There's so much going on of Coronas Virus flu's around. Well it happens of Emergency Climate change, so those who avoid severe Viruses from China caught, we'll get more trouble.
I think the reason a lot of people are against HS2 is because they don't understand why it's being built. In all fairness, the project has been framed poorly by the press. The main reason isn't to cut journey times off, that's just a secondary benefit. Essentially, all fast services (currently done by Pendolinos on the West Coast Main Line) will be re-routed via HS2, freeing up the WCML (which is currently VERY congested) to handle commuter traffic. The current Pendolino's require a lot of separation on the WCML because they're doing 125mph on old, crowded infrastructure. With that no longer an issue, the WCML will effectively gain two extra tracks (the old fast lines) for commuter traffic and capacity will effectively double on the old route, and intercity capacity (cities which are served by both classic lines and HS2) will triple. Many Leeds and East Scotland services will also be routed by HS2, taking some pressure off the ECML too. Sadly, much of the increased costs of the line are due to NIMBY'ism, pointless consultations (which amount to nothing when the line is built anyway), and the fact that its being built under existing planning regs rather than an all-encompasing Act of Parliament. This is how the French keep their costs down when building high speed lines.
I can give you a few precise examples of such nimbyism driving up costs - Woodlesford was going to have a junction roughly 1/4mile away where the leeds link would separate from the spur to york, the locals campaigned to have this changed and now the current plans have 2, 2-mile tunnels under the entire village to link up to leeds, with the cost increasing the budget. Church fenton currently has 5 lines going through the village, with the plans calling for 2 more for HS2 (7 total), the locals complained until the route was diverted around the village including a new 1.4km viaduct. I can only imagine how much extra that is going to cost.
it would also allow for bigger capacity trains that are cheaper to manufacturer as due to the tilt mechanisms the loading guage is slightly restricted which means that internally seating per carriage is lost to the tilt mechanism and its safety features and mantenance would inevitably go down aswell as the tilt has to be regularly tested, it would also usher in the digital signalling which will replace the light based signalling currently used meaing that they will begin upgrading the 50+ year old signaling system the UK runs on to in cab systems which allow for with modern breaking and motor tech trains even at high speed to run closer together safely increasing capacity. Thus HS2 will free up the mainline for freight trains which will help the northern economy boom cos since the 1990s there has been an increase in rail freight between the mainland and throughout the UK (hopefully they bring back the postal train too like they did in france) hence the national rail motto "Britain Runs On Rails". If the north is to re industrialise the rails are gonna be of big importance for local commute and freight.
@@temslink2000 they have brought some of the mail trains back. You'll see them every night going down the east coast main line, they are distinctive due to the blue lights on the doors.
@M K MISHRA Depends on which route. I took the Hangzhou to Beijing train in early Dec and it was fully occupied for the second class seats. Probably becos it's more affordable. Not sure about the first and business class seats. I knew this route is very popular and book it online 2 months ahead.
2:40 What we really need is a better service on local trains. And that is *exactly* what HS2 is designed to do. HS2 is designed to take the fast trains off of not one, not two, but three mainline railways. That is going to free up all the big gaps that fast trains need and allow stopping services to bunch up a lot closer together. That will allow locals to get trains with less of a wait. The new station at Birmingham is going to free up the existing Birmingham stations to have more space to platform trains that go to places outside of the HS2 path.
Great Britain is a very interesting case study for this. For many years Britain could avoid investing in high speed rail simply because its InterCity system was really good. Britain was blessed with many railway lines that were so well planned from the very beginning with only few sharp angled curves on all mainlines. Even I thought that Britain may perhaps not need high speed rail because of this very good InterCity speeds up to 125 mph. With such train connections who needs a high speed rail system, right? Ultimately it's backward thingking. In the 1950s you might as well have asked: "With all these great steam locos who needs diesel trains?" Or in the 1980s: "With all these great diesel locos (and cheap oil from Scotland) who needs electrification?" Yes, it's true. It's mind blowing and annoying how damn' expensive to build high speed rail is. But in the end I belive it's inevitable. Better to do it now than waiting another decade until cost has gone up even more.
Use reverse phycology! Pitch to London mob..." How do we help southern people visiting the north get out of there much faster and back to the utopia of London?..
duke Silver you don’t know what bad transport is Machester to Blackpool is 50 miles it took me four hours and all the direct trains were cancelled so you had to swap at Preston this is a norm 😆
I know about HSRail. Just travelled 700k at 200 mph. To Hong Kong .Took 5hr 30 mins. First class uncomfortable. You do not need HS2 for short journeys.waste money. Upgrade existing rail to allow trains to do 100 mph as they did 60 years ago. I remember seeing steam engine Flying Scotsman
you clearly know nothing about rail networks if you're saying that. Let's do a simple thought experiment and look at the leeds to birmingham leg since that is a simple network - there is just one direct line, 2 tracks currently, this means that hs2 would double that to four. Imagine you decided to upgrade the current network to four tracks, you'd have to do the work overnight and at weekends, pay people shift work, put on replacement bus services, re-align every single junction on the route and after all that, you couldn't increase the speed since you can't change physics. It would clearly cost far, far more than building a new line where you could pay people 9-5 and don't need to pay for any rail replacement busses etc. The problem is anti-hs2 people have repeated that lie so much they actually believe it.
"You do not need HS2 for short journeys" Because High Speed Railways are dedicated to intercity express trains... If you want to make short journeys you'd obviously take the local trains, which would have better frequency thanks to the construction of HSR.
i have done extensive research on HS2. One of the key things that so many people (particularly the press) seem to forget about is the fact that HS2 will drastically improve commuter networks. Building of HS2 will allow most intercity trains travelling on the East Coast Mainline, Midland Mainline and West Coast Mainline all to be transferred to HS2. Whilst this doesn't seem like much at first it will drastically improve the frequency of commuter trains on lines. the problem with the current lines we have is that high speed trains of 125mph and slower stopping commuter trains averaging about 60mph all have to share the same lines. The fact they have different speeds and different breaking distances mean headways (the distance between trains have to be huge). By removing the intercity trains off the lines onto HS2 all the trains remaining on the line are of similar characteristics and headway and thus frequency of trains can be drastically increased, reducing overcrowding. It will also increase punctuality of the trains as fewer trains and thus bottlenecks will be removed. Here i have a particular example of this. Aberystwyth (west coast of Wales) about as far from HS2 you can get, will benefit from it. The trains that serve Aberystwyth pass through Birmingham International where it is often congested due to the many different types of trains passing through here (intercity and commuter). This often leads to trains arriving late in Aberystwith. By removing intercity trains from the Birmingham International rail corridor the bottleneck at Birmingham International will be reduced and Aberystwith will get a better service. HS2 will also allow more freight to be transferred to rail freeing up space on our roads.
Maybe spend less on military, agent provocateurs meddling in other faraway countries and put it to the infrastructure building and healthcare? Just a thought.
Give me £100b and I'll build a better train than HS2. I'll call it the *Speedy Hyper Intercity Train*, and the name alone will fall in line with the Conservatives' attitude to public transport.
The reason HS2 cost so much is because of Engineers and Quantity surveyors. The work together to inflate the project billing for up to 30x the actual work hours. It was the same on the Edinburgh trams - everyone was desperate for the project code, because they could easily charge £3000 for £100 worth of work. I know people who worked in the bidding team for Jacob's (HS2 contractor), the exact same will happen with the parliament works too (Jacob's again)
You make it sound like the Contractor's can charge what they want. Their profit margins must be incredible. But they are not- 2 or 3% on turnover is a decent margin. T.he real reason is a lack of technical understanding by Cost Consuktants who cannot understand what things cost. So they put a budget on a project and it's always underestimated. I was an estimator for a national Contractor and every Project I have worked on and heard of since 1997 started off with an offer price that was over the budget.
There's a country that built 35,000km of high speed rail in the last 25 years. And it's gonna takes us 10 years to get less than a 1000. How can people still have faith in the British way of doing things?!
We could build faster than china - we regularly do - the problem is that we let everyone and their dog complain about it rather than getting on and doing it. We never used to be this way, that's why we used to be great. Don't believe me? The victorians needed a line to link the marsh lane station in leeds with the new central station - a direct line would go through the cemetery of the Leeds Minster, so naturally they just got on and built it - they made some new gravestones to replace those buried by the works and they now line the railway embankment.
Does anyone actually believe that this government would spend over £100 billion on a railway so people can get to work 30 mins sooner? You need to see the bigger picture.
@@xaiano794 have you got any references for that? I doubt that there isn't a construction scam going on, the whole thing might be marginalized but I'm sure each part is put out to tender, the Tories would never agree anything without backhanders.
@@fuckfannyfiddlefart and I agree that the work will be issued to their friends, that's why it'll remain nationalised, so they retain full control. Ultimately though that's not an issue with the hs2 project, but with the current corrupt government, but hey brexit was more important than an honest government.
The UK does not need HS2, but it could really do with it. There need to be new lines to accommodate current ridership, let alone potential future increases. We might as well make it modern and fast if we're going to go that far. The initial Japanese bullet train also went massively over budget and there were strong (mainly political) calls to cancel it. Try telling the Japanese people now to live without it. Now, there has definitely been some incompetence in building HS2, but even then, some of that is due to NIMBYs complicating the situation more than necessary.
It's not the idea that's wrong, it's the execution. How is it possible for China to go from zero high-speed rail to the largest network in the world in just 20 years? What's the cost per km of building it in comparison? How was it tendered? Will it be obsolete in 20 years due to many factors, it might well be. I'm not saying China and the UK should be apples for apples but if it's 10 x the cost per km and takes 5 x the time to deliver, it's telling you something is wrong. I support infrastructure projects in general but the way they are being managed makes them largely DOA (dead on arrival)
We let everyone complain indefinitely. It sounds like this shouldn't be the sole reason, yet it is and i'll give examples. The original plan was to run the line above ground out of london, the locals all complained and demanded it be put in tunnels, which can cost up to 15 times more per km. They are building an extra 16km of such tunnels. The original plan was to have a junction at a village called woodlesford near leeds (if you can find the original plans, you'll see all these changes) - all the locals complained and the single junction is now 2, 3-km tunnels under the entire village to link up to leeds. The original plan included a spur to link up to york, going alongside the existing tracks through church fenton (there are currently 5 tracks through the village, this would make it 7 tracks) but they all complained until the plans were changed to divert the route around the village including a new 1.4km viaduct. The anti-hs2 crowd have been, very intentionally, driving up the cost.
@@xaiano794 I'm sure you're right about changes made increased costs made delays and that NIMBYisum is a massive impediment to any infrastructure project. These are not problems China has to deal with for sure, which makes it much cheaper and faster to build them, this I knew already which is why I don't think it should be looked at as being Apples to Apples on price or timeframe. However, there is a limit (or there should be) on how far north on cost and timeframe you can go before these projects become economically and technologically redundant. I don't know enough about the original planned route/implementation and the revisions to comment but I'd also be willing to bet that the procurement, tendering, labour costs (unionised workforce), over-regulation, political footballing, and bureaucracy are even bigger problems to delivering such projects at all, let alone is acceptable timescales and costs. Furthermore, I don't trust that even the original plan was well thought out, forward looking enough, or took advantage or account of the technology and economics that this project would have to compete with, or could be used to build it. I'd say High-speed rail, such as the Shinkansen in Japan, has been the best solution for moving people around at the 250km ~ 500km odd distance for the last 60 years or so, that's for sure. The lack of ambition in the UK since 1970 to implement it, may now mean that we've missed that particular boat. This seems an open question to me right now and one that I think is worth seriously looking at bearing in mind the cost and time frame vs economic benefit and technology advances that may well make it uncompetitive and to some extent, obsolete even. If this project would have been planned as late as the 1980s and finished in the late '90s, It would have made a lot more sense. Seeing as we are now looking at completion in 2040, the case for it, in its current form at least, may not be the right way to go anymore. Again, this is an open question but a very important one to answer. One thing I do know is that sunk cost fallacy is not a good reason to continue with any project.
@@markfernandes2467 I can tell you that the sunk cost issue is only relevant when no action is an option since it may be better to cancel everything. Unfortunately anyone who has travelled on the Leeds to Birmingham route at rush hour via literally any mode of transport will tell you how bad the capacity issue is. As far as rail goes, the issue is a simple one : we don't have enough tracks. A new line would double capacity along the route and while some might advocate a regular speed line along the same route, having no improvement would obviously not be an option unless you wanted to intentionally make the route impossible to travel upon. Upgrading the existing lines would cost more, much more, and it's something many opponents of hs2 avoid discussing, but it's obvious to see why it would be more expensive as soon as you start to consider what such an upgrade would entail. Imagine the Leeds to Birmingham route, currently it is a single line, 2 tracks. If you were to upgrade it to a 4 track layout, you would have to do the work overnight, at weekends, pay people shift rates, pay for replacement bus services, cancel trains and it would take decades to boot. That's before you consider that railway lines have been built up to and that urbanised land would be far more expensive to acquire. Hs2 is actually the cheapest option, that's why despite the massive cost increases caused by nimbys it's still being considered by the government.
@@xaiano794 I assure you, I totally agree with you that none of the other "options" you bring up are viable options at all. Upgrading existing lines is dumb. All your points as to why this is the case are valid in my opinion. The problem is that I'm not sure that HS2, in its current form, solves the problem as well as it should either. You can't look at the problem without looking at the economics and technological development on the horizon. Again, I think this is an open question and one that needs to really be answered as well as we can given the uncertainty or predicting 20 years out. I accept your point that endlessly pontificating is also not a good idea. However, right now I honestly think the current generation of high-speed rail system proposed, may not be the way to go if I think about a 2040 completion. Another practical problem is HS2 may not solve any part of the problem (Leeds to Birmingham) until it solves 100% of the problem. I'm not sure on this, as it might be possible to open the project stage by stage, you'd probably know better than me if this is in their current plans. I'd certainly hope they'd be looking to open leg by ley rather than all at once in 20 years but I don't know. Right now (I just looked it up) Birmingham to Leeds is 150km as the crow flys, around 200km by road apparently. a Bus is the cheapest way to get there (6 to 26GBP) and takes 2hours and 20 mins. Interestingly "ride-sharing" and by car currently compete with this on price and time whereas rail currently is on average 3 times the cost (45~70 GBP) and can't even beat driving on time taken according to this source at least. www.rome2rio.com/s/Birmingham-England/Leeds The real question to me, therefore, is in 2040, is high-speed rail the best answer for 150km to 200km distance routes? Furthermore, is an incremental improvement over that time a better way to go than no improvement for 20 years? My suspicion is that the advent of autonomous vehicles will probably cut the door to door times and costs down to levels any current-gen high-speed rail could for this journey. All you have to do is concede this one point and HS2 looks like a bit of a white elephant. That's my concern.
Building high speed railways is for countries such as China, India and mainland Europe who are progressing. It's not a sensible choice for countries like Britain and the USA who are declining.
sure - let's do that. Let's look at a single leg from leeds to birmingham since that is a less complex part of the network and easy to isolate. There are currently only 2 tracks, one line direct from birmingham to leeds. HS2 would double the amount of tracks. If we expanded the current 2 lines to birmingham to 4 tracks (i.e. same capacity) we would have to do it in weekend closures, overnight works, put on replacement busses - so we would have to pay people night shifts, pay for busses, suffer decades of closures on the main line while the works are carried out whereas HS2 built on separate land would be able to be worked on 9-5 without disrupting anything. Upgrading the existing line would cost far, far more than building a new line on a new route and the worst thing is you would get no added benefit for this massive cost, your line would still be the same speed as it always was - you can't change physics after all. I understand that you've heard lots of other people repeating this lie, but surely you can tell after thinking about it for just a few minutes that it is a lie - you would have to take the current tracks out of service to upgrade them, that would cost massive amounts of money and cause literally decades of disruption.
The project is now starting to eat money the rest of the railway networks needs. It would make more sense to upgrade the east coast line to Scotland and link it to HS1 at St Pancras. It would make more sense to build, or at least upgrade, a line across the north from Manchester to Leeds. It would be more economic by far to improve the congested motorway network. Just 2% of passenger trips are nowadays by rail - or 8% by distance - and a minuscule percentage of freight ones. Like it or not, roads are the lifeline of the economy. High-speed rail is irrelevant.
@@AllahAkbar-gt5dz @Phil Mitchell isn't it suspicious you've ignored the replies I made to your other comments, especially about you proving how little you know about the situation? The line from Birmingham to Leeds is far more overcrowded than the Newcastle to Edinburgh run, longer distance and would cost more to add new lines mostly due to the terrain. I suspect you've come to this conclusion based on the false assumption that what matters are journey times when that isn't the case, it's capacity. Hs2 just has the bonus of providing both at the lowest price. As for motorways, it takes a 6 lane motorway to carry the same volume of traffic hs2 its projected to take, how much of the UK should we pave over? I can copy paste too
The UK has become the least productive nation in western world where projects are expected to cost over 3-4 times more than their original budget! Perhaps the British Government should consider hiring reputable Chinese Contractors to build HS2. Take a look at the various High Speed rail projects that the Chinese are currently building around the world including Turkey (linking Ankara with Istanbul and various cities across Turkey) and it is only cost $4.1 Billion for 533km length of High Speed rail as compared to HS2 which is expected to cost £150 Billion for 531km in length. Shocking!!
Whilst the UK has half the land area of France, the UK is actually longer than France. So to those who say the UK doesn't need high speed rail, I'd like to see them sit on a 10-11 hour train journey from North Scotland to West Cornwall!! Or are we to fly with all the emmissions arguments going on? That's the problem with NIMBYs and democratic processes
Watch the piece on this done by Whitewick's Abandoned Railways. The guy they talk to explains how it will actually benefit the rest of the network and what the alternatives would actually cost.
Well I suppose it could be worse they could of voted Labour, it was prodominatly Labour run councils that turned a blind eye to grooming gangs in the North. If I lived in the North, I'd rather vote for party that desent investe in iinfrastructure over a party that allows rape gangs.
@@jjosephs6521 You mean that one council - in that one town. Funny how all labour members everywhere are responsible for that now. I suppose that means that one councillor in torbay, Mike King who fled to manilla with all our money means that all the conservatives are responsible according to you? Or do you imagine one rule applies to your side and another rule to labour?
@@jjosephs6521 As this is a conversation about HS2, all you are doing is making irrelevant and mendacious comments, so yes calling you a clown is warranted
People clearly want HS2 to cost as much as possible - it's the only possibility that makes any sense since it is literally all the people complaining that are driving up the cost. "Let's have yet another inquiry into HS2, we need to make it even more expensive" i can imagine them saying "We need to divert more of it into tunnels, we all know tunnels cost 15x more money" 8 billion spent already and not a single mile constructed yet they want to scrap it, presumably so they can start over and waste another 8 billion.
Not joining hs1 and 2 together is the stupidest decision ever. Why does London need trains to terminate there? You could use hs1 trains on hs2 and save billions by joining a quarter mile of track. It already exists as part of the overground at Camden. It's non sensical.
As soon as it was redesigned to no longer even connect to HS1 and instead destroy natural scenery right next to the existing Chiltern line it clearly became a pointless boondoggle that someone with backhanders from airports is determined to push on with despite the insanity of it. Sunk cost fallacies abound. Build the northern part first and people might believe this guy saying that HS2 is the essential first step. Whether there are other projects waiting on the shelf doesn't change the fact that it's costs will outweigh the benefits, especially as self driving fleets of cars start growing.
but it does connect up - it connects just up from st pancras. The current plan isn't to run direct services because the 2 ventures will be funded separately with nearly 20bn of chinese funding pledged for HS2 already. If we paid for it all ourselves then we could integrate the services but the fact is they are building the tracks so it could be connected up if we shelled out at a later date. The designers aren't idiots even if the politicians are - and check the actual plans which are still publicly available if you don't believe me.
@@xaiano794 Its massively failed the money test. What was its original cost and what is it estimated to be now? God know what the cost will be if and when its finished. But Phil Mitchell is right in his assertion about welfare being slashed by the Tories
@@davidcolley7714 I posted a detailed explanation of how people like Phil here have managed to increase the cost of the project, you either didn't bother to read it, or you did and decided to lie in this post. Either way you're proving my point, you don't care about what is best for people wanting to travel by rail, you only care about your own personal wishes, this seems to be an extremely common factor in many replies on here including Phil who has also ignored facts, lied, as he did here and pushed his own personal views ahead of any search for an ideal solution.
@@xaiano794 You are very good at calling people liars, which proves what an obnoxious person you are. You didn't listen to his social concerns but you plow ahead and say that HS2 is an ideal solution and anyone who objects are fools. No it's you who will not listen, even as the costs go through the roof you still persist in your foolish adherence to HS2. People are allowed to voice their misgivings to projects that may affect them, but you would no doubt throw then into a Gulag. What a vile brainwashed idiot you are
There was an alternative plan to use the old Great Central Route from Marylebone up to Manchester which was mainly still unbuilt on. Would have cost much less and taken less time.
It actually uses stretches of this route and that was the original plan, however the nimbys started complaining and the plans had to be modified to appease them, at massive cost. Just one example is outside London where over 10 miles of tunnels are being constructed because people complained that a rail line would ruin their view. It costs as much as 15 times as much to build a line in a tunnel.
@@Mishima505 But the trackbed has been built-over in places and many key structures like tunnels and viaducts have been blocked or knocked-down (look at Nottingham Victoria, or the viaducts at Brackley, Leicester and Rugby (over the W.C.M.L.). Reinstating all that's gone would be hugely expensive in today's scenario, with inflated costs for everything. It just wouldn't be affordable to reconstruct the 'London Extension'.
It's the year 2100, the HS 2 is still not built. People are still rethinking: the maglev is too costly, the noise is too high, the original rail track is not suitable for maglev, new route planning with new negotiations...It is a never ending discussion
The Sentance cough is not a bad ploy this time of year for ministers to employ when like the 1930's they appear in front of Stummings with no achievable 5 year plan.
HS2 should just go from London to Birmingham, we only need another true International city and it should be Birmingham, in fact it would have been Birmingham had Birmingham not have to bail out Liverpool & Manchester in the 70's. Andy Burnham complaining that the North gets less should direct that to London because Manchester gets far more from Whitehall than Birmingham, check the figures yourself Mr Burnham, look at the BBC! The Midlands gives the most and recieves the least.
@@allovdem it's not the trains that are the issue - it's the lack of tracks. Currently we only ave one line, 2 tracks, from leeds to birmingham - hs2 would double that to four.
@@xaiano794 No huge demand from people wanting to travel to Birmingham from Leeds and vice versa. If there was then Cross Country would have lengthened the trains that they use
Start north go south and as 1 person suggested to save money and cut the number of houses destroyed to get it follow the M40 where it will link up with the chiltern mainline heading into london using what used to be 3rd and 4th tracks on the chiltern mainline to create the new HS2 tracks on the approch into london as the beding is still there and the worst it will get is a couple new bridges and a couple of station carparks being changed. This according to the guy should save us tons of money, bring investment the chiltern lines, get the north up and running asap, and only add 4-10 mins to the journey time while reducing the amount of housing and green belt destroyed
That was the original plan, minus the starting at the North. The people who live along the route blocked the project in the courts complaining about the impact on their view, so the line had to be sunk into an extra 10 miles of tunnels to appease them. This appeasement has happened along the whole route and if you can still find the original draft of the hs2 plans you'll see this. This is why the cost has tripled
How about: Abandoning most of the crazy expensive London-Bham section, but go ahead with the Manchester-Crewe Link, the Link into Birmingham Curzon Street from the West Coast Mainline and the new link into Leeds from the Midland Line. Build them pretty much as per the current plans. Even if nothing more of HS2 is ever built, these will hugely benefit rail connections in the midlands and north at far lower cost than the whole project. Rebuild Euston too given how far they've already got with it. If HS2 IS revived, they can simply be integrated into it.
Why is the Route from Birmingham to London crazy, the whole idea of running HS2 from Birmingham to London is that the present Birmingham to Rugby section is now overloaded.
Probably because 25% of the UK's GDP originates in London. A fast rail link is unlikely to change that. My home town Hull, needs the M62 extending into the city. Is this viable? What would make the north more attractive? A faster journey to London? I doubt it.
@@miyahtallulah HS3's planned route would link liverpool to hull via leeds - they can't move on to that because people keep obstructing HS2 and delaying everything.
@sprouting wings yeah but itll take at least 10 years to build and by then it will be too old, so we should skip straight to vacuum tubes like on Futurama. But then that will be too old. Maybe HS4 should just involve teleportation?
How is HS2 last last Century Engineering, it is being built for speeds upto 300 MPH, in cab signalling and high speed tracks, it is not being built for George Stephenson " Rocket ".
Scrap it! Improve existing lines by electrification and larger capactity before building new lines. HS2 will probably only benefit London and the South-East. Better connectivity to the existing HS1 in the north will probably be more beneficial
Upgrading the existing railway network will be just as expensive, if not more expensive, than the entirety of HS2 itself. Plus it won't be as effective since the upgrade would be more of a railway for next year rather than for 100 years.
How about decent public transport connecting Liverpool - Manchester - Leeds - York - Hull and Newcastle first? In England, northerners are second class citizens.
HS3 is the next project which would link liverpool-manchester-leeds-hull and hs2 would link leeds-york-newcastle. They can't move on to HS3 because people keep holding up HS2 so when you want to ask why things haven't been done yet, it's because of all these people on here complaining about it. They are holding it up.
i'm quite pleased with the comments that our brand new tory mp for rother valley said today, we don't need hs2, we need good rail lines between east and west!
he's a moron - the line from sheffield/rotherham to birmingham is massively over capacity - that takes capacity away from the sheffield-manchester route. Ideally you want both, but the concept of wasting the 8 billion already spent is idiotic.
@@AllahAkbar-gt5dz I don't think you understand how money works - i'm guessing you're a child and your parents just pay for everything, no way you could possibly be an adult, but let me explain. If you were going to put petrol in your car and decide not to spend £1.30/l at the BP garage, you haven't saved £1.30 by not going there - you'd only save money if you managed to buy it cheaper - so unless you have a cheaper alternative, you could end up costing us all money when you force us to drive down the road and find out the only other option costs £1.50/l at the services...
The project is now starting to eat money the rest of the railway networks needs. It would make more sense to upgrade the east coast line to Scotland and link it to HS1 at St Pancras. It would make more sense to build, or at least upgrade, a line across the north from Manchester to Leeds. It would be more economic by far to improve the congested motorway network. Just 2% of passenger trips are nowadays by rail - or 8% by distance - and a minuscule percentage of freight ones. Like it or not, roads are the lifeline of the economy. High-speed rail is irrelevant.
At a time when interest rates are essentially zero, a country should be building out every possible infrastructure project available. If money is free, only rank order of importance should be a criterion for haste or delay. .
YET......WITHIN A WEEK. THEY CAN FIND THE MONEY TO GO TO PHONEY WARS. DISRUPT COUNTRIES. ETC ETC ETC. THEY SEEM TO FIND THE MONEY FOR THAT. I THINK IT WOULD BE FAR MORE JUST. AND A PRIORITY, THAT WASPI WOMEN WERE REIMBURSED. INFRASTRUCTURE BROUGHT TO STANDARD. HEALTH CARE... APPRENTICESHIPS ETC ETC ETC...............MORE OF A PRIORITY. MAD WORLD...XXX
We spend far too much time talking instead of doing! Many of us will never get to use it because we will of died, utterly ridiculous! The Chinese have since said they can do it far cheaper and in a more reasonable time frame, this is how we used to operate as world leaders in engineering.
They aren't, the thing that people seem to conveniently ignore is that the project has changed. The original design was for an above ground rail line on a direct route. The complainers demanded it be changed many times, including burying 10 miles of track outside London, adding several billion to the cost, the locals near Leeds blocked an above ground junction forcing the design to be changed to 2, 2-mile tunnels adding billions to the cost. There are numerous other examples, if you can find copies of the initial plans you'll see. The problem is most of the news you hear is from those same complainers and their advocates who obviously won't want you to blame them for the cost rises they forced upon the project.
Quite ironic that many NIMBYs who live in places like Chesham and Amersham have their homes on former farmland that, when the railways began to expand, particularly the Metropolitan (which is part of the London Underground now), were bought near stations for homes so commuters can travel by train. Fast forward 150 or so years and everyone in those areas commits to themselves on opposing HS2.... Whilst driving around in their Range Rovers.
@@onlinefriend3889 good point. Add to that if plans were shelved every time someone or other objected we'd still be living in caves! Any improvement is always going to affect somebody or something. I hear the great John Nettles who currently narrates some sort of nature program on TV is complaining about a solar farm that's due to be installed the other side of his 'back fence" Ironic really lol
HS2 sounds to me like going online, searching for hours for a product at the most reasonable price and making sure that reviews of it are all favourable and then having it delivered (having paid for it) and opening it up eagerly to find an EXTRA bill of sale inside amounting to over TWICE the price you had already paid!! Analogy I know but it's fucking ludicrous!!
that's because you've never looked t why it's increased - all the anti-hs2 people have been secretly driving the price up. Don't believe me? look at some of the route changes that have been forced upon the designers - outside london they campaigned against HS2 demanding that the section through their entire region be put in tunnels - 10 miles of tunnels, add that to the cost. Woodlesford on the leeds leg, they complained that they were going to be able to see the junction which would be sited 1/4 mile from their village. They demanded it be changed and the plans were modified to provide 2, 2-mile tunnels right under the whole village - again, at what cost? The best example is church fenton - the original plan called for 2 more tracks, there are already 5 through the village. 12 houses were to be affected by the new tracks - they successfully campaigned and now the plan has been changed to build a 1.4km viaduct to avoid the village. It'll cost millions. The thing is that people clearly have been intentionally wasting money with the clear aim of cancelling the whole project. The irony is that despite the cost increases it is still the most cost effective option, that's why it's going ahead - just at a huge cost increase thanks to your fellow 'frugal' brits. We did this to ourselves.
@@xaiano794 The project is now starting to eat money the rest of the railway networks needs. It would make more sense to upgrade the east coast line to Scotland and link it to HS1 at St Pancras. It would make more sense to build, or at least upgrade, a line across the north from Manchester to Leeds. It would be more economic by far to improve the congested motorway network. Just 2% of passenger trips are nowadays by rail - or 8% by distance - and a minuscule percentage of freight ones. Like it or not, roads are the lifeline of the economy. High-speed rail is irrelevant.
@@AllahAkbar-gt5dz isn't it suspicious you've ignored the replies I made to your other comments, especially about you proving how little you know about the situation? The line from Birmingham to Leeds is far more overcrowded than the Newcastle to Edinburgh run, longer distance and would cost more to add new lines mostly due to the terrain. I suspect you've come to this conclusion based on the false assumption that what matters are journey times when that isn't the case, it's capacity. Hs2 just has the bonus of providing both at the lowest price. As for motorways, it takes a 6 lane motorway to carry the same volume of traffic hs2 its projected to take, how much of the UK should we pave over?
HS2 will cost so much because the people who will manage and built the project do not care for the project they just care for £££. We need to bring pride in our service back into our culture and stop rewarding greedy people. Remember when staff outfits were dignified and we built not just functional infrastructure but amazing infrastructure. it's amazing what you can afford to build when the sole goal of building it isn't just to fill some shareholders wallet
We seriously need to stop HS2. The spiralling costs, loss of habitat, ancient woodland etc. The north needs better east - west trains and better public services for local commutes. Not a faster way to drain to the south (and I do mean drain, not train). Also the topography of England means the trains won't often be able to actually run at high speed.
So why has the West Midlands got to suffer for train services in the North, the whole idea of HS2 is to ease up capacity at Birmingham New Street so giving other Rail Services a chance in the west midlands
It does seem like a lot to spend on non-maglev train lines. These would run "quick-ish" but are hardly a true high speed rail technology. It's hard to consider a two plus hour inter-city journey fully within a small country a "fast" service. How painfully slow it must be without this.
Just ditch the link between Birmingham and London, it will be cheaper, quicker, we will finally have a infrastructure project that will not disproportionately benefit London
An IPPR North report says that in the last decade the North has lost out on £66 billion of transport infrastructure had the investment been comparable to what Westminster invested in London. Westminster Planned transport investment for London will be seven times more per person than in Yorkshire. Per person London will get £3,125 more than Yorkshire. What does Scotland, Liverpool, Newcastle, Wales, Cornwall etc. that have been crying out for investment get for the money Westminster takes from them to pay for the over £100 billion HS2 from London, Cross rail £18 billion in London, crossrail 2 £41.3 billion in London etc. For decades Westminster has favoured London and the south east of England for investment. Boris Johnsons Torys will be no different they will throw the north a few crumbs with great fanfare and propaganda but the vast majority of investment will still be in London and the south east of England. www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/politics/london-planned-transport-spending-seven-times-more-per-head-than-for-yorkshire-1-9942398/amp&ved=2ahUKEwjU5Z-p5ZbnAhUUilwKHWywDuAQFjAMegQIAhAC&usg=AOvVaw01klvmuBPGPo53aAJ_NDh3&cf=1
so this new line will help the average worker? cant see a macdonalds employee stumping up the $1000s for a season ticket. will be only for people on $100,000+ and a lovely house in the countryside..
This line is being built initially from Birmingham to London and will replace the existing fast train service from Birmingham to London, then it will be expanded to Manchester known as HS3.
@@movesky6696 so you're for hs2 being built then? It will add an extra route from London to the North East as there will be a junction on the Leeds line to join up with the line to Newcastle just north of church Fenton
@@xaiano794 (1 look at london crossrail it cost over run has not work 2/3 year later ) 2 cost of hs2 would be the same over run "will be shareholder's look after well " but the worker would a zero
Replacing the current class of nuclear submarines is expected to cost £31 billion. Another £10 billion has been put aside to cover any extra costs or spending over the estimate.So far in the development of the Trident replacement the government has allocated or spent around £4.8 billion of its budget.Extending the life of the current Trident missiles into the early 2060s will cost around £250 million.Keeping the current Trident submarines in operation until 2028, four years longer than planned, is also expected to cost between £1.2 and £1.4 billion. The House of Commons Library says that savings from the Submarine Enterprise Performance Programme are expected to make up for some of that. What is the cost of running Trident day to day?The Ministry of Defence’s budget for 2016/17 is a planned £35 billion, increasing every year to 2020/21 when it is estimated to be almost £40 billion.The annual operating costs of Trident are expected to be around 5% to 6% of this every year, or around £2 billion. That’s about 1% of government spending on social security and tax credits in 2015/16, or the amount spent on the NHS every week. How much has Trident cost in the past? In 1998 the Strategic Defence Review estimated that the costs of buying Trident originally had been £12.52 billion. In 2015/2016 prices this is around £18.35 billion. Once the system began to be used in 1994, it cost between 3% and 4.5% of the annual defence budget to run. It increased to between 5% and 6% in 2005-06 and has remained at this level ever since.
@@WhereAllTheRumGone Both cost money, but one is going ahead and one isn't, even though one is much more cost effective, future proof and universally beneficial than another.
The longer they delay the decision the more likely it is it will be done.Thats why they are waiting.Who is going to argue its sense to waste 10billion.
forget about HS2, Just spend those money to electrify tracks in the north and improve signalling on WCML, ECML and suburb railways around major cities such as London, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
104 billion of tax payers money to the have to pay 100 quid for a train ticket to london.. I say scrap it keep the old trains and use the 104 billion to give us free travel on our existing trains.. also save the planet
That's exactly what hs2 is doing, yet somewhere along the line you've been lied to and convinced the two issues are separate. Between Birmingham and Leeds there are currently only 2 tracks, a single line. Hs2 will double this capably and take hundreds of thousands of passengers a month off the current services and on to the express ones. This will obviously reduce overcrowding on the regular trains and help many issues with them. The time saving is a bonus, but don't get conned by the London to Leeds Times as those aren't what matters, it's the time from Leeds to Birmingham that will see the biggest change, the current 2h journey will only take around 35 minutes with hs2
This has to be a p!$$take. I’m sorry but with all the money being spend on making our railways much efficient is completely failing. I don’t care about HS2 being built and Crossrail is still being delayed. £millions and £billions have been wasted just to keep our railways moving and new trains being built to keep on the demand for the passengers that want better energy efficient trains with lots of available seats.
That's what hs2 will do, on the Leeds to Birmingham route there is no more space for more trains with more seats and yet it's hopelessly overcrowded. We need more tracks. The cheapest option is to build a new line, which is what they are doing, the fact it is high speed is just a bonus.
@@Andrewjg_89 Indeed, it isn't cheap to build infrastructure - i don't recall any national campaign to pay a similar amount to hs2 (345 miles of double track - a total of 690 miles at a cost of 107bn, 155m per mile) to add just a single lane to the m6 www.expressandstar.com/news/2008/01/14/plan-for-m6-cost-at-76m-per-mile/ But this is the problem, isn't it and why we have so much overcrowding on the rail network, we are perfectly OK with spending monumental sums on new roads, but when any money is proposed for rail it's dismissed as absurdly expensive.
@@buddyhirshfield5970 they didn't quit, they never gave funding to the project to start with. Nothing was pulled, they didn't quit anything, they just never allocated any money to it.
If we're going to really invest money in a fast link to the northern cities let's look at 21st century technology. The case for investing in a hyperloop technology is growing. Hyperloop is currently being proved. It is faster and more environmentally friendly.
Have you seen a hypo loop, I went to Birmingham New Street station on Saturday to go to London and missed my Hypo loop service, sorry you live in a dream nothing has been invented yet, we cant even get Mono Rails to run correctly.
Once a network rail worker came into my school for a chat about trains, apparently *HS3* will connect London to the Isle of Wight
Thanks Channel 4 for not editing the two minutes of a man coughing. That really added to the report
Well its great of them to leave 2 minutes for us to surf the comments
Too many coronas
There's so much going on of Coronas Virus flu's around. Well it happens of Emergency Climate change, so those who avoid severe Viruses from China caught, we'll get more trouble.
@@samcosgrave3342 You mean Half Coronas? lol
I think the reason a lot of people are against HS2 is because they don't understand why it's being built. In all fairness, the project has been framed poorly by the press. The main reason isn't to cut journey times off, that's just a secondary benefit.
Essentially, all fast services (currently done by Pendolinos on the West Coast Main Line) will be re-routed via HS2, freeing up the WCML (which is currently VERY congested) to handle commuter traffic. The current Pendolino's require a lot of separation on the WCML because they're doing 125mph on old, crowded infrastructure. With that no longer an issue, the WCML will effectively gain two extra tracks (the old fast lines) for commuter traffic and capacity will effectively double on the old route, and intercity capacity (cities which are served by both classic lines and HS2) will triple. Many Leeds and East Scotland services will also be routed by HS2, taking some pressure off the ECML too.
Sadly, much of the increased costs of the line are due to NIMBY'ism, pointless consultations (which amount to nothing when the line is built anyway), and the fact that its being built under existing planning regs rather than an all-encompasing Act of Parliament. This is how the French keep their costs down when building high speed lines.
Very well said.
I can give you a few precise examples of such nimbyism driving up costs - Woodlesford was going to have a junction roughly 1/4mile away where the leeds link would separate from the spur to york, the locals campaigned to have this changed and now the current plans have 2, 2-mile tunnels under the entire village to link up to leeds, with the cost increasing the budget.
Church fenton currently has 5 lines going through the village, with the plans calling for 2 more for HS2 (7 total), the locals complained until the route was diverted around the village including a new 1.4km viaduct. I can only imagine how much extra that is going to cost.
it would also allow for bigger capacity trains that are cheaper to manufacturer as due to the tilt mechanisms the loading guage is slightly restricted which means that internally seating per carriage is lost to the tilt mechanism and its safety features and mantenance would inevitably go down aswell as the tilt has to be regularly tested, it would also usher in the digital signalling which will replace the light based signalling currently used meaing that they will begin upgrading the 50+ year old signaling system the UK runs on to in cab systems which allow for with modern breaking and motor tech trains even at high speed to run closer together safely increasing capacity. Thus HS2 will free up the mainline for freight trains which will help the northern economy boom cos since the 1990s there has been an increase in rail freight between the mainland and throughout the UK (hopefully they bring back the postal train too like they did in france) hence the national rail motto "Britain Runs On Rails". If the north is to re industrialise the rails are gonna be of big importance for local commute and freight.
@@temslink2000 they have brought some of the mail trains back. You'll see them every night going down the east coast main line, they are distinctive due to the blue lights on the doors.
@@xaiano794 So do you live anywhere close to route of this white elephant called HS2?
When China built 20k, km in a decade and ur bumbling about the HS2, goodness. U need to invest, without a doubt.
@M K MISHRA you were in ghost china. In my china, the high speed trains are always full.
be careful, dont go to ghost china again!
@M K MISHRA Depends on which route. I took the Hangzhou to Beijing train in early Dec and it was fully occupied for the second class seats. Probably becos it's more affordable. Not sure about the first and business class seats. I knew this route is very popular and book it online 2 months ahead.
2:40 What we really need is a better service on local trains. And that is *exactly* what HS2 is designed to do.
HS2 is designed to take the fast trains off of not one, not two, but three mainline railways. That is going to free up all the big gaps that fast trains need and allow stopping services to bunch up a lot closer together. That will allow locals to get trains with less of a wait.
The new station at Birmingham is going to free up the existing Birmingham stations to have more space to platform trains that go to places outside of the HS2 path.
Great Britain is a very interesting case study for this. For many years Britain could avoid investing in high speed rail simply because its InterCity system was really good. Britain was blessed with many railway lines that were so well planned from the very beginning with only few sharp angled curves on all mainlines. Even I thought that Britain may perhaps not need high speed rail because of this very good InterCity speeds up to 125 mph. With such train connections who needs a high speed rail system, right? Ultimately it's backward thingking. In the 1950s you might as well have asked: "With all these great steam locos who needs diesel trains?" Or in the 1980s: "With all these great diesel locos (and cheap oil from Scotland) who needs electrification?" Yes, it's true. It's mind blowing and annoying how damn' expensive to build high speed rail is. But in the end I belive it's inevitable. Better to do it now than waiting another decade until cost has gone up even more.
Well said
@@hsvr Thanks! Are you also in favour of HS2?
Yes,we need Highspeed rail.
@@muhammeddiloarhussain1375 that's a dis for Britain is it then?
The Japanese went over budget. High speed will be expensive but it will pay for itself in price and usefulness.
@@chrisj9700 Any amount is value for money if it generates more wealth than it costs.
Use reverse phycology! Pitch to London mob..." How do we help southern people visiting the north get out of there much faster and back to the utopia of London?..
😂😂😂
I get the north needs more money but I wouldn't call southern trains golden like Burnham did
duke Silver you don’t know what bad transport is Machester to Blackpool is 50 miles it took me four hours and all the direct trains were cancelled so you had to swap at Preston this is a norm 😆
I know about HSRail. Just travelled 700k at 200 mph. To Hong Kong .Took 5hr 30 mins. First class uncomfortable. You do not need HS2 for short journeys.waste money. Upgrade existing rail to allow trains to do 100 mph as they did 60 years ago. I remember seeing steam engine Flying Scotsman
Yes, Malcolm. In England the topography also means that HS2 is usually unable to even reach high speeds.
you clearly know nothing about rail networks if you're saying that.
Let's do a simple thought experiment and look at the leeds to birmingham leg since that is a simple network - there is just one direct line, 2 tracks currently, this means that hs2 would double that to four.
Imagine you decided to upgrade the current network to four tracks, you'd have to do the work overnight and at weekends, pay people shift work, put on replacement bus services, re-align every single junction on the route and after all that, you couldn't increase the speed since you can't change physics. It would clearly cost far, far more than building a new line where you could pay people 9-5 and don't need to pay for any rail replacement busses etc.
The problem is anti-hs2 people have repeated that lie so much they actually believe it.
"You do not need HS2 for short journeys"
Because High Speed Railways are dedicated to intercity express trains... If you want to make short journeys you'd obviously take the local trains, which would have better frequency thanks to the construction of HSR.
Remember that time a government project completed on time and within budget? Me neither.
High Speed 1?
Santa Clause Sure, HS1: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_1
i have done extensive research on HS2. One of the key things that so many people (particularly the press) seem to forget about is the fact that HS2 will drastically improve commuter networks. Building of HS2 will allow most intercity trains travelling on the East Coast Mainline, Midland Mainline and West Coast Mainline all to be transferred to HS2. Whilst this doesn't seem like much at first it will drastically improve the frequency of commuter trains on lines. the problem with the current lines we have is that high speed trains of 125mph and slower stopping commuter trains averaging about 60mph all have to share the same lines. The fact they have different speeds and different breaking distances mean headways (the distance between trains have to be huge). By removing the intercity trains off the lines onto HS2 all the trains remaining on the line are of similar characteristics and headway and thus frequency of trains can be drastically increased, reducing overcrowding. It will also increase punctuality of the trains as fewer trains and thus bottlenecks will be removed. Here i have a particular example of this. Aberystwyth (west coast of Wales) about as far from HS2 you can get, will benefit from it. The trains that serve Aberystwyth pass through Birmingham International where it is often congested due to the many different types of trains passing through here (intercity and commuter). This often leads to trains arriving late in Aberystwith. By removing intercity trains from the Birmingham International rail corridor the bottleneck at Birmingham International will be reduced and Aberystwith will get a better service. HS2 will also allow more freight to be transferred to rail freeing up space on our roads.
The Aberystwyth line is slow is because of the stupid stops that they have in Wales
Commuters have virtually vanished. WFH
@@johnreid7447 If it wasn't for the as you put it Stupid stops this line would of been closed by now.
What's Burnham on about Birmingham gets a lot less attention than Manchester.
Anti-HS2 trolls like to pretend Birmingham is a suburb of London, so that they can pretend "the money is all going to London". ;-)
As someone that lives in Birmingham that used to live in greater Manchester I definitely disagree
It should have been up and running for when the Channel Tunnel opened. No EU finding for it now either! Useless politicians.
The EU didn't fund anything. They haven't got any money. They took money off the UK and give us 50% back as development grants.
Maybe spend less on military, agent provocateurs meddling in other faraway countries and put it to the infrastructure building and healthcare? Just a thought.
We dont spend a lot on the military, we arent USA
@@samuelthornton9179 2% of GDP which is way more than many other countries
You need to speed more you lack a dedicated Intradictor force now that the tonka has retired
Give me £100b and I'll build a better train than HS2.
I'll call it the *Speedy Hyper Intercity Train*, and the name alone will fall in line with the Conservatives' attitude to public transport.
The International Space Station is estimated to have cost $150billion. That's dollars!
@Dylan Clayton So I guess he means that it's cheaper to build something in space than across a few fields?
HS2 will be replaced by Relatively High Speed 2
The reason HS2 cost so much is because of Engineers and Quantity surveyors. The work together to inflate the project billing for up to 30x the actual work hours. It was the same on the Edinburgh trams - everyone was desperate for the project code, because they could easily charge £3000 for £100 worth of work.
I know people who worked in the bidding team for Jacob's (HS2 contractor), the exact same will happen with the parliament works too (Jacob's again)
You make it sound like the Contractor's can charge what they want. Their profit margins must be incredible. But they are not- 2 or 3% on turnover is a decent margin. T.he real reason is a lack of technical understanding by Cost Consuktants who cannot understand what things cost. So they put a budget on a project and it's always underestimated. I was an estimator for a national Contractor and every Project I have worked on and heard of since 1997 started off with an offer price that was over the budget.
There's a country that built 35,000km of high speed rail in the last 25 years. And it's gonna takes us 10 years to get less than a 1000. How can people still have faith in the British way of doing things?!
A lot less than 1000km.
We could build faster than china - we regularly do - the problem is that we let everyone and their dog complain about it rather than getting on and doing it.
We never used to be this way, that's why we used to be great.
Don't believe me? The victorians needed a line to link the marsh lane station in leeds with the new central station - a direct line would go through the cemetery of the Leeds Minster, so naturally they just got on and built it - they made some new gravestones to replace those buried by the works and they now line the railway embankment.
35,000km since 2008.
Does anyone actually believe that this government would spend over £100 billion on a railway so people can get to work 30 mins sooner? You need to see the bigger picture.
The problem is these building works are all privatized, and we are paying shareholders rather than workers!
Democratize & NATIONALIZE!
it is nationalised - the company is wholly owned by the government
currently, anyway (looking at you, boris)
@@xaiano794 have you got any references for that?
I doubt that there isn't a construction scam going on, the whole thing might be marginalized but I'm sure each part is put out to tender, the Tories would never agree anything without backhanders.
@@fuckfannyfiddlefart yeah it's a registered entity on companies House.
@@fuckfannyfiddlefart and I agree that the work will be issued to their friends, that's why it'll remain nationalised, so they retain full control.
Ultimately though that's not an issue with the hs2 project, but with the current corrupt government, but hey brexit was more important than an honest government.
The UK does not need HS2, but it could really do with it. There need to be new lines to accommodate current ridership, let alone potential future increases. We might as well make it modern and fast if we're going to go that far.
The initial Japanese bullet train also went massively over budget and there were strong (mainly political) calls to cancel it. Try telling the Japanese people now to live without it.
Now, there has definitely been some incompetence in building HS2, but even then, some of that is due to NIMBYs complicating the situation more than necessary.
It's not the idea that's wrong, it's the execution. How is it possible for China to go from zero high-speed rail to the largest network in the world in just 20 years? What's the cost per km of building it in comparison? How was it tendered? Will it be obsolete in 20 years due to many factors, it might well be. I'm not saying China and the UK should be apples for apples but if it's 10 x the cost per km and takes 5 x the time to deliver, it's telling you something is wrong. I support infrastructure projects in general but the way they are being managed makes them largely DOA (dead on arrival)
We let everyone complain indefinitely. It sounds like this shouldn't be the sole reason, yet it is and i'll give examples.
The original plan was to run the line above ground out of london, the locals all complained and demanded it be put in tunnels, which can cost up to 15 times more per km. They are building an extra 16km of such tunnels.
The original plan was to have a junction at a village called woodlesford near leeds (if you can find the original plans, you'll see all these changes) - all the locals complained and the single junction is now 2, 3-km tunnels under the entire village to link up to leeds.
The original plan included a spur to link up to york, going alongside the existing tracks through church fenton (there are currently 5 tracks through the village, this would make it 7 tracks) but they all complained until the plans were changed to divert the route around the village including a new 1.4km viaduct.
The anti-hs2 crowd have been, very intentionally, driving up the cost.
@@xaiano794 I'm sure you're right about changes made increased costs made delays and that NIMBYisum is a massive impediment to any infrastructure project.
These are not problems China has to deal with for sure, which makes it much cheaper and faster to build them, this I knew already which is why I don't think it should be looked at as being Apples to Apples on price or timeframe. However, there is a limit (or there should be) on how far north on cost and timeframe you can go before these projects become economically and technologically redundant.
I don't know enough about the original planned route/implementation and the revisions to comment but I'd also be willing to bet that the procurement, tendering, labour costs (unionised workforce), over-regulation, political footballing, and bureaucracy are even bigger problems to delivering such projects at all, let alone is acceptable timescales and costs.
Furthermore, I don't trust that even the original plan was well thought out, forward looking enough, or took advantage or account of the technology and economics that this project would have to compete with, or could be used to build it.
I'd say High-speed rail, such as the Shinkansen in Japan, has been the best solution for moving people around at the 250km ~ 500km odd distance for the last 60 years or so, that's for sure. The lack of ambition in the UK since 1970 to implement it, may now mean that we've missed that particular boat. This seems an open question to me right now and one that I think is worth seriously looking at bearing in mind the cost and time frame vs economic benefit and technology advances that may well make it uncompetitive and to some extent, obsolete even.
If this project would have been planned as late as the 1980s and finished in the late '90s, It would have made a lot more sense. Seeing as we are now looking at completion in 2040, the case for it, in its current form at least, may not be the right way to go anymore. Again, this is an open question but a very important one to answer. One thing I do know is that sunk cost fallacy is not a good reason to continue with any project.
@@markfernandes2467 I can tell you that the sunk cost issue is only relevant when no action is an option since it may be better to cancel everything. Unfortunately anyone who has travelled on the Leeds to Birmingham route at rush hour via literally any mode of transport will tell you how bad the capacity issue is.
As far as rail goes, the issue is a simple one : we don't have enough tracks. A new line would double capacity along the route and while some might advocate a regular speed line along the same route, having no improvement would obviously not be an option unless you wanted to intentionally make the route impossible to travel upon.
Upgrading the existing lines would cost more, much more, and it's something many opponents of hs2 avoid discussing, but it's obvious to see why it would be more expensive as soon as you start to consider what such an upgrade would entail.
Imagine the Leeds to Birmingham route, currently it is a single line, 2 tracks. If you were to upgrade it to a 4 track layout, you would have to do the work overnight, at weekends, pay people shift rates, pay for replacement bus services, cancel trains and it would take decades to boot. That's before you consider that railway lines have been built up to and that urbanised land would be far more expensive to acquire.
Hs2 is actually the cheapest option, that's why despite the massive cost increases caused by nimbys it's still being considered by the government.
@@xaiano794 I assure you, I totally agree with you that none of the other "options" you bring up are viable options at all. Upgrading existing lines is dumb. All your points as to why this is the case are valid in my opinion.
The problem is that I'm not sure that HS2, in its current form, solves the problem as well as it should either. You can't look at the problem without looking at the economics and technological development on the horizon. Again, I think this is an open question and one that needs to really be answered as well as we can given the uncertainty or predicting 20 years out.
I accept your point that endlessly pontificating is also not a good idea. However, right now I honestly think the current generation of high-speed rail system proposed, may not be the way to go if I think about a 2040 completion.
Another practical problem is HS2 may not solve any part of the problem (Leeds to Birmingham) until it solves 100% of the problem. I'm not sure on this, as it might be possible to open the project stage by stage, you'd probably know better than me if this is in their current plans. I'd certainly hope they'd be looking to open leg by ley rather than all at once in 20 years but I don't know.
Right now (I just looked it up) Birmingham to Leeds is 150km as the crow flys, around 200km by road apparently. a Bus is the cheapest way to get there (6 to 26GBP) and takes 2hours and 20 mins. Interestingly "ride-sharing" and by car currently compete with this on price and time whereas rail currently is on average 3 times the cost (45~70 GBP) and can't even beat driving on time taken according to this source at least. www.rome2rio.com/s/Birmingham-England/Leeds
The real question to me, therefore, is in 2040, is high-speed rail the best answer for 150km to 200km distance routes? Furthermore, is an incremental improvement over that time a better way to go than no improvement for 20 years? My suspicion is that the advent of autonomous vehicles will probably cut the door to door times and costs down to levels any current-gen high-speed rail could for this journey. All you have to do is concede this one point and HS2 looks like a bit of a white elephant. That's my concern.
Alexander Stafford! The first Tory MP I have ever agreed with and I voted labour in the last election.
Building high speed railways is for countries such as China, India and mainland Europe who are progressing. It's not a sensible choice for countries like Britain and the USA who are declining.
John 259 we rlly aren’t declining
It must be scrapped, it is 20 years out of date. Think what 100 billion could do for the rest of the rail network.
£10 a meter .... well work the unit cost out and go from there
That's a lot of money to give to the shareholders...
sure - let's do that.
Let's look at a single leg from leeds to birmingham since that is a less complex part of the network and easy to isolate. There are currently only 2 tracks, one line direct from birmingham to leeds.
HS2 would double the amount of tracks.
If we expanded the current 2 lines to birmingham to 4 tracks (i.e. same capacity) we would have to do it in weekend closures, overnight works, put on replacement busses - so we would have to pay people night shifts, pay for busses, suffer decades of closures on the main line while the works are carried out whereas HS2 built on separate land would be able to be worked on 9-5 without disrupting anything.
Upgrading the existing line would cost far, far more than building a new line on a new route and the worst thing is you would get no added benefit for this massive cost, your line would still be the same speed as it always was - you can't change physics after all.
I understand that you've heard lots of other people repeating this lie, but surely you can tell after thinking about it for just a few minutes that it is a lie - you would have to take the current tracks out of service to upgrade them, that would cost massive amounts of money and cause literally decades of disruption.
The project is now starting to eat money the rest of the railway networks needs. It would make more sense to upgrade the east coast line to Scotland and link it to HS1 at St Pancras. It would make more sense to build, or at least upgrade, a line across the north from Manchester to Leeds. It would be more economic by far to improve the congested motorway network. Just 2% of passenger trips are nowadays by rail - or 8% by distance - and a minuscule percentage of freight ones. Like it or not, roads are the lifeline of the economy. High-speed rail is irrelevant.
@@AllahAkbar-gt5dz @Phil Mitchell isn't it suspicious you've ignored the replies I made to your other comments, especially about you proving how little you know about the situation?
The line from Birmingham to Leeds is far more overcrowded than the Newcastle to Edinburgh run, longer distance and would cost more to add new lines mostly due to the terrain. I suspect you've come to this conclusion based on the false assumption that what matters are journey times when that isn't the case, it's capacity. Hs2 just has the bonus of providing both at the lowest price.
As for motorways, it takes a 6 lane motorway to carry the same volume of traffic hs2 its projected to take, how much of the UK should we pave over?
I can copy paste too
The UK has become the least productive nation in western world where projects are expected to cost over 3-4 times more than their original budget! Perhaps the British Government should consider hiring reputable Chinese Contractors to build HS2. Take a look at the various High Speed rail projects that the Chinese are currently building around the world including Turkey (linking Ankara with Istanbul and various cities across Turkey) and it is only cost $4.1 Billion for 533km length of High Speed rail as compared to HS2 which is expected to cost £150 Billion for 531km in length. Shocking!!
Whilst the UK has half the land area of France, the UK is actually longer than France. So to those who say the UK doesn't need high speed rail, I'd like to see them sit on a 10-11 hour train journey from North Scotland to West Cornwall!! Or are we to fly with all the emmissions arguments going on? That's the problem with NIMBYs and democratic processes
Watch the piece on this done by Whitewick's Abandoned Railways. The guy they talk to explains how it will actually benefit the rest of the network and what the alternatives would actually cost.
Northerners you voted for BJ enjoy the lack of investment for next five years!
Well I suppose it could be worse they could of voted Labour, it was prodominatly Labour run councils that turned a blind eye to grooming gangs in the North. If I lived in the North, I'd rather vote for party that desent investe in iinfrastructure over a party that allows rape gangs.
@@jjosephs6521 You mean that one council - in that one town. Funny how all labour members everywhere are responsible for that now.
I suppose that means that one councillor in torbay, Mike King who fled to manilla with all our money means that all the conservatives are responsible according to you? Or do you imagine one rule applies to your side and another rule to labour?
@@jjosephs6521 Clown
@@davidcolley7714
Not an argument against the insurmountable evidence of my position.
@@jjosephs6521 As this is a conversation about HS2, all you are doing is making irrelevant and mendacious comments, so yes calling you a clown is warranted
The north should just blame journalists like you for not covering the positives of HS2 clearly
Has there ever been a big high speed rail not gone over budget?
You could run 21 million BA flights to Manchester from Heathrow for £106 Billion
The north will instead get the Saga contingent.
People clearly want HS2 to cost as much as possible - it's the only possibility that makes any sense since it is literally all the people complaining that are driving up the cost.
"Let's have yet another inquiry into HS2, we need to make it even more expensive" i can imagine them saying
"We need to divert more of it into tunnels, we all know tunnels cost 15x more money"
8 billion spent already and not a single mile constructed yet they want to scrap it, presumably so they can start over and waste another 8 billion.
In an age of IT is the concept of moving people around outdated?
no. work exists.
I think that is fine but #CLOSEMOTORWAYS first!
Not joining hs1 and 2 together is the stupidest decision ever. Why does London need trains to terminate there? You could use hs1 trains on hs2 and save billions by joining a quarter mile of track. It already exists as part of the overground at Camden. It's non sensical.
As soon as it was redesigned to no longer even connect to HS1 and instead destroy natural scenery right next to the existing Chiltern line it clearly became a pointless boondoggle that someone with backhanders from airports is determined to push on with despite the insanity of it. Sunk cost fallacies abound. Build the northern part first and people might believe this guy saying that HS2 is the essential first step. Whether there are other projects waiting on the shelf doesn't change the fact that it's costs will outweigh the benefits, especially as self driving fleets of cars start growing.
but it does connect up - it connects just up from st pancras. The current plan isn't to run direct services because the 2 ventures will be funded separately with nearly 20bn of chinese funding pledged for HS2 already. If we paid for it all ourselves then we could integrate the services but the fact is they are building the tracks so it could be connected up if we shelled out at a later date.
The designers aren't idiots even if the politicians are - and check the actual plans which are still publicly available if you don't believe me.
Britain is cutting care homes and children’s centres, yet blowing £80bn on a railway line that has failed every viability test
Lying again, it passed even the most recent report into viability.
@@xaiano794 Its massively failed the money test. What was its original cost and what is it estimated to be now? God know what the cost will be if and when its finished. But Phil Mitchell is right in his assertion about welfare being slashed by the Tories
@@davidcolley7714 I posted a detailed explanation of how people like Phil here have managed to increase the cost of the project, you either didn't bother to read it, or you did and decided to lie in this post. Either way you're proving my point, you don't care about what is best for people wanting to travel by rail, you only care about your own personal wishes, this seems to be an extremely common factor in many replies on here including Phil who has also ignored facts, lied, as he did here and pushed his own personal views ahead of any search for an ideal solution.
@@xaiano794 You are very good at calling people liars, which proves what an obnoxious person you are. You didn't listen to his social concerns but you plow ahead and say that HS2 is an ideal solution and anyone who objects are fools. No it's you who will not listen, even as the costs go through the roof you still persist in your foolish adherence to HS2. People are allowed to voice their misgivings to projects that may affect them, but you would no doubt throw then into a Gulag. What a vile brainwashed idiot you are
@@davidcolley7714 you really can't read, can you? I never called hs2 ideal, I said that you, like others did not strive for an ideal solution.
anyone else find that flickering light on Big Ben during the interview very annoying
It would be nice to know the cost, but it keeps on climbing and climbing. Today £106bn, next year a whole lot more
How will the fares go up? People will go by car wherever they want to go as usual.
Should have gone with hornby and meccano.
There was an alternative plan to use the old Great Central Route from Marylebone up to Manchester which was mainly still unbuilt on. Would have cost much less and taken less time.
It actually uses stretches of this route and that was the original plan, however the nimbys started complaining and the plans had to be modified to appease them, at massive cost.
Just one example is outside London where over 10 miles of tunnels are being constructed because people complained that a rail line would ruin their view. It costs as much as 15 times as much to build a line in a tunnel.
Xaiano totally crazy. Imagine if the Japanese had so many planning appeals when they built the Shinkansen in the 1960s
The Great Central route has been erased from the map: so much of it has been demolished, infilled and/or built-over that it could never be reinstated.
@@None-zc5vg there is still quite a bit north of Aylesbury up to Rugby where there bridges & trackbed is still there, although overgrown in parts.
@@Mishima505 But the trackbed has been built-over in places and many key structures like tunnels and viaducts have been blocked or knocked-down (look at Nottingham Victoria, or the viaducts at Brackley, Leicester and Rugby (over the W.C.M.L.). Reinstating all that's gone would be hugely expensive in today's scenario, with inflated costs for everything. It just wouldn't be affordable to reconstruct the 'London Extension'.
It's the year 2100, the HS 2 is still not built. People are still rethinking: the maglev is too costly, the noise is too high, the original rail track is not suitable for maglev, new route planning with new negotiations...It is a never ending discussion
Start construction in the North and link up with London lastly. Always put London at the back of the queue from now on instead of vice versa.
Jason Devon no because north is a waste and rubbish. Who even cares about the notth
well you wont get HS3 in the North until the original new Railway, HS2 is built and connects Birmingham to London first
BETTER TRANSPENINE ROUTE!
Pay 200 pounds to London? No thanks
The Sentance cough is not a bad ploy this time of year for ministers to employ when like the 1930's they appear in front of Stummings with no achievable 5 year plan.
HS2 should just go from London to Birmingham, we only need another true International city and it should be Birmingham, in fact it would have been Birmingham had Birmingham not have to bail out Liverpool & Manchester in the 70's. Andy Burnham complaining that the North gets less should direct that to London because Manchester gets far more from Whitehall than Birmingham, check the figures yourself Mr Burnham, look at the BBC! The Midlands gives the most and recieves the least.
we desperately need the birmingham to leeds leg. the lines were over capacity 10 years ago, we need it now.
@@xaiano794 Yes but it can be a normal pendalino service
@@allovdem it's not the trains that are the issue - it's the lack of tracks. Currently we only ave one line, 2 tracks, from leeds to birmingham - hs2 would double that to four.
@@xaiano794 No we don't need it. A better line connecting Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool is what is needed
@@xaiano794 No huge demand from people wanting to travel to Birmingham from Leeds and vice versa. If there was then Cross Country would have lengthened the trains that they use
Start north go south and as 1 person suggested to save money and cut the number of houses destroyed to get it follow the M40 where it will link up with the chiltern mainline heading into london using what used to be 3rd and 4th tracks on the chiltern mainline to create the new HS2 tracks on the approch into london as the beding is still there and the worst it will get is a couple new bridges and a couple of station carparks being changed. This according to the guy should save us tons of money, bring investment the chiltern lines, get the north up and running asap, and only add 4-10 mins to the journey time while reducing the amount of housing and green belt destroyed
That was the original plan, minus the starting at the North. The people who live along the route blocked the project in the courts complaining about the impact on their view, so the line had to be sunk into an extra 10 miles of tunnels to appease them.
This appeasement has happened along the whole route and if you can still find the original draft of the hs2 plans you'll see this.
This is why the cost has tripled
How about: Abandoning most of the crazy expensive London-Bham section, but go ahead with the Manchester-Crewe Link, the Link into Birmingham Curzon Street from the West Coast Mainline and the new link into Leeds from the Midland Line. Build them pretty much as per the current plans. Even if nothing more of HS2 is ever built, these will hugely benefit rail connections in the midlands and north at far lower cost than the whole project. Rebuild Euston too given how far they've already got with it. If HS2 IS revived, they can simply be integrated into it.
Why is the Route from Birmingham to London crazy, the whole idea of running HS2 from Birmingham to London is that the present Birmingham to Rugby section is now overloaded.
106 billion !!! lol that's about 25x the cost of Trident submarines & double our annual defence budget . WTF?
So what you're saying is if we built hs2 and cancelled trident we'd be better off in only 25 years even if it never made any money?
What a good point!
Northern England is like the American South...last in line.
Alton Riggs Scotland pays for it and they get nowt
Probably because 25% of the UK's GDP originates in London. A fast rail link is unlikely to change that. My home town Hull, needs the M62 extending into the city. Is this viable? What would make the north more attractive? A faster journey to London? I doubt it.
@@miyahtallulah HS3's planned route would link liverpool to hull via leeds - they can't move on to that because people keep obstructing HS2 and delaying everything.
HS2 is the last century engineering. It is outdated before it ever runs along any railway lines. We need monorail and not this old fashioned rail.
Monorail, monorail, monorail, monorail. Lol
From 200MPH to 3MPH monorail. Ok Boomer.
Is there a chance the track could bend?
@sprouting wings yeah but itll take at least 10 years to build and by then it will be too old, so we should skip straight to vacuum tubes like on Futurama. But then that will be too old. Maybe HS4 should just involve teleportation?
How is HS2 last last Century Engineering, it is being built for speeds upto 300 MPH, in cab signalling and high speed tracks, it is not being built for George Stephenson " Rocket ".
Scrap it! Improve existing lines by electrification and larger capactity before building new lines. HS2 will probably only benefit London and the South-East. Better connectivity to the existing HS1 in the north will probably be more beneficial
Upgrading the existing railway network will be just as expensive, if not more expensive, than the entirety of HS2 itself. Plus it won't be as effective since the upgrade would be more of a railway for next year rather than for 100 years.
So how does HS2 benefit London and the South East, HS2 goes North to Birmingham and Manchester not to Kent.
Twenty years? Far to long to build and to expensive at the cost of who.Don't make the people pay who can least afford it Boris.
How about decent public transport connecting Liverpool - Manchester - Leeds - York - Hull and Newcastle first? In England, northerners are second class citizens.
HS3 is the next project which would link liverpool-manchester-leeds-hull and hs2 would link leeds-york-newcastle.
They can't move on to HS3 because people keep holding up HS2 so when you want to ask why things haven't been done yet, it's because of all these people on here complaining about it. They are holding it up.
Fraser McFadyen yes because northerners are waste
Ask the Government for your money, HS2 has nothing to do with bad transport up North that is a different thing.
These NIMBY'S JEEEEEEZZZ
Will you be affected by the construction of HS2?
i'm quite pleased with the comments that our brand new tory mp for rother valley said today, we don't need hs2, we need good rail lines between east and west!
he's a moron - the line from sheffield/rotherham to birmingham is massively over capacity - that takes capacity away from the sheffield-manchester route.
Ideally you want both, but the concept of wasting the 8 billion already spent is idiotic.
@@xaiano794 wasting 8 billion? How bout saving another 100 billion ya muppet
@@AllahAkbar-gt5dz I don't think you understand how money works - i'm guessing you're a child and your parents just pay for everything, no way you could possibly be an adult, but let me explain.
If you were going to put petrol in your car and decide not to spend £1.30/l at the BP garage, you haven't saved £1.30 by not going there - you'd only save money if you managed to buy it cheaper - so unless you have a cheaper alternative, you could end up costing us all money when you force us to drive down the road and find out the only other option costs £1.50/l at the services...
The project is now starting to eat money the rest of the railway networks needs. It would make more sense to upgrade the east coast line to Scotland and link it to HS1 at St Pancras. It would make more sense to build, or at least upgrade, a line across the north from Manchester to Leeds. It would be more economic by far to improve the congested motorway network. Just 2% of passenger trips are nowadays by rail - or 8% by distance - and a minuscule percentage of freight ones. Like it or not, roads are the lifeline of the economy. High-speed rail is irrelevant.
@@AllahAkbar-gt5dz so you can't answer the question. I think that says far more than your copied bs.
Thanks.
At a time when interest rates are essentially zero, a country should be building out every possible infrastructure project available. If money is free, only rank order of importance should be a criterion for haste or delay.
.
YET......WITHIN A WEEK. THEY CAN FIND THE MONEY TO GO TO PHONEY WARS. DISRUPT COUNTRIES. ETC ETC ETC. THEY SEEM TO FIND THE MONEY FOR THAT.
I THINK IT WOULD BE FAR MORE JUST. AND A PRIORITY,
THAT WASPI WOMEN WERE REIMBURSED.
INFRASTRUCTURE BROUGHT TO STANDARD.
HEALTH CARE...
APPRENTICESHIPS ETC ETC ETC...............MORE OF A PRIORITY. MAD WORLD...XXX
The fares will be so expensive because of the cost of building it so nobody will be able to afford to use it!
Don't be so absurd. Fares will always be at a rate that people can afford, unaffordable fares would make less money, use your head!
60p back over what time frame!!!!! Its going to be there forever ffs long term means long term.
We spend far too much time talking instead of doing! Many of us will never get to use it because we will of died, utterly ridiculous! The Chinese have since said they can do it far cheaper and in a more reasonable time frame, this is how we used to operate as world leaders in engineering.
No question in my mind that the project will be scrapped. The UK is terrible at costing projects and is, frankly, getting worse.
They aren't, the thing that people seem to conveniently ignore is that the project has changed.
The original design was for an above ground rail line on a direct route. The complainers demanded it be changed many times, including burying 10 miles of track outside London, adding several billion to the cost, the locals near Leeds blocked an above ground junction forcing the design to be changed to 2, 2-mile tunnels adding billions to the cost.
There are numerous other examples, if you can find copies of the initial plans you'll see.
The problem is most of the news you hear is from those same complainers and their advocates who obviously won't want you to blame them for the cost rises they forced upon the project.
Almost everything in the Uk is so expensive, yet the wages are nothing spectacular.
Wasn't ALL of this country ancient woodland at one time?
Quite ironic that many NIMBYs who live in places like Chesham and Amersham have their homes on former farmland that, when the railways began to expand, particularly the Metropolitan (which is part of the London Underground now), were bought near stations for homes so commuters can travel by train. Fast forward 150 or so years and everyone in those areas commits to themselves on opposing HS2.... Whilst driving around in their Range Rovers.
@@onlinefriend3889 good point. Add to that if plans were shelved every time someone or other objected we'd still be living in caves! Any improvement is always going to affect somebody or something. I hear the great John Nettles who currently narrates some sort of nature program on TV is complaining about a solar farm that's due to be installed the other side of his 'back fence" Ironic really lol
HS2 sounds to me like going online, searching for hours for a product at the most reasonable price and making sure that reviews of it are all favourable and then having it delivered (having paid for it) and opening it up eagerly to find an EXTRA bill of sale inside amounting to over TWICE the price you had already paid!! Analogy I know but it's fucking ludicrous!!
that's because you've never looked t why it's increased - all the anti-hs2 people have been secretly driving the price up.
Don't believe me? look at some of the route changes that have been forced upon the designers - outside london they campaigned against HS2 demanding that the section through their entire region be put in tunnels - 10 miles of tunnels, add that to the cost.
Woodlesford on the leeds leg, they complained that they were going to be able to see the junction which would be sited 1/4 mile from their village. They demanded it be changed and the plans were modified to provide 2, 2-mile tunnels right under the whole village - again, at what cost?
The best example is church fenton - the original plan called for 2 more tracks, there are already 5 through the village. 12 houses were to be affected by the new tracks - they successfully campaigned and now the plan has been changed to build a 1.4km viaduct to avoid the village. It'll cost millions.
The thing is that people clearly have been intentionally wasting money with the clear aim of cancelling the whole project. The irony is that despite the cost increases it is still the most cost effective option, that's why it's going ahead - just at a huge cost increase thanks to your fellow 'frugal' brits.
We did this to ourselves.
@@xaiano794 The project is now starting to eat money the rest of the railway networks needs. It would make more sense to upgrade the east coast line to Scotland and link it to HS1 at St Pancras. It would make more sense to build, or at least upgrade, a line across the north from Manchester to Leeds. It would be more economic by far to improve the congested motorway network. Just 2% of passenger trips are nowadays by rail - or 8% by distance - and a minuscule percentage of freight ones. Like it or not, roads are the lifeline of the economy. High-speed rail is irrelevant.
@@AllahAkbar-gt5dz isn't it suspicious you've ignored the replies I made to your other comments, especially about you proving how little you know about the situation?
The line from Birmingham to Leeds is far more overcrowded than the Newcastle to Edinburgh run, longer distance and would cost more to add new lines mostly due to the terrain. I suspect you've come to this conclusion based on the false assumption that what matters are journey times when that isn't the case, it's capacity. Hs2 just has the bonus of providing both at the lowest price.
As for motorways, it takes a 6 lane motorway to carry the same volume of traffic hs2 its projected to take, how much of the UK should we pave over?
HS2 will cost so much because the people who will manage and built the project do not care for the project they just care for £££. We need to bring pride in our service back into our culture and stop rewarding greedy people. Remember when staff outfits were dignified and we built not just functional infrastructure but amazing infrastructure. it's amazing what you can afford to build when the sole goal of building it isn't just to fill some shareholders wallet
It was never going to cost 30billion.They never should have suggested it would.
We seriously need to stop HS2. The spiralling costs, loss of habitat, ancient woodland etc. The north needs better east - west trains and better public services for local commutes. Not a faster way to drain to the south (and I do mean drain, not train). Also the topography of England means the trains won't often be able to actually run at high speed.
So why has the West Midlands got to suffer for train services in the North, the whole idea of HS2 is to ease up capacity at Birmingham New Street so giving other Rail Services a chance in the west midlands
What has happened to the great British pioneering spirit. Build hyperloop from London, all the way to Edinburgh. (P.S. probably would never happen)
Fixed*
Again nobody's actually got full scale working hyperloops - waay too expensive to develop for now
Build a MEGLEV NO WHEELS From Leeds to MAN to FOLKSTON. BYPASS
LONDON. FRIEGHT ONLY.
It does seem like a lot to spend on non-maglev train lines. These would run "quick-ish" but are hardly a true high speed rail technology.
It's hard to consider a two plus hour inter-city journey fully within a small country a "fast" service. How painfully slow it must be without this.
the cost was bumped up by anti-hs2 people. They want it to cost as much as possible in the hopes it will be cancelled.
Just ditch the link between Birmingham and London, it will be cheaper, quicker, we will finally have a infrastructure project that will not disproportionately benefit London
Cost is all about money in the mouths of avaricious politicians. Cost is environmental to the majority of FAIR minded people.
Werent the climate change people didnt want people in the UK using trains , was really stupid.
An IPPR North report says that in the last decade the North has lost out on £66 billion of transport infrastructure had the investment been comparable to what Westminster invested in London. Westminster Planned transport investment for London will be seven times more per person than in Yorkshire. Per person London will get £3,125 more than Yorkshire.
What does Scotland, Liverpool, Newcastle, Wales, Cornwall etc. that have been crying out for investment get for the money Westminster takes from them to pay for the over £100 billion HS2 from London, Cross rail £18 billion in London, crossrail 2 £41.3 billion in London etc. For decades Westminster has favoured London and the south east of England for investment. Boris Johnsons Torys will be no different they will throw the north a few crumbs with great fanfare and propaganda but the vast majority of investment will still be in London and the south east of England.
www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/politics/london-planned-transport-spending-seven-times-more-per-head-than-for-yorkshire-1-9942398/amp&ved=2ahUKEwjU5Z-p5ZbnAhUUilwKHWywDuAQFjAMegQIAhAC&usg=AOvVaw01klvmuBPGPo53aAJ_NDh3&cf=1
so this new line will help the average worker? cant see a macdonalds employee stumping up the $1000s for a season ticket. will be only for people on $100,000+ and a lovely house in the countryside..
This line is being built initially from Birmingham to London and will replace the existing fast train service from Birmingham to London, then it will be expanded to Manchester known as HS3.
Build the two Northern wings FIRST
they should, but it wouldn't be economical really
they really should - leeds to birmingham is hopelessly overcrowded.
@@xaiano794 had overcrowded form king's cross london to sunerland
@@movesky6696 so you're for hs2 being built then? It will add an extra route from London to the North East as there will be a junction on the Leeds line to join up with the line to Newcastle just north of church Fenton
@@xaiano794 (1 look at london crossrail it cost over run has not work 2/3 year later ) 2 cost of hs2 would be the same over run "will be shareholder's look after well " but the worker would a zero
Replacing the current class of nuclear submarines is expected to cost £31 billion. Another £10 billion has been put aside to cover any extra costs or spending over the estimate.So far in the development of the Trident replacement the government has allocated or spent around £4.8 billion of its budget.Extending the life of the current Trident missiles into the early 2060s will cost around £250 million.Keeping the current Trident submarines in operation until 2028, four years longer than planned, is also expected to cost between £1.2 and £1.4 billion. The House of Commons Library says that savings from the Submarine Enterprise Performance Programme are expected to make up for some of that.
What is the cost of running Trident day to day?The Ministry of Defence’s budget for 2016/17 is a planned £35 billion, increasing every year to 2020/21 when it is estimated to be almost £40 billion.The annual operating costs of Trident are expected to be around 5% to 6% of this every year, or around £2 billion. That’s about 1% of government spending on social security and tax credits in 2015/16, or the amount spent on the NHS every week.
How much has Trident cost in the past?
In 1998 the Strategic Defence Review estimated that the costs of buying Trident originally had been £12.52 billion. In 2015/2016 prices this is around £18.35 billion.
Once the system began to be used in 1994, it cost between 3% and 4.5% of the annual defence budget to run. It increased to between 5% and 6% in 2005-06 and has remained at this level ever since.
If HS1 cost 6.6 billion to construct - at 67 miles and a wee tunnel , how in gods name will it cost an estimated 106 Billion to build HS2 ?
Remember, free high speed broadband for all is cRaZy!
Yes because most people ain't under the illusion that it is free.
@@WhereAllTheRumGone Both cost money, but one is going ahead and one isn't, even though one is much more cost effective, future proof and universally beneficial than another.
The longer they delay the decision the more likely it is it will be done.Thats why they are waiting.Who is going to argue its sense to waste 10billion.
Why so much? Bungs, backhanders and bent councillors and construction firms. Next.
Takes 20yrs to build!!! ...no wonder it costs £105 billion...50% goes to lawyers, consultancies and staff wages lol i'd be retired by then 🤣...
forget about HS2, Just spend those money to electrify tracks in the north and improve signalling on WCML, ECML and suburb railways around major cities such as London, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
How much has the London underground cost everyone in the UK?
Joe Bloggs Not to mention Crossrail
@@frmcf it is only a lot/waste of money if it is outside London.
@@frmcf London will regret sticking its face up to the North during the last 4 years.
Joe Bloggs no it won’t lol
@@smashb3766 get back to quarantine
104 billion of tax payers money to the have to pay 100 quid for a train ticket to london.. I say scrap it keep the old trains and use the 104 billion to give us free travel on our existing trains.. also save the planet
In excess of £106 billion would be far better spent on run down northern towns and cities.
The Leeds to Birmingham leg is in the North and it's badly needed
Zaros Kujala no one cares about northern cities they’re useless and irrelevant
@@smashb3766 How so?
Need to sort the current railway out, not 106 bn for a half hour quicker journey to fucking London 💀💀
That's exactly what hs2 is doing, yet somewhere along the line you've been lied to and convinced the two issues are separate.
Between Birmingham and Leeds there are currently only 2 tracks, a single line. Hs2 will double this capably and take hundreds of thousands of passengers a month off the current services and on to the express ones.
This will obviously reduce overcrowding on the regular trains and help many issues with them.
The time saving is a bonus, but don't get conned by the London to Leeds Times as those aren't what matters, it's the time from Leeds to Birmingham that will see the biggest change, the current 2h journey will only take around 35 minutes with hs2
HS2 UTTER DISASTER RIGHT NOW, MUST BE SIDELINED FOR NOW IN FAVOUR OF INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT RIGHT NOW IN NORTH AND ACROSS THE NATION
This has to be a p!$$take. I’m sorry but with all the money being spend on making our railways much efficient is completely failing. I don’t care about HS2 being built and Crossrail is still being delayed. £millions and £billions have been wasted just to keep our railways moving and new trains being built to keep on the demand for the passengers that want better energy efficient trains with lots of available seats.
That's what hs2 will do, on the Leeds to Birmingham route there is no more space for more trains with more seats and yet it's hopelessly overcrowded. We need more tracks.
The cheapest option is to build a new line, which is what they are doing, the fact it is high speed is just a bonus.
Well HS2 is running into the £billions.
@@Andrewjg_89 Indeed, it isn't cheap to build infrastructure - i don't recall any national campaign to pay a similar amount to hs2 (345 miles of double track - a total of 690 miles at a cost of 107bn, 155m per mile) to add just a single lane to the m6
www.expressandstar.com/news/2008/01/14/plan-for-m6-cost-at-76m-per-mile/
But this is the problem, isn't it and why we have so much overcrowding on the rail network, we are perfectly OK with spending monumental sums on new roads, but when any money is proposed for rail it's dismissed as absurdly expensive.
I blame corporatists, who lied and low balled the actual price tag.
Can we get a grant from the EU before we leave?
@MGazT A gift before we leave then.
You got HS1, that'll be it now
No.
High speed rail is always a scam in the United States never works
How can you claim it's a scam if you've never funded a single project?
California has to keep up
@@buddyhirshfield5970 california never funded it's high speed rail project. Pretty difficult to finish something if you deny it funding
They saw it was a boondoggle so they quit
@@buddyhirshfield5970 they didn't quit, they never gave funding to the project to start with. Nothing was pulled, they didn't quit anything, they just never allocated any money to it.
*did anyone find out what coastline is mapped on the presenter's necktie ?*
If we're going to really invest money in a fast link to the northern cities let's look at 21st century technology.
The case for investing in a hyperloop technology is growing. Hyperloop is currently being proved. It is faster and more environmentally friendly.
Maglevs are fast but they've never been profitable - they are essentially still in the development phase
Have you seen a hypo loop, I went to Birmingham New Street station on Saturday to go to London and missed my Hypo loop service, sorry you live in a dream nothing has been invented yet, we cant even get Mono Rails to run correctly.
Cancellations and delays will make it the same time most likely 🤷🏼♀️