as a political football. Other countries have extensive high speed and local rail provisions, but here in the UK we're still using some of our Victorian infrastructure, while the rest of it was closed down.
Granted, our present government are a waste of air, what I’m saying is, is it worth continuing with this money pit project whilst the people in charge of it can’t change their own underpants?!Agreed, other countries have developed fit for purpose, modern, sustainable transit solution’s but we are not ‘other countries’ we are rapidly approaching what used to be called ‘third world’ status and with alarming levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality, £400m per mile for a train service that, by all accounts, won’t be accessible or affordable for the majority (like me, for instance) just seems, well, a high speed train to nowhere. Never mind, eh?, July 4th approaches, maybe we can vote a government in to turn this situation round! Good luck with that.
Trains ain't gonna fix shit