The fact that a train between Birmingham and Warrington (for Manchester and Liverpool) takes about the same amount of time as from Warrington to Carlisle, a route almost 60 miles longer as the crow flies, is embarassing, and it's only going to get worse.
As someone who moved from the Bay Area™ to an area which is ground zero for North American tornado activity, the heartland states are also becoming too expensive to live in. There's got to be some kind of correction eventually...as to whether any of us have will survived this speculative hoarding of human shelter, who can say?
@@fauxpinkytoo in my home state of Minnesota, the Minneapolis council has greatly expanded its rollout of affordable housing which has cooled the inflation rate for housing in general to 1%. It’s still outrageously expensive but it’s heading in the right direction. Hopefully they keep it up.
Only in the south-east. Britain has the problem of a very heavily centralised economy. There is London - Mega City One. That's where all the business happens, home of the filthy rich. Around it is a belt of cities that largely function as commuter towns, supplying workers that flood into London each day but can't afford to life there. And outside of that is the wasteland - Britain's version of the rust belt, once home to heavy industry that is no longer viable.
@@vylbird8014 And the elite want to keep it that way, and keep London as the only place things happen, totally uncaring of the fact it takes one banking crisis to cripple the entire UK economy because that's ALL the UK economy is. We have zero diversification. We need to massively invest in our city regions so they can specialise in other industries and sectors, so when one sector shits the bed, the others buffer it and on the whole, the country is still fine. EVERYONE will benefit from that, even the filthy rich. ESPECIALLY the filthy rich, because they can invest their money into something new that's going to have a huge return. But nope. We put all out eggs in the London basket. It says everything that HS2 would have been the first major rail infrastructure built in the UK outside of London since the Victorian era, which is 112 years ago at the absolute latest.
*THIS WAS GENUINELY F-KING TERRIFYING* when incorporated into my understanding of civilisation collapse, the Uk is just screwed into infinity... And I already knew it was screwed - just not USSR 1992 levels screwed.
I like to call it the subcontractor matrioshka. Its a wonder literally anything ever gets done, they seem to be more busy fighting and suying eachother than actually building things. Another issue is deskilling of people actually running those projects - often it seems there isn't anyone who can actually push back against whatever made up nonsense the contractors present as a bid. "Build it out of Renderite for 10£? LOOKS GOOD TO ME!" And then the work starts and it turns out they need to rip every single newly installed door out of the hospital because no one thought to check if hospital beds can pass though them. Currently they are busy laying and ripping out conduits over and over because its like 10 different contractors doing that work (seemingly one for each separate subsystem sharing the conduit) and by the time its "done" half of them are not functioning. Absolute clown show
It does not - I live in Bulgaria now and everything happens and quick. We had a tornado tear up about 100 trees and they fell on school entrances and stuff, before the storm had even ended the council had guys out with chainsaws and cranes, other guys with welders and steel to repair the railings, the crushed cars were loaded and away - the schools opened the next day as normal. All the roads were open. They would not have even got a company contracted to do the safety survey in the first week in the UK.
Strange even hearing about passenger trains. I've never had a ticket beside a 1 or 2 car train creeping at a jogging pace for an only at christmas ride that dead ended in a field and reversed back to the parking lot. Maybe an hour round trip, prolly less. It has been at the dead end where double narrows to one for 20 or 30 years. They put what amounts to a glorified cart with a mower engine on it now. Something you could trailer tow with a compact car. Abandoned 364 days a year near enough.
I think that for once Alice is wrong about Trump and Farage being people who can move the political dial. Both are pretty much defined by their laziness and opportunism. They both just basically unquestioningly parrot talking points from right-wing media and act like it was their idea the whole time. Farage probably didn't even really want a Brexit vote- he infamously went on TV to tell people he heard it had failed before the results were in, and his career took a big hit afterwards because he had to give up his MEP job and he was too ugly to succeed on US television. Trump is eternally cursed because one of the very few achievements of his presidency was helping to fund the development of effective Covid vaccines, but he can't really milk it because so many of his core supporters are fully aboard the anti-vax train and booed him every time he tried to brag about it.
Yeah I think that's fair - the dial on brexit was moved by decades of manufacturing outrage over fake regulations in order to sell papers. I remember the UKIP posters in the Blair years that were focusing on keeping the pound, but it took an unrelated economic crisis to convince people that the reason they couldn't buy a house is the bananas not being bendy enough. (not to excuse what was done to Greece, but that wasn't the cause of problems here in the UK...)
holy shit, gareth loves HS2 more than i love my family; the tories are unspeakably monsterous for killing this man's wife and selling her organs off for the sake of the 😂s, my condolences for this loss for the united kingdom and gareth too
Try as I might, I just can't NOT hate HS2. I love trains as much as the next listener of this podcast, but the whole project has never made any sense to me. If it was really about improving capacity on the network, not just journey times, then why didn't they plan a route that had more intermediate stops and had more connections to other lines, so that more people could use it? They instead decided to focus on a train that only went to a few stations, and only slightly faster than the current trains, but used massively more expensive tracks to do so. Then they announced that this would justify slowing down all the fast trains on the existing lines, even if you live in one of the many, many places HS2 won't go. Then they steadily made it worse and more expensive at every opportunity. There's a real need for major investment in the UK rail network, but from the beginning HS2 has always been really poorly designed and implemented. It's never been very popular in the North beyond a vocal faction of the political and business class, and a lot of the support for it has always come from London-based politicians and businessmen who'd like to be able to get to Northern airports and TV studios a bit more easily whilst claiming the (inevitably exorbitant) ticket price on expenses. There is basically no demand for a fast train from Old Oak Common (where nobody wants to go unless they live near the Elizabeth Line) to a station 15 minutes walk from Birmingham New Street (where all the other trains in Birmingham go). There's no point at all to the project in such a mutilated form. If they're not building it from Euston to Manchester then they ought to just kill the whole project rather than waste any more money on it.
I think Gareth has been through this more on railnatter, but in a nutshell; High-speed, limited stop trains cause a problem because local stopping trains get in their way. In order to enable high-speed, limited stop services on current infrastructure we have to keep local stopping services infrequent, and start them just behind one high-speed service so they can end just in front of the next one. Building a separate line for the high-speed, limited stop services mean that you can massively increase the frequency of local stopping services on existing track without them getting in the way. If all HS2 did was add additional even faster services it would be just as pointless as you assess it to be, but it's by pulling fast services out the way of local services that it can deliver real capacity benefits. HS2 to Manchester would have enabled a station like Winsford, as a random example, to get more than 1TPH in each direction. Right now there's 2TPH from Crewe to Liverpool, one direct and one stopping (the stopping train calls at Winsford), but sure enough the stopping train departs a mere 6 minutes after the direct train - any more would get in the way of the fast trains to Scotland that HS2 phase 2 was supposed to carry. In a few words: we already have fast(ish), low-capacity services and HS2 would have got them out of the way of the trains that more people can use.
Notice that HS2 was originally to end in London right next to HS1, but with no connectivity between them? Because HS2 was designed on the assumption that all meaningful journeys would start or end in London. Why would anyone want to travel otherwise? The purpose of HS2 was to bring more commuter workers to satisfy London, as businesses there are unhappy that the cost of living there means even the cleaning staff demand high wages.
@@Mickulty Worth noting too that the frequency of the fast trains (at least before Avanti got hold of things. It's fucking First Group for christ sake, they can't run anything well) was every 20 minutes or so. So 3 trains an hour to/from Manchester and London (or Glasgow), then stop at 3-5 places all the way. That gives you a good idea of how much capacity these services eat up on the existing network.
@@vylbird8014 The original, original plan was to directly connect HS1 and HS2 under Euston, St Pancras and Kings Cross in a massive underground interchange station. If you look at the alignment of HS1 it flows perfectly into that plan. Stratford International was also part of this plan for people who needed to get off (or on) not quite so centrally so as to not have quite as many people all in that one mega hub. You have have got on in Manchester and gone all the way to Brussels, all on one train.
Liam wasn't lying about Gareth Dennis' voice tho aye
Even a year later.
The “PVP enabled” comment is hilarious and helps takes the sting off of the grim reality
i see gareth dennis, i click
The fact that a train between Birmingham and Warrington (for Manchester and Liverpool) takes about the same amount of time as from Warrington to Carlisle, a route almost 60 miles longer as the crow flies, is embarassing, and it's only going to get worse.
It takes 20 minutes longer to get from Manchester to Newcastle than it does to get from Manchester to London. It's a third of the distance.
Britain is already like San Francisco because nobody can afford to live there.
As someone who moved from the Bay Area™ to an area which is ground zero for North American tornado activity, the heartland states are also becoming too expensive to live in. There's got to be some kind of correction eventually...as to whether any of us have will survived this speculative hoarding of human shelter, who can say?
@@fauxpinkytoo in my home state of Minnesota, the Minneapolis council has greatly expanded its rollout of affordable housing which has cooled the inflation rate for housing in general to 1%. It’s still outrageously expensive but it’s heading in the right direction. Hopefully they keep it up.
Only in the south-east. Britain has the problem of a very heavily centralised economy. There is London - Mega City One. That's where all the business happens, home of the filthy rich. Around it is a belt of cities that largely function as commuter towns, supplying workers that flood into London each day but can't afford to life there. And outside of that is the wasteland - Britain's version of the rust belt, once home to heavy industry that is no longer viable.
@@vylbird8014 And the elite want to keep it that way, and keep London as the only place things happen, totally uncaring of the fact it takes one banking crisis to cripple the entire UK economy because that's ALL the UK economy is. We have zero diversification. We need to massively invest in our city regions so they can specialise in other industries and sectors, so when one sector shits the bed, the others buffer it and on the whole, the country is still fine. EVERYONE will benefit from that, even the filthy rich. ESPECIALLY the filthy rich, because they can invest their money into something new that's going to have a huge return. But nope. We put all out eggs in the London basket. It says everything that HS2 would have been the first major rail infrastructure built in the UK outside of London since the Victorian era, which is 112 years ago at the absolute latest.
Internal Affairs that are internal to everything: Eternal Affairs.
*THIS WAS GENUINELY F-KING TERRIFYING* when incorporated into my understanding of civilisation collapse, the Uk is just screwed into infinity...
And I already knew it was screwed - just not USSR 1992 levels screwed.
Oh shit they released tomorrows episode today. Truly a trashFUTURE
I like to call it the subcontractor matrioshka. Its a wonder literally anything ever gets done, they seem to be more busy fighting and suying eachother than actually building things. Another issue is deskilling of people actually running those projects - often it seems there isn't anyone who can actually push back against whatever made up nonsense the contractors present as a bid. "Build it out of Renderite for 10£? LOOKS GOOD TO ME!" And then the work starts and it turns out they need to rip every single newly installed door out of the hospital because no one thought to check if hospital beds can pass though them. Currently they are busy laying and ripping out conduits over and over because its like 10 different contractors doing that work (seemingly one for each separate subsystem sharing the conduit) and by the time its "done" half of them are not functioning. Absolute clown show
It does not - I live in Bulgaria now and everything happens and quick. We had a tornado tear up about 100 trees and they fell on school entrances and stuff, before the storm had even ended the council had guys out with chainsaws and cranes, other guys with welders and steel to repair the railings, the crushed cars were loaded and away - the schools opened the next day as normal. All the roads were open. They would not have even got a company contracted to do the safety survey in the first week in the UK.
It’s contract managers all the way down.
Is this what the Romans felt like?
Strange even hearing about passenger trains. I've never had a ticket beside a 1 or 2 car train creeping at a jogging pace for an only at christmas ride that dead ended in a field and reversed back to the parking lot. Maybe an hour round trip, prolly less.
It has been at the dead end where double narrows to one for 20 or 30 years. They put what amounts to a glorified cart with a mower engine on it now. Something you could trailer tow with a compact car.
Abandoned 364 days a year near enough.
"getting quests from sainsbury's to fight shoplifters" is that british-memes-in-doom guy still making their map? could be a new combat area
Oh hell no if you see a shop lifter you didn't see a shop lifter (at least when it comes to big shops like tesco)
Thisssss
I think that for once Alice is wrong about Trump and Farage being people who can move the political dial. Both are pretty much defined by their laziness and opportunism. They both just basically unquestioningly parrot talking points from right-wing media and act like it was their idea the whole time. Farage probably didn't even really want a Brexit vote- he infamously went on TV to tell people he heard it had failed before the results were in, and his career took a big hit afterwards because he had to give up his MEP job and he was too ugly to succeed on US television. Trump is eternally cursed because one of the very few achievements of his presidency was helping to fund the development of effective Covid vaccines, but he can't really milk it because so many of his core supporters are fully aboard the anti-vax train and booed him every time he tried to brag about it.
Yeah I think that's fair - the dial on brexit was moved by decades of manufacturing outrage over fake regulations in order to sell papers. I remember the UKIP posters in the Blair years that were focusing on keeping the pound, but it took an unrelated economic crisis to convince people that the reason they couldn't buy a house is the bananas not being bendy enough.
(not to excuse what was done to Greece, but that wasn't the cause of problems here in the UK...)
You're supposed to commute by Canal Boat, not kayak
You could kayak along the canals I guess? Maybe bung a lift from a narrowboat when you're feeling a little tired.
FLY THERE LIKE MARY POPPINS I DONT KNOW WHAT TO TELL YOU
8:34 I have become Chong, destroyer of woke
holy shit, gareth loves HS2 more than i love my family; the tories are unspeakably monsterous for killing this man's wife and selling her organs off for the sake of the 😂s, my condolences for this loss for the united kingdom and gareth too
Make Britain PvE Again
Try as I might, I just can't NOT hate HS2. I love trains as much as the next listener of this podcast, but the whole project has never made any sense to me. If it was really about improving capacity on the network, not just journey times, then why didn't they plan a route that had more intermediate stops and had more connections to other lines, so that more people could use it? They instead decided to focus on a train that only went to a few stations, and only slightly faster than the current trains, but used massively more expensive tracks to do so. Then they announced that this would justify slowing down all the fast trains on the existing lines, even if you live in one of the many, many places HS2 won't go. Then they steadily made it worse and more expensive at every opportunity.
There's a real need for major investment in the UK rail network, but from the beginning HS2 has always been really poorly designed and implemented. It's never been very popular in the North beyond a vocal faction of the political and business class, and a lot of the support for it has always come from London-based politicians and businessmen who'd like to be able to get to Northern airports and TV studios a bit more easily whilst claiming the (inevitably exorbitant) ticket price on expenses.
There is basically no demand for a fast train from Old Oak Common (where nobody wants to go unless they live near the Elizabeth Line) to a station 15 minutes walk from Birmingham New Street (where all the other trains in Birmingham go). There's no point at all to the project in such a mutilated form. If they're not building it from Euston to Manchester then they ought to just kill the whole project rather than waste any more money on it.
I think Gareth has been through this more on railnatter, but in a nutshell;
High-speed, limited stop trains cause a problem because local stopping trains get in their way. In order to enable high-speed, limited stop services on current infrastructure we have to keep local stopping services infrequent, and start them just behind one high-speed service so they can end just in front of the next one.
Building a separate line for the high-speed, limited stop services mean that you can massively increase the frequency of local stopping services on existing track without them getting in the way.
If all HS2 did was add additional even faster services it would be just as pointless as you assess it to be, but it's by pulling fast services out the way of local services that it can deliver real capacity benefits.
HS2 to Manchester would have enabled a station like Winsford, as a random example, to get more than 1TPH in each direction. Right now there's 2TPH from Crewe to Liverpool, one direct and one stopping (the stopping train calls at Winsford), but sure enough the stopping train departs a mere 6 minutes after the direct train - any more would get in the way of the fast trains to Scotland that HS2 phase 2 was supposed to carry.
In a few words: we already have fast(ish), low-capacity services and HS2 would have got them out of the way of the trains that more people can use.
Notice that HS2 was originally to end in London right next to HS1, but with no connectivity between them? Because HS2 was designed on the assumption that all meaningful journeys would start or end in London. Why would anyone want to travel otherwise? The purpose of HS2 was to bring more commuter workers to satisfy London, as businesses there are unhappy that the cost of living there means even the cleaning staff demand high wages.
@@Mickulty Worth noting too that the frequency of the fast trains (at least before Avanti got hold of things. It's fucking First Group for christ sake, they can't run anything well) was every 20 minutes or so. So 3 trains an hour to/from Manchester and London (or Glasgow), then stop at 3-5 places all the way. That gives you a good idea of how much capacity these services eat up on the existing network.
@@vylbird8014 The original, original plan was to directly connect HS1 and HS2 under Euston, St Pancras and Kings Cross in a massive underground interchange station. If you look at the alignment of HS1 it flows perfectly into that plan. Stratford International was also part of this plan for people who needed to get off (or on) not quite so centrally so as to not have quite as many people all in that one mega hub. You have have got on in Manchester and gone all the way to Brussels, all on one train.
@jemimallah2591 Was that just a self description?