Sadly, your hopes have been dashed as the PM's official spokesman said this week that they weren't considering resurrecting plans for HS2 to continue on to Crewe & Manchester which is excellent news as HS2 is an environmental disaster of epic proportions & Britain's biggest infrastructure mistake in half a century.
@@Inkyminkyzizwoz .. what's "rubbish"? The government HAVE said they won't resurrect ANY of the cancelled sections - FACT. HS2 has been a disaster since day one - FACT.
@astrophilip .. research shows that even if HS2 had been built in full, traffic on the M1 & M40 would have reduced by less than 1% & it'll have absolutely ZERO effect on domestic flights.
HS2 to the original plans including goldborne link and sheffield meadowhall is needed drastically. Linking Birmigham, Derby Nottingham, Crewe, Liverpool, Leeds, York and Newcastle was a slam dunk
Yep, then the following plan for HS3 (Northern Powerhouse Rail) to link from west to east from Liverpool to Leeds (and I guess Hull deserves nice things too lol). HS2 was also support to originally join with HS1 in a mega station below Euston, Kings Cross, St. Pancras along with a full on rebuild of Euston and the warren of Underground interchanges for all the line that converge under there. Which is desperately needed even if they don't build HS2. Euston is NOT fit for purpose any more.
@@TalesOfWar Euston fails without HS2 and an incomplete HS2, I agree that the Euston Cross station is better. HS3 was very good with joining up with HS2 it wouldve given a good example for wales, scotland and east anglia to have it if another high speed line was to be needed.
This was so hard to watch because it’s so accurate. I just want to yell at the politicians, particularly the conservatives - it was their job to manage the project, and they were the ones that were complaining about how much it cost. Unfathomable levels of incompetence. I’m also furious with the Green party, who were passionately campaigning against this project despite the fact that it would’ve been fewer domestic flights, less cars on the road, and more freight by rail. Their environmentalist credentials gave license to driving the cost up and ultimately getting it cancelled.
I have no respect for the Green's after that, and finding out they've opposed the building of solar installations on multiple occasions. They're green in name only it seems. Kind of in the same vein of Greenpeace making everyone hate nuclear power back in the 70's and 80's and here we are now having abandoned the building of new plants in favour of extending the life of gas and coal in much of the world instead.
If the Green Party actually ran transport in the UK, it would be a hell of a lot better than under the Tories. They support HS2 being funded and completed in full. This is nothing but Tory scapegoating for their incompetence.
Didn't the Conservative government start immediately selling off the land it had already bought for the HS2 project at a loss without even seeking the permission of parliament who had to authorise the purchase in the first place just to make it even more exorbitantly difficult for the next government to restart/reboot the project? That is actually criminal. Like that should genuinely be considered treason.
They *tried* to sell the land but it doesn't work through the bureaurocracy that fast and I don't think much if any of the land actuall got sold before the new government came in earlier this year and stopped it pending further review iirc.
Hopefully they couldn't sell off much at all. HS2 needs to go forward and they need to lay the groundwork for expansion if they are to be a serious European economy.
Yep they thoroughly poison-pilled this. This video didn’t mention their car agenda. Or - more importantly - the “cost per kilometre” of all the motorways they built. Or really, passenger-kilometre and kilogram-kilometre for freight. Motorways just have lower capacity for the same cost, or a higher cost to match the rail capacity. The numbers never get mentioned in newspapers though, when complaining about government spending. I wonder why.
@@justwobert9850 Wow really that’s huge if true. Their corruption was inefficient? First I’ve heard this but would love to hear if Starmer can still cancel it.
build it as originally planned. nothing else will get done cheaper or faster the main issue with the project has been constant government meddling to "cut costs", which anyone with a brain would realise would escalate costs wildly, not the uk government though. also making trains faster cuts down on train hours meaning service can be delivered with fewer trains built, smaller land use for depots and staff costs decrease per train too. if the line is slowed the project will get more expensive in delivery & operations.
Yeah exactly, 100% agree with all of this. The line needs to get to Crewe AT A MINIMUM to even have a proper impact, then they need to just get on with the rest. Good project, poorly managed, can still be good.
The cost savings from the upkeeping of fewer trains are negligible and vastly compensated by the higher maintenance costs of high speed rail lines, something which is rarely discussed because so far countries have only had to worry about their construction
@@abelsuisse9671 hence the use of slab track to cope with the higher speeds. and the faster the line the lower the train hours & improvement in running costs which the strategic business case found would be well worth the investment
@mattevans4377 no idea where Old Oak is. However if it is a choke point then it should be sorted out as a priority. By "London" I meant the London terminus.
The recent bright idea suggesting HS2 is reduced from European to UK loading gauge at the same time as abandoning best practise for high speed concrete base in favour of ordinary ballasted track reveals all too clearly why this country seems incapable of delivering acceptable infrastructure. Those charged with running this nation (into the ruddy ground as far as I can see) have evidently learned nothing from ballsup after ballsup, starting with the total lack of a strategic canal (never mind rail) network, via the gauge debacle through the bobawful mess for which the crook Marples let Beeching shoulder the blame and the cherry pickers' charter of 'privatisation' 30 years ago. Never mind HS2, take the Portishead Branch. Mileage in single figures, over half the track still in situ (in need of replacement), single track and we're still waiting after over 20 years. In the same time China's (double track) high speed network has expanded by many thousands of miles without the benefit of any extant formation.
There are plenty of proper high-speed lines with balasted tracks. In fact, Europe's fastest high-speed lines are balasted : LGV Est, LGV SEA, LGV BPL, LGV Rhin-Rhône, and LGV Méditerranée in France. These lines are run at 320kph in daily operations, concrete tracks aren't necessary and used mostly on bridges and viaducts.
@@KyrilPG hs2 alightment and land acquisition is 330kph to 360kph operating speeds with the amount of tunnels & viaducts and ultra gentle curves it wouldn't be possible to use ballasted track without further increasing construction delays, costs and running costs when the line opens.
@@trainworms The lines mentioned were built to the 360 standard, and LGV Est, with balasted tracks, was used for the 574.8 km/h speed record in 2007... This doesn't prevent transitions from balasted to concrete tracks at tunnel or bridge entrances, and save on construction costs.
Ballasting I can understand, even though it would be more expensive in the long run. Cutting down the loading gauge is just asinine though. It would cause a lot more problems for very little cost saving. Only the "classic compatible" trains could run beyond Birmingham.
@@KyrilPG Ballasted track is not a cost-saving over the 60 year timespan that is included in HS2 costs, due to the higher maintenance costs over that period. It's a short term saving, but a long-term more expensive option.
It's worth noting that, while many of the main lines are capable of 200km/h operation, many of them _should_ be capable of 225km/h operation. It's been planned for so long that the first trains capable of that speed are now being phased out of service.
The main reason those trains can't run at those speeds is because they share tracks with trains that can't do more than 160km/h (or less) in places where they'd want the fast running, and there isn't the capacity to deal with that speed differential. It also needs a lot of effort with signalling and the like (the WCML upgrade ditched it to save money after massive overruns in both time and money) to meet the UK's legal requirement for cab-based signalling for faster than 125mph. And it saves maybe a couple of minutes (not least because a lot of the routes these trains run on aren't aligned in a viable way for 125mph) at most - not worth it.
Part of the reason it’s so expensive is Because it keeps on being messed about with. It would also be cheaper if we didn’t have a ‘feast and famine’ approach to infrastructure in this country.
I reckon proportional representation would give us a more predictable investment strategy in the medium to long term. Wild swings in government position doesn't help with planning. That said, the tories were in favour of HS2, until they slowly drifted to the right, a drift which seems to continue unabated with Cleverly now out of the leadership race. I suppose you could make an argument that Farage by proxy killed HS2.
@@Inkyminkyzizwoz Even then, with a stonking Tory majority still intact, Ed Davey was demolishing walls as he won (in what wasn't a surprise) Chesham and Amersham outflanking the Tories to being the most extreme NIMBY party (ignoring the obvious winners the Green Party) and Boris scrapped planning reform and tacked hard NIMBY in response. Arguably it was Chesham and Amersham (who now, with the line's damage being done, want it to be as useful as possible to the country so the disruption wasn't in vain) turning from UKIP to the LibDems as their anti-HS2 vote and uniting the opposition to the Tories that killed the northern bits of HS2. Best (and worst) thing about PR is that it gives a layer of insulation between individual politicians and the voting public it brings. Constant coalitions remove accountability to carry out pledges to the public and allow you to blame other parties in the Government for bad policies. And that you vote for party not individual means that the individual's reelection bid is to climb the party list rather than appeal to their constituents' desires. It does mean that stuff can be done - as long as the political class want it.
@@sihollett That depends on what PR system is use. An rules around list creation, for example the UK could keeping the same constituencies boundaries but allocate constituencies to each party to appoint someone base on the number of votes they got from that constituency.
@@InkyminkyzizwozI don't think so. The issue with our system is that it causes these massive swings. So you get one big left wing majority that builds something, and then a big right wing majority that tears it down/sabotages there build/underfunds it. With a more balanced majority I think this issue would stop because each tendency would be at least partially represented. Building a big major project only to cancel it half way is a much bigger waste than building a medium sized big project and getting it done on time and letting it get to the end.
You're spot on about the capacity argument. One thing I'm sick and tired of hearing is people making out that it's all about 'saving 20 minutes'! Furthermore, one argument that seems to have become especially prevalent since the pandemic is claims that increases in home working will reduce the need for travel anyway. Well, the fact that rail passenger numbers are almost back to what they were beforehand suggests otherwise - besides, people said the same when the telephone was invented!
@@peterwilliamallen1063No, it is more like 20 minutes. Not that the actual figure matters - the people making that argument can't even seem to agree on what it is!
@@Inkyminkyzizwoz Nope mate, not sure where you got 20 mins from but it does matter, on offical HS2 ltd paper work and other offical sites it has been stated that the HS2 trains will complete the journey from Birmingham to London or vis vers in 50 mins, at the moment the average time by Pendolino from Birmingham to London is 90 mins, depending on the stopping sequence and the overall speed so 90-50 = 40 mins and this has been stated in official HS2ltd video's. The 20 min timing has cme from Chinese whispers where it takes only one person to incorrectly state the time and then every one is staing it. It is nothing to do with people making this statement of 20 ins, it is wht the Builders HS2 ltd state and they state 40 mins.
@@peterwilliamallen1063.. * OFFICIAL .. not "offical. *VICE VERSA .. not "vis vers". *COME .. not "cme". *EVERYONE .. not "every one". *STATING ... not "staing". *MINS .. not "ins". *WHAT .. not "wht". 😉
@@CRIMSONANT1 God you are a boring Fart arn't you James my boy, personlly I could not care too hoots about spellin matics , oops I mean about Spelling Mistakes just get your facts right about HS2, it's route through Birmingham and what is going as it is comming home it is comming home and yor White Nelly the trumper is now dead 😆😆🐘🐘🚄🚄👍👍
It's very difficult to directly compare UK and Italian/French/etc prices as UK prices for HS2 contain 60 years of maintenance, the trains and the stations - most other European countries just give the price for the railway tracks being constructed. There was one HS2 'cost increase' (the one where it went from 30-something billion to 50-something billion) where they simply added the cost of the trains and changed the pricetag of the railway from the median estimated price (50-50 as to whether it goes over or under) to the 95th percentile price (5% chance of cost overruns). The route hadn't changed, nor the cost, it was just accounted for differently and the cost of HS2 apparently went up by nearly 50%! Of course, this has meant that contractors bids had higher prices than originally planned because the publicly-stated costs slated for that contract were higher - a phantom 'increase' in costs turning into a real one.
Comparing the costs is also silly because if HOW we cost things. Our costs include EVERYTHING. Including the really expensive things, the stations. Other countries chunk it out over multiple smaller projects all part of the same larger programme. That also makes it harder to cancel things because you'd need to cancel each individual project rather than just the whole thing like we do here. In France for example you'll have one part of the project being to build the actual lines between the cities, then another project will be building the stations or adding the platforms and infrastructure to existing stations for the new lines, then another for the "final mile" bringing things from outside to the actual city. It's a more modular approach management wise. We do the same thing here in terms of the engineering, but the way the thing is managed from the top down is what really causes so many of the problems we see whenever we do any kind of large scale infrastructure project here in the UK. It also doesn't help that the way the system is structure isn't designed to do big projects. The tendering system relies WAY too heavily on smaller companies that can't scale for big things like this. Back in the past we'd have say Balfour Beaty who'd do the vast majority of the work, now it's tendered out to a hundred or more smaller companies who contract and sub-contract hundreds more for the bits they can't actually handle themselves, it makes managing things incredibly complex and expensive. There are genuine advantages of having massive companies that do everything, back in the day that used to be all in house at the government level. Something else sold off to the private sector. There are some things that private industry just can't possibly do without the state doing all of the heavy lifting first. Think the space programme with NASA in the USA or British Aerospace here, or BT when it was the part of the General Post Office.
That's a thorough and knowledgeable account. ✓✓ Two reasons for building to high speed standards: (1) the faster you go the more journeys you get out of the same fleet the more new capacity you create & (2) building a new trunk line to 1900s spec would be just silly.
The line needs to get to Crewe AT A MINIMUM to even have a proper impact, then they need to just get on with the rest. Good project, poorly managed, can still be good.
The missing link to Leeds is going to be very costly to the North, which is in dire need of infrastructural support. The pollies are focused on London and neglecting the rest of Britain.
@@JohnFromAccounting I dunno, I've seen rail experts predicting that once HS2 opens and people get a taste of just how much better it is than the existing line things will move forward with the other bits of HS2 pretty quickly.
@@BigBlueMan118.. it'll be completely the opposite .. once people "get a taste" of how much the fares will cost, this monstrous vanity project will be dead in the water. It'll become nothing more than a glorified shuttle service between west London & Birmingham that only the elite will be able to afford.
@@pedromorgan99 This is why we need engineers. I'm an economist, and say shit like "make train go straight so it go fast". You've got numbers and stuff.
There's also the happy geographical benefit of much of where it needs to go being along that straight line. Like the Eastern Sea Board in the US or Quebec to Toronto in Canada. Those places are crying out for a high speed rail connection, but there are different political forces at play there.
This is a very simplistic view on high speed rail in the UK, and by this I include lines like the West Coast mainline that isn't truly high speed. Firstly, whilst it's true that costs have increased massively due to decisions made as to the exact route of the line seems to get factored into the cost increases is inflation. The longer it takes you to build a railway line the more expensive it will become. The other thing that I think is often missed is that often in mainland Europe costs for both speed rail lines are for the track between the cities, not into the centre of cities (which often isn't and to be truly high speed anyway and may have to run on regular tracks for the final few miles of the journey) or the stations at either end (for new stations in between of course, but not the existing ones at end). Secondly, you talk about the possibility of increasing capacity on the existing lines instead. The reason why HS2 took the form it did was because there just isn't the space to extend capacity on the West Coast Mainline without spending about as much as HS2. Thirdly, Northern Powerhouse Rail won't help reduce the time taken to travel to the Northern cities, especially past Manchester to cities like Leeds, because it isn't new track and so it will still have to share the lines with existing traffic. In the end this whole project wasn't to reduce the travel time to London, but to increase capacity for local commuter trains, and maybe also provide better services between cities outside of London and the South East that has had massive investment in recent decades with the rest of the country getting very little. The East Midlands that is described as a deprived region of Europe is again completely ignored, as is South Yorkshire and arguably West and North Yorkshire as well, as well as the North East. What I don't get though, even if the full project was unaffordable now why not just keep the plans in place, keep the plans that has been acquired, and just build it after the London to Birmingham leg has been completed? The reason is simple. The line ran through government held constituencies that opposed the line from the get go so by cancelling it they hoped to keep hold of those seats in parliament. The whole project should have been built from Manchester and Leeds heading southwards and not from London going north. That way if the money ran out at least the most important part of the project would be completed to Birmingham and people could continue journeys on to London from connecting stations. Finally, even if nothing more than is currently in progress of being built gets built a connection up to Crewe, just south of Manchester, needs to be built, avoiding the biggest bottleneck on the line around Stafford and Stoke. Not doing this is criminal in my opinion and is basically economic sabotage. The problem with the UK is that it's too London centric which causes massive inequality in the country that needed to be addressed. Yes, London is a world city, it's the capital, it has the largest population, it needs high quality investment in its infrastructure, but you can't only spend government there or you just build up bigger problems that are even more costly to overcome further down the line.
Oh, and one other thing you forgot to mention is HS1 wasn't built when the Channel Tunnel was finished. Train services from the continent sped through Northern France and through the Channel Tunnel and then had to crawl through Kent on not even West Coast Mainline style high speed lines to get to London, but slow commuter lines, and this went on for over 20 years after its completion!!! I think this just says it all.
Extend HS2 to all the Midlands major towns as well as Glasgow and Edinburgh but cost effectively by minimising tunnels, over designed bridges and viaducts. Britain is likely to need rail for a few more centuries and construction will not get any cheaper in the future. If Britain is to descend further into mediocrity then do as Rishi Sunak intended and make HS2 a complete waste of resources by only extending to Birmingham. If Britain is to ever turn the corner and progress then build a spine - of high speed rail.
"over designed bridges and viaducts. Britain is likely to need rail for a few more centuries" The former comes from the latter! The main reason why we have 'over designed' on HS2 is that it's aiming to be there at least 100 years later without needing any serious and costly refurb. They don't want the Thame viaduct failing after 115 years like the Nuneham Viaduct did a couple of years ago (and a shed ton of 60s road viaducts have basically done over the last decade).
@@sihollett The main problem is the excessive extent of the tunnels, bridges and viaducts which is more of a routing problem no doubt because of politics. Simpler designs for structures can be equally durable. The architecture of the Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian and German high speed lines is more utilitarian.
The engineering isn't the problem or even the reason things cost so much. It's the assholes who don't want it to be anywhere near their house or who are asking insane amounts for the land to build it over (or under). We do have a genuine problem in this country in terms of available engineers though. We don't have enough to build it any faster than it's already being built. We just don't do enough large scale infrastructure projects in this country any more. Go to somewhere like France and it's a rolling programme. You go from one project to the next and it doesn't end, because they're always building something new or improving something old. There's a reason a lot of the engineers and project managers working on HS2 are French.
The National Infrastructure Commission (an executive agency of the Government that provides advice on Infrastructure) released a big report this week about why the UK is so bad at building infrastructure. It referred to many challenges, but one that it really called out on HS2 for, was planning and development consents. Even though HS2 has had multiple long Hybrid Acts passed by Parliament to approve it, it has *so far* required over 8,000 other planning consents and approvals from hundreds of public bodies and local governments. Another example of this is the proposed Lower Thames Crossing (a road tunnel linking the M25 in Essex to the M2 in Kent). The planning permission process for this new road has already cost more than £300m, which is more than the actual building costs of the world's longest road tunnel (the Lærdal tunnel, in Norway).
@@sihollett I'm sure there are think tanks saying the same sort of things (because they are in fact true) - but the National Infrastructure Commission did release a report "Cost drivers of major infrastructure projects in the UK" on October 10th. It's a great (though depressing) read if you haven't seen it yet.
I would be happy for a 200 km/h extension to Manchester if that means we can actually have a new independent corridor! To be honest I think that just finishing the project as it was is still the best solution. You can argue to make the construction SLOWER to spread the costs throughout the years, but changing the projects will ultimately make everything cost more. As for the Italian comparison, High speed projects in Italy are usually much cheaper for two main reasons: > salaries are less than half than British ones > high speed rail links always merge with the traditional lines near the stations, which makes the HS absolutely useless - they may separate the lines in the future but that would be an extra additional cost that is not in the initial cost.
The fact the birthplace of the railway does already have a bunch of "Pretty Fast Trains" doing up to 200 km/h on their lines does help explain why support for this was so slushy, I guess. I really didn't know that part. Nor did I have the overview that this is all about capacity with high speed being a "nice to have" and sexy-to-the-public selling point as opposed to a dire need, in a country whose cities, in the scheme of things, are not that far apart. Plus of course there was the NIMBY thing you've described- that part I did know- and even there, I must admit that some of the NIMBYs had a point, like those who demanded that a famous patch of old growth English forest in the way of the planned route be tunnelled under rather than bluntly carved straight through. Anyway, good summary, old chap! I love the footage that you've used to illustrate it which is often very scenic.
While the station-to-station journey times on the WCML and ECML are competitive with car and plane, we also need to remember that a lot of journeys will include connecting legs from suburban or regional stations at one or both ends. So while flying along at 200km/h is quicker than driving at 110km/h, by the time you've fannied around on local trains/buses it might not be quicker after all - speeding the main bit of the journey up to 300km/h will offset that. Adding more tracks to existing lines would be *waaay* more disruptive. For a start, most the overbridges and underbridges would need to be rebuilt. They often go through towns and villages, which would mean a lot more compulsory purchase and demolition needed. Services on those lines would need to be suspended or reduced during possessions. And because we need to relieve both the East and West routes, both lines would need extensive upgrades, instead of one new route running up the middle that barely touches existing tracks.
200 million per kilometer is equivalent to the costliest parts of Paris' huge new deep underground metro expansion (Grand Paris Express) currently under construction, including stations, systems, trains, depots, and maintenance centers... Despite having many tunnels, HS2 is still mostly built on the surface and in the countryside, not deep under a very densely built city through very poor soil conditions... Also, one of the latest high-speed lines opened in France in 2016, LGV SEA, was built for less than 8 billion euros, including several stations' overhauls and a bunch of environmental mitigation features. It's a little over 300 kilometers in length, plus 30 km of access ramps and connection tracks. So, about 330 kilometers of new high-speed lines. If HS2 is restarted (hopefully so), they really should ask the French or the Spanish, or both, to manage the project and do the work. High-speed lines and other transportation infrastructures in France and Spain are built for a mere fraction of the cost and mostly in time (or reasonably late). The anglosphere should just stop trying to build these things on their own, they can't.
The French, certainly, were heavily involved in the route creation process for HS2. The price issues are systemic, government created, ones that are basically politically impossible to remove. (the planning system, that government funding is subject to political whims, etc).
The costs here are mostly down to politics and a general lack of organisation or structure in place for large scale projects. France has been on a rolling infrastructure build practically since the end of WW2. They have everything in place to do stuff like this and a huge pool of engineers to do it. We... don't.
HS2 needs to, at MINIMUM, go the distance from *Euston* to Birmingham. All this talk of HS2 ending at Old Oak Common is wild to me. Shoving passengers onto the already wildly packed Liz Line (Crossrail) simply won't work.
It's a pity you didn't look at the time savings futher north. Glasgow and Edinburgh were due to get trains to London in 3h30, at which point the air routes become uncompetitive and we'd see massive reduction in flights, freeing space at London airports for intercontinental routes instead. That then justifies the highest speeds as the closer you get to 3 hours, the more of that business shifts to rail. Once you get under 3 hours the air traffic collapses. Famously Madrid to Barcelona went from 80% air to 80% rail when the AVE line opened. The most crucial sections to build are now the line to Euston (as you rightly pointed out) and the Phase 2a line to Crewe as this bypasses the two track Shugborough Tunnel (put in originally to keep the Nimby owner of Shugnorough Hall happy - history repeats!). Its this 2 track section and Colwich Junction (which has no flyovers) just to the south of it which constrain the whole of the main line from London to Glasgow and everywhere in between. On the East Coast there is an equivalent bottle neck at Welwyn where the 2 track Digswell Viaduct breaks the 4 track line and worse Welwyn North station (served every 30 mins by local trains) further reduces capacity. The alternative to HS2 via Leeds is to widen this bridge and the two tunnels north of it. Railtrack proposed this. There was uproar locally as there are some very nice houses close to the railway here and they were NIMBYs in bold block capitals. The Sunack cuts failed to provide any solution to these two major issues, so either the decision was made in ignorance of this or they simply didn't care about rail, perhaps not surprising given Sunak's £40M per year helicopter habit. I really hope some rational decision making will be made soon to get the project back on track in full.
The problem with the HS2 project was due to its implementation strategy and political considerations. By starting construction in the South, the project incurred substantial cost increases early on, largely attributed to efforts to appease NIMBYs in Conservative-held areas. This approach led to the project significantly exceeding its budget. Had construction commenced in the North, as initially promised as part of the "leveling up" agenda, the project might have faced a different trajectory. The North, generally more receptive to the project due to its potential economic benefits, might have presented less resistance, potentially resulting in lower costs for mitigation measures. Moreover, starting in the North could have created a stronger economic imperative to complete the London connection, making it politically challenging to abandon the southern portion. This approach might have generated more momentum for the project, potentially making it less susceptible to cancellation or significant cuts. Part of the original justification for HS2 included reducing the wealth inequality between the North and South, improving connectivity, and stimulating economic development in the North. These goals align with the argument for initiating construction in the North. While speculative, such an approach might have resulted in less accommodation of southern NIMBYs, thereby reducing costly rerouting. It could have also led to lower overall costs due to more receptive communities in the North and potentially fostered stronger political will to complete the entire project, including the crucial London leg.
Interesting points. The planning certainly began with the blind assumption that of course it had to meet London or what would even be the point? The question being, I suppose, would there be passengers enough to justify a high speed line connecting a string of northern cities to each other?
I'm sorry as a resident of Amersham I am both outraged and appalled by the idea that my neighbours are "NIMBYs in Conservate-held areas" - they are BANANAs (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone) in Lib-Dem-held areas. ;P The initial cost had a lengthy tunnel under the Misbourne Valley (the obvious route between London and Birmingham, but every attempt from the Grand Union Canal to the M1 was pushed away from it by the locals while people on less optimal routes were begging for the transport link and so got it) - having a tunnel there has nothing to do with why costs have spiralled (and has reduced the spiralling in the areas it goes under due to a lot of that spiralling being due to HS2 paying for councils to have planning staff dedicated to throwing spanners in the construction works making it take longer and cost more, whereas if you are underground you have less influence from the council) - the tunnels are being built to budget.
Good video, but with one note: the Midlands-North West Rail link that the metro mayors have proposed would still be high speed rail, but it would be with a top speed of 300km/h rather than 360km/h, and there would also be a few other cost-cutting measures such as using ballasted track rather than slab tracks although the exact details need to be confirmed because, as you pointed out, it's still just a proposal at this stage!
Compared to spending 20 odd billion on revamping the houses of Parliament, a brand new railway of hundreds of miles long for 80-100bn doesn't seem that bad...
Brit here! IMO, the best way forward is to maximise the benefit without overblowing the costs even more is to A. Complete it to Euston (OBVs) B. Complete it to just past the bottleneck of Crewe C. Link it to HS1, so we can have truly long distance HSR. Of course we need to talk about the economic benefits, but it is also crucial to talk about the environmental impact. People knock of concerns about destroying ancient woodland as simply NIMBYism, yet the sharp decline in biodiversity is truly alarming in the uk, and these trees are crucial to preserving it. We also need to talk about embedded carbon, which means that this project will not contribute to the green transition, but hinder it. Also, building it to 360km/h is absurd, and inflates the cost unnecessarily.
Linking to HS1 is a net negative, rather than a benefit-maximiser. It's not as bad as a Heathrow spur (there, even if it magicked into existence and cost nothing, it would be a negative to run trains on it instead of to London), but the costs far outweigh the benefits.
@@APAG They are mutually exclusive when London demand fills all all the paths as London capacity is reduced by European service that most of the small amount of demand won't use as its too infrequent and doesn't serve their origin-destination pair directly (so changing in London is a much better option).
@@sihollett This is true, should the situation stay the same, but having such a centralised country - i would say - is a bad thing. The connection of the north to Europe, should be part of a wider plan to reduce our economic dependence on London. Of course this on its own won't change the situation, but our current idea that everything has to be about London is unsustainable. Besides, if sacrificing some capacity to Euston means a service every couple hours to Europe exists, I'm all for it.
@@APAG London isn't going to go away - we've had decades of trying to disperse its economy across the country, and yet it's still there being overly-dominant. Where we've been successful in dispersing the economy from London are places where there are high quality links to London (and promises to make them much much better with HS2) and the business on offer there. Treasury to Darlington, BBC to Salford, etc. 'Rest of South East' economic powerhouses like Reading, Milton Keynes, etc work due to their fast and frequent links to London - rather than pulling people out, those links bring businesses in. Making London links worse in favour of a leisure-focussed direct train to Paris every couple of hours - than they could be is not a good way to grow the North and make it an effective economic counterweight to London! I'm also not sure how building a rail scheme where only about 1 in 6 passengers were modelled as not travelling to/from somewhere in SE England (half the number that wouldn't even leave SE England!) is going to end the dominance of London and the South East. HS1-HS2 link is a scheme that boosts Kent and the Thames Valley far more than it does the North.
Cancellation seems to be costing hundreds of millions. Hundreds of millions to do less. I saw something like a £200 million change to the train order. But absolutely - 'can you redesign Euston for the fifth time' when they've already bought the most expensive thing (the land) and cleared most of it is just wasting money given the cost of planning in the UK. You might save 50 million in concrete, but you've spent 60 million looking for it.
The UK and California... injecting confidence in the Anglo world and inspiring Australians that we too can develop a high speed rail service which we can raise as a fresh idea just before every election...
The West Coast mainline trains can only run at 200km/h because they are tilt trains. Unless special high speed tilt trains are built, the time savings on HS2 will be lost by running at less than 200km/h once the trains get beyond Birmingham. The usual go would be for the UK to build a fleet of expensive high speed tilt trains, and then reinstate the rest of HS2, making the those trains obsolete. Since they would already exist, they'd probably continue to be used, but without tilting. Passengers would then suffer the fact that tilt trains have to be narrower (to allow for tilting). Disclaimer, I now live in Australia, where 160km/h is regarded as fast, and rarely achieved.
HS2 Trains will travel at 225 mph from London Euston to Birmingham and Lichfield then when the new extension from Lichfield to Manchester is open they will trvel at 185 mph
There are several fundamental problems with HS2 - we could start with its acronym HS (for High Speed). It should have been labelled HC2 (HC for High Capcity), from the outset because that was the primary objective for any new rail line north of London - to create additional new capacity for future expansion of rail travel, thereby facilitating significant modal shift away from private car and short haul air travel. However, quite apart from that semantics blunder, there are a number of obvious flaws in this, potentially game changing transport strategy; 1. HS2 should always, as a mandatory requirement, have been constructed to link directly to HS1, thereby facilitating through services to the European mainland direct from provincial UK cities (and back again). 2. HS2 could have performed this essential function by construction of an combined underground through terminus between Euston and St. Pancras. 3. HS2 should always have been constructed with junctions facilitating North-South and East-West services operating seamlessly between both the new and existing networks, in other words, servicing other UK provincial population centres, exclusive of London. 4. HS2 should always have been planned as the first element of a much wider NEW UK-wide network of lines to supplement the existing conventional network, thereby separating fast transit express services from slower commuter and freight rail services on a much wider pan-UK scale. 5. Finally the massive problem of seemingly out of control budgetary practice - how is it that France can plan, construct and open two new rail lines (LGV BPL & LGV SEA, christened on the same day in July 2017) that, combined, constitute a larger network in total to that proposed in the original HS2 plan, ie. phases 1, 2a, 2b and 2c (Eastern & Western Arms), and bring them in on time for a total cost under 15bn€, or about £13bn - yes, I know there are some significant differences between projects on either side of La Manche but they don't account for a minimum four fold chasm in cost overruns!!! Compare and contrast rail journeys in the UK with those in mainland Europe - here in the UK you can board a single direct train service in Aberdeen and alight at Penzance but the 1245km (778miles) journey will take you 13.5hours - on the other side of La Manche a very similar1257km rail journey between Torino (Piedmont, Northern Italy) and Lamezia (Calabria, Southern Italy) is also possible using a single direct service but the Frecciarossa 9583 departs Porto Nuova @08:00 and arrives in Lamezia Centrale station @17:28, 9.5 hours later, or to put in another way, a full 4 hours less in overall travel duration. What's more when the currently planned High Speed Line from Salerno to Reggio Calabria opens in 2030 this will reduce the overall travel time for the same distance by at least another hour! Whatever happened to Britain's "White Heat of Technology" revolution trumpeted by Harold Wilson back in the mid 1960s?
Hs2 is now being built into London Euston and the Metro Mayors of the West Midlands and Greater Manchester are looking at plns to build a hi speed line from Lichfield to Manchester now using Metro Concil fumds and private momey
It would be interesting to see a proper cost breakdown of HS2 and comparison to similar European or Asian projects. Not simply dividing the cost/km of the headline figures
12:40 “could potentially be done with a cheaper regular rail line” but what does that mean? There’s no such thing really. If you build a new alignment it has all the same costs of clearing land and buying land. If you put slow trains on it then you’d have TWO parallel lines running slow trains. But you clearly don’t want to mix slow trains and fast trains - the timetable loses frequency. So would you try putting fast trains on the old line? That’s poppycock with the lines being aligned in the 1800s for steam trains. (The curves are added on purpose to help them). Bottom line is, NOBODY builds lines for steam trains anymore, so ANY new line is going to be a high speed line. Whether it’s high speed or “very high speed”, it’s always going to be straighter than the old lines just because of what century we are in. Sorry!
Would it not have been cheaper to go onto Leeds from Manchester rather than having an eastern leg? You'd also tick off a lot of Northern Powerhouse Rail too. Thoretically it could then go onto York, Newcastle, Edinburgh then Glasgow improving the Transpennine routes too...
That was an excellent and concise assessment of where we are at. Given that the reason to build is increased overall capacity, not speed in itself, the political decision to go for a line speed of 360 km/h when everyone else was doing 300 km/h was pure vanity (“my train goes faster than yours”). Higher speed requires gentler curves, heavier engineering and most significantly, with so much of the line in tunnel, larger diameter tunnels with more pressure-relief shafts. It also led to specification of concrete slab track for much of the line, which is about twice as expensive to build as ballasted track (though cheaper to maintain). The Manchester/West Mids mayors’ HS2-lite proposal is for 300 km/h - high speed by any standard - running on ballasted track.
France had opened Phase 1 of LGV Est with a design speed of 350kmh in 2007. Madrid to Barcelona opened in 2008 with a design speed of 350km/h. HS2 was designed with a 400km/h design speed and a 360km/h opening-day top speed in 2009 with an opening date 20 years down the line. It wasn't vanity, it was literally the standard tech of the time. Eurostars can do 320km/h on TGV Nord, which opened in 1993 - 300km/h wouldn't have even been the previous generations' tech. There's no vanity with the speed they picked other than the leaving of a legacy where we do our best to leave a legacy that future generations don't have to pay a fortune fixing due to our myopia. And the ballasted track by the Mayors has been criticised within the industry for being a short-term saving that will cost in the long run as maintenance is much more intensive. Sure, if it gets it built rather than not built, the extra costs would be worth it, but it's everyone who knows about these things (including the people who came up with the proposal) know its a false economy.
It has ben tried and failed and HS2 is not a vanity project as it is being built to speed up WCML services from London Euston to Birmingham and the North West so taking passenger services off the southern hlf of the WCML giving more spce for the ever increasing freight trins using the Southern Half of the WCML
This discussion starts (as often happens) by falling into the trap that UK rail does / should centre on London…. Becomes a London-centric issue, how long to travel to / from London etc. There is much more than London in the UK… something successive governments (based in London, elected by voters in the London region…) have ignored, with most of the fairly limited infrastrucure spending over the last (many) decades being in the south east (London) region….Elizabeth tube line, starting HS2 in London… and perennial underspending in the north (still run on Victorian era train lines, are few direct train connections between the major northern cities, most northern cities have little to no city metro or trams..they operate mostly on buses, or easier to just drive!) which is why large (northern) parts of the population feel shortchanged, that yet again infrastructure spending has been in the south (HS2…London to Birmingham) and then stopped (again!) before any spending in the North. You wonder if HS2 construction had, instead of starting with the southern zone, started in the North and then headed south, it wouldn’t have been stopped? Would’ve had massively more economic impact in the northern regions, probably much cheaper per km up there (fewer NIMBYs of politically vital southern electorates), and London-centric political egos would’ve wanted to keep going to connect to London….couldn’t have the north having something better than the south! Ultimately it’s Laughable / embarrassing debacle. From a history as railway pioneers (the Victorians built a massive rail system with relative ease…and, yes, cheap labour), the UK now can’t built 200km from Birmingham northwards across relatively flat and low cost (and generally NIMBYless) land without huge cost overruns, delays…because, again, they’ve spent all the money already… in the South And it gets worse.. there was supposed to be a HS3 / Northern Powerhouse scheme too, connecting the (run north south) HS2 lines with new east-west improvements to massively improve connectivity across the North between the northwest (Liverpool, Manchester) and Yorkshire (Sheffield, Leeds, York) and across to Hull on the east coast. But…no HS2 is getting that far north to connect to now, and the whole HS3 / Powerhouse seems to being quietly forgotten about too. Back to the Victorian age we go! Brunel would turn in his grave!
I think in the UK as in Australia the imperative is build wider and more motorways.The land they take up and continual noise of traffic has become a fact of life.
@@DavidKnowles0 Not quite - the A1(M) was only finished in North Yorkshire as recently as 2018. However the general thrust of your argument is true - the UK has spent the last 25 years only building new fast roads about 25 years after most other developed countries would have done so. Belgium, Austria (both of which had half the motorway of the UK for less than half the area/population) and Italy (which had roughly twice the motorway for a similar sized country) are the only European countries (with motorways) that have increased their motorway percentage less since the year 2000.
Greeting to Australia from Britain. I was totally against the construction of HS2 as planned, but as the bulk of the money has already been wasted, Sunak's decision to cancel the cheaper bits was imbecilic at best. Not that Sunak used trains when a helicopter or RAF plane was available (even for London-Newcastle) What went wrong? Firstly it was described by the government as World Leading- a red flag if ever there was, knowing the UK government's track record (pardon the pun) at doing anything on time, within budget and actually useful. It was over specified in terms of speed- 360km/h, which means higher infrastructure costs and higher energy consumption during operation (the UK power grid is barely adequate now). Gold plating is the term used, and is also the reason that the Great Western electrification was truncated. Boring tunnels to satisfy NIMBYs has added billions to the cost, and given that leisure travel is now higher than business travel, who wants to watch the inside of tunnels instead of scenery. Meanwhile, capacity enhancements in other parts of the country have been delayed due to lack of funds. The link to HS1 would be the only way to provide an alternative to Manchester-Europe air travel. Having to get off the train at Euston and get a taxi to St. Pancras to get on a Eurostar is going to have zero effect on air travel. The contracts and their lack of supervision were a licence to print money for the contractors, and the European suppliers of boring machines. Planning has been done on the hoof with frequent changes to the plans- You can almost hear the cash registers going "Kerching" in the builders' accounts departments. Before anybody comments, I have written and administered contracts.
Under the plans of the present HS2, there were no plans to connect HS2 to HS1 on financial grounds as there is no call for train services from Birmingham and Manchester o Europe having adequat cheap flights from Birmingham and Manchester Airports and in sme wys quicker and HS2 is a Domestic Hi Speed line to be operated y Avanti West Coast Trains where as HS1 is operated by Eurostar only
Lets assume the myth of the GCR - that there was a modern fast line from Sheffield (or even Liverpool) to Aylesbury that got closed and can be easily reopened (even though most of that is nonsense)... From Aylesbury to London the line is really slow and there's not capacity for fast paths through Rickmansworth/Beaconsfield. Marylebone is a poorly-sited terminus that can't easily be expanded (ditto Paddington). You are going to have to build a new-build London to Aylesbury line, and something going to Birmingham (which the GCML didn't serve). Effectively you are going to have to build most of HS2 phase 1 anyway.
There is to much hype about 'high speed'' rail. Higher speed rail (150-200k/hr) doesn't require the necessary high engineering requirements that high speed (200-300k/hr). I do agree with Kyle, there are other options for less expensive 'higher speed' rail especially if building dedicated rail corridors or dedicated track on existing rail corridors.
Did you actually watch the video? It said if you are going to build new, then why not build it to modern standards, which can support faster travel than the 200kmh we have today? Also that you need a good reason to encourage passengers to use it. Getting there quicker is such a reason.
They looked in detail at 200km/h super-fast tracks along the WCML (which is already 4-tracked most of the way to Crewe, and 200km/h on the fast tracks - the interventions you talk about were done long ago!) and quickly found that was going to be more expensive than a greenfield line with 400km/h. Similarly widening a motorway by a lane each way costs the same amount as building the same mileage of new-build 6-lane motorway due to having to work around the existing structures and traffic.
@@sihollett - I am aware of that the various option have been looked at. You can have a new dedicated 'higher speed' rail corridor that would be cheaper to build than a highly engineered 'high speed' corridor. At the moment the UK can't afford anything after 14 years of austerity by successive Tory governments.
@@TheRip72 - Yes I did watch the video. 'High speed' rail is gold plated 'nice to have' service that required higher engineering standards resulting in higher costs than higher speed rail. As seen with costs blow outs, can the UK after 14 years of austerity by successive Tory government's can afford to have a gold plated project or higher speed rail that could have included the Northern Rail project?
@@chrismckellar9350 They looked at lower speed (~250km/h) options. They saved about 3% of construction costs by dropping the top speed, but removed a load of benefits and increased operational costs. Austerity started in 2008 as New Labour had run out of money. Austerity was the way of having money to spend. The UK Government has never been spending more.
No! Don’t measure all costs by kilometre! MOST of the costs are in the station - so what do you think those comparisons are using? Not stations! It’s one of the biggest travesties of the project, that overdue station upgrades have been postponed and postponed by existing networks, leaving their old stations in an awful state until they’re needed to change for a new rail line. IT’S NOT THE LINE THAT COSTS THE MONEY. Euston Station being an extreme example of safety upgrades that are long overdue - unlike Sydney Central, you can’t go to the platform until a few minutes before departure and there’s a terrible scramble when the platform numbers are finally displayed. The space there (for people, not just trains) is tragically poor. For more information go see an expert TH-camr like Gareth Dennis’s channel.
I would love to share what came from floating in flood water and the two hours I gave to what if? And yes it's cost effective and allows infrastructure to the dynamic of getting there. I feel it's a blessing. Cheers
10:48 Glad you mentioned the HS1 - HS2 Link. I feel that it is one of the silent cuts to the HS2 project and gutted HS2 in terms of future potential. Basically forcing a reliance on changing through London if you want to get to Europe via rail from somewhere outside of London, such as Birmingham or Leeds. Which will likely have the negative outcome of making Euston and St Pancras even more overcrowded in future with large numbers of people having to use the stations to change between lines.
Running trains on such a link would have gutted HS2 in terms of future (and opening day) potential - taking not just the small amount of spare capacity, but also some of the already-allocated capacity to run through trains with little demand compared to other uses of those paths. Euston and St Pancras will cope with the addition of number of passengers changing between HS1 and HS2, if you don't build the link. It's a rounding error amount of people at those busy stations. Will Old Oak Common and Stratford cope with the increase of people changing there if you build the link? It's going to be a bigger number than you are adding to the terminals by not building, as you'd have both people changing from other HS1/HS2 trains onto the link (as the through trains can't serve everyone everywhere all at once), and a much larger number changing off the through trains to get to where they want to go (as the overwhelming majority on both routes want Central London).
London-Rugby is the most congested section, so that is the first section to be targeted for relief. Or do you think that Leeds-Carlisle would be a better place to start? The existing line there nearly closed in the late 80s.
@@TheRip72 HS2 should have started in Manchester. The east west connection from Liverpool through Manchester to Leeds would benefit 15 million in the regions of the North.
HS2 could have been built to the original specification on time and on budget by working with China's experts in high speed rail technology. As usual the UK is slow and expensive for infrastructure and regarded as a joke having postponed Heathrow expansion, HS2 and nuclear power plant construction.
They could increase capacity dramatically by running stopping and express trains at the same time using sidings to make way for the express trains, currently it just alternates between stopping and express, so the train line is empty most of the time.
It doesn't just alternate between stopping and express. They flight trains so that you get several expresses, followed by several 'stoppers' (sorted by when they stop to maximise throughput), followed by a single empty path before the next round of expresses. There's 2 or 3 empty paths each hour out of Euston, with 12 in use. I guess they could be filled as long as you continue to flight stoppers (so trains stopping at Watford create a free path for a train stopping at Milton Keynes to fall back into, for example) and have two platform loops and through track at Watford Junction, holding the Watford stopper at Watford for 15 minutes before it can take the path of the next Watford stopper (as the first empty one). The status quo is much more efficient! The WCML fasts have more trains running along them than every TGV line in France, despite having too many flat junctions and lots of trains that stop en-route. The costing-as-much-as-HS2-phase-1 upgrade of the 2000s and the related timetable optimisation have milked pretty much all you can out of the WCML.
@@sihollett I don't understand what your describing exactly, the dover to london victoria & st pancras line goes past my house, I think this is a busy line? The 2 trains go a few mins apart, then nothing for half an hour, then only the victoria train, then nothing for half an hour, then repeat. I can't help feeling it could have many more trains.
@@arkatub I can compare those. West of Ashford, trains to St Pancras use HS1, so you must live east of there? Major destinations on that section are Margate, Ramsgate, Canterbury, Dover & Folkstone. Once east, on to the older Victorian lines, HS1 trains stop regularly, making progress slow. West of Ashford, trains to Victoria continue this stopping pattern, taking 2 hours to reach London instead of the 35 minutes on HS1. It converges with Several other lines on the way there, especially as you approach London Compare that to the lines out of Euston which HS2 will relieve: It serves Birmingham (2/hour), North Wales (1/hour), Manchester (3/hour), Liverpool (1/hour), Preston & Glasgow (1/hour). That is 8 so far. Glasgow is 400 miles from London so you cannot stop those trains at too many stations because they would take too long to reach their destination. They are usually fairly full anyway. There are another 2/hour which run as far as Leighton Buzzard on the fast lines because there is no space for them on the slow lines. These are slightly slower than the others which therefore catch them up, so they need more space. On the slower lines are trains to Tring, Milton Keynes & Northampton. It is also a busy freight route. Trains from Croydon (2/hour I think) also join the line at Wembley & need to cross the fast lines to join the slow lines, so these need clearance in the timetable. I am certain I have missed some services in that summary too. There needs to be a little slack in the timetable because without it, a single delay caused by anything from a train fault to an unwell passenger would disrupt the service for hours. So your comparison is similar to the line between Chester & Crewe: While that may not be heavily served, it merges with services from Liverpool Manchester & Glasgow further up the line...the part HS2 is intended to relieve.
@@arkatub We're not looking at the Ashford-Dover line with HS2. We're looking at the WCML - a far busier line. There's a flight of several trains 3 or 4 minutes apart, a 3 or 4 minute gap, and then another flight of trains. The fast lines had (pre-pandemic, before Avanti had all sorts of issues, mucking things up) 9 Intercity trains and 3 fast regional trains in each direction, each off-peak hour, with 3 gaps to allow stopping trains to stop or change to the slows.
HS2 simply has to get built in full at some point. The WCML can't take any more people and the ECML is getting there too. The UK Rail network is well over capacity and HS2 is one project meant to fix it; its an idea so old BR was drawing up plans for something like it. Getting expresses out of the way of the local trains makes everything faster and more frequent, mixing them just slow everyone down.
Arguments that the WCML is "full to capacity" rely on a discredited, out of date forecasting model which overestimates long distance passenger growth & isn't used for anything anymore except to justify the monstrous vanity project that is HS2. Network Rail's "New Lines Programme Capacity Analysis" shows that WCML capacity is kept artificially low by private operators wanting to maximise their profits. A DfT analysis shows that in peak hours leaving Euston, WCML trains were loaded at just 52.2%. The blatant corruption within HS2 Ltd that's recently been exposed proves they've been publishing misleading projections & exaggerated figures since day one of this disastrous project .. don't believe everything you read about so-called "capacity" issues!
HS2 failed because the line goes through the Conservative heartlands without any benefit to the people living in those areas If like HS1 or crossrail, the line had been of benefit to people living in the southeast of England. The whole line would be opening within a year or so
If we can't, then shows the world three things: 1. That we are no longer a powerful and influential country (though I think this has been the case now for around eight years already) 2. How astonishingly corruot our Tory politicians were (and still are) and 3. That we nor only are incapable of building large-scale infrastructure projects outside of London and the South East; but that we also do not possess world-class engineers anymore, with which to complete them. But alot of the reasons lie with point no.2. That's what more people (especially English people) need to realise and accept. I'm still not sure that enough do, even now.
HS2 aside, I'm looking forward to a new golden age for rail transportation with Great British Railways, the new state-owned company taking over passenger services in the U.K soon. The past 30 years of privatized rail has been an unmitigated disaster, even Margaret Thatcher knew it wouldn't work.
@TheRip72 lol I used to catch the train home from work in BR days..... I gave up and bought a car the trains always breaking down cancelled or someone was on strike...... think your looking at the past through rose tinned glasses 🤣
It's widely acknowledged that the biggest problem in rail in Britain right now is too much government interference (much worse than under BR). Until the DfT/Treasury/Cabinet Ministers micromanagement goes, things are not going to improve. The current (National) Government-run TOCs haven't seen any improvement since they were taken over by the state because the private company couldn't fulfil their contracts. The only positive difference of nationalisation is not paying companies' shareholders money. You don't get suddenly better upper management (and you might lose some good ones), you probably increase the oversight of the dreaded Treasury-brained bean-counters, you don't fix industrial relations (and politicise them more). Nationalisation in and of itself isn't a solution, just as privatisation wasn''t in and of itself a solution in the 90s. Both are just ideological moves that may have some benefits and may have some problems, but they are more than cancelled out by other effects on the railways.
Tories were beyond bad, in all aspects of government. HS2 just a manifestation. So relieved to have new leadership, think they will at least realise we need to lever value from phase 1. No brainer
Terminating it out in the suburbs of London would be ridiculous. And the Hs1-Hs2 link seems like a no-brainer to me. If anything else gets built, those 2 things are the minimum. Of course, if you live in NSW, having disconnected, incompatible services which terminate nowhere in particular (NW Metro, WSA Metro, etc), are the standard operating procedure,l and it's depressing to see the UK a si8milar thing.
If money and planning were no object, this is what my vision for a fully national network of high speed lines would be: - HS2 built in full as originally planned, and extended right up to Scotland. The Western branch continuing from Wigan would be Preston-Lancaster-Carlisle-Glasgow/Edinburgh and the Eastern one continuing from York would be Durham-Newcastle-Edinburgh-Dundee-Aberdeen - HS3/NPR built in full as Liverpool-Manchester-Bradford-Leeds-York/Hull, plus an additional branch from Manchester to Sheffield (connection to HS2) - HS4Air connecting HS1 and HS2 via Gatwick and Heathrow as briefly proposed - HS5 branching off HS4Air just south of Heathrow to Eastleigh, from where trains could then run to Portsmouth and Southampton, with possible second phase to Exeter - HS6 branching off HS2 just south of Birmingham Interchange, running as Bristol-Exeter (connection to HS5)-Plymouth - HS7 from Heathrow (connection to HS4Air) to Bristol (connection to HS6)-Newport-Cardiff-Swansea - HS8 branching off HS1 in the Thurrock area to Cambridge via Stansted and Peterborough/Norwich, with further extension as Peterborough-Leicester-East Midlands (connection to HS2)
The HS1 link was insanely expensive, would create capacity problems on the Overground (due to rerouting freight away from where), diverted HS1 and HS2 trains away from their main traffic destination and only a third of traffic would stay on the train across the whole of London. The cheerleading case for it by Greengauge21 had to have a trains-worth of people each hour happily walking 400m between Stratford and Stratford International, but no one walk the 500m between Euston and St Pancras, just to try and create traffic (only a third of which would cross the Channel, of which half of that would have boarded at Old Oak Common from local services). The need to build passengers to justify the expense meant adding as many stops as possible to serve as many flows as possible. Manchester-Paris genuinely would be quicker via the more frequent services to/from the London terminals than with the 5 added stops making the journey half an hour longer. If you want to throw money at a link between HS1 and HS2, spend a tenth of the money on an underground moving walkway between the two stations - with the added benefit of serving Birmingham-Brighton passengers as well as Birmingham-Brussels passengers with it. And there's a lot more Birmingham-Brighton traffic than Birmingham-Brussels.
I remember in the 90s Glasgow Central Station had prepared a Eurostar waiting area anticipating that direct trains to the continent were coming soon. So people have been promised this for about 30 years. Since then flights have got cheaper so perhaps not many people would travel for 8 or so hours to reach the continent, of course with high speed rail it would be much less than that menaing there would be demand. It is not unrealistic, though, that there woulld be appreacable demand from closer cities such as Birmingham. One of the main draws of rail travel over air is the convenience that it takes you straight into the city centre in one journey. If people have to alight at St. Pancras and go to another terminus wait for another train they would probably just say no thanks it is easier to get a flight. However you are right that for the size of the connection, the projected costs were unfeasibly high.
@@tomq6491 I agree that it sucks politically - but the only reason to have built it would be political and even the politics didn't add up. The question would have been "is it worth spending billions to give Manchester/Crewe/Leeds city centres and the East Midlands and West Midlands areas direct trains to Kent/Lille/Paris at the expense of being unable to serve, for example, Stoke and Stafford with HS2 trains to London?". The whole UK, outside SE England, has enough traffic to (the whole of) Europe to fill 1 train every 2 hours (per air traffic, matching Greenguage's 1/6th of the traffic on the 3tph link). And most of it would have had to change trains anyway due to the inability to serve everywhere frequently (even if you serve central Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, etc with trains, you then need Manchester/Leeds passengers to change onto those trains, and you are looking at very infrequent trains that mean it's normally better to take the half-hourly-or-better train to London and the more-than-hourly train through the Chunnel). Reduce the interchange penalty between St Pancras and Euston - linking every service at both and it would be far better at getting people on the railway than infrequent direct trains that take longer than changing in London.
@@sihollett The problem is many people will be already changing trains in somewhere like Paris. The more changes you introduce the less attractive the entire journey is overall, and the more attractive a direct flight becomes. To reduce the interchange penalty would take more than a moving walkway, you'd need to synchronise HS1 and HS2 services to minimise delays and reduce border friction considerably. It's also about risk management. If the HS2 service is delayed, or cancelled, and someone misses their HS1 connection, there might not be an available seat for hours, you can't guarantee someone would just be able to hop on the next available train (Eurostar services require all passengers to have a seat and are often completely full especially during popular days). So every connection you need to add in buffer time to at least reduce the risk, which can end up meaning a journey that in theory takes less time actually takes more. At least on a direct train, even if it is delayed, you still have a seat and you will get there on that train.
@@sihollett I agree that they shouldn't spend many billions on it, but by that I mean it shouldn't cost that much for something that would only be a mile long, it is ridiculous that it would cost that much. Even if they made the rails of gold it shouldn't cost that much. I think it would be wrong to look at current figures as a projection for the number of people who would go to Europe via train North or London, as if a service was easily available then they are more likely to use it. Across the water trans border rail travel is routine. In addition, it could act as a cross thames link. Allowing for greater connections from say South East London and Kent to the North. The idea that people could travel to the main station for an onward journey was the same argument that Beeching used as a reason to close down branch lines, and look how bad that turned out to be.
@@Croz89 Re: changing trains - most northerners would be changing trains onto the link anyway (lack of direct trains, poor frequency of the direct trains) as they wouldn't have direct service. And half the passengers using the link to go on the trains to Europe would be from West London/SE England using Old Old Common to board the trains as the through traffic from beyond is so marginal. If you wanted to minimise changes, have a change in the massive megacity where 95% of the demand from both HS1 and HS2 is to: London. And there it can between a whole gamult of northern destinations and a whole gamult of Continental ones (and the more frequented, but less cool-sounding southeastern ones reached by Thameslink) with decent frequencies rather than infrequent trains between a few northern locations (Solihull, Toton, Leeds, Crewe, Manchester Airport and Manchester Piccadilly) and two continental ones (Lille and Paris). The UK border changes required for beyond-London trains from Europe (or different changes like both border controls at St Pancras) would enable the oft-talked about trains from London to Bordeaux and Frankfurt, as well as return of the Disney and Snow/Ski trains (the latter more frequently than before). Everywhere within HSR range of London served with one (far easier than Paris, even without a travelator) change in the Capital is what should be the aim here, not token trains that help a handful of people and hinder far more. Re: risk management - there's a lot more chance that an HS2 train is late if there's trains coming off the French network polluting the performance of the line. A simple line with no reverse branching is much more reliable than a through line with far more imported delays. A signal failure at Edinburgh can muck up trains in Brighton thanks to Thameslink. Do we really want Manchester trains' reliability being reduced by a problem in Marseilles (and vice versa)? Risk management was down the list of reasons not to build an HS1-HS2 link, but it is still there as a reason not to do it! Through tickets from outside London to Eurostar have always been forgiving about delays at either end, seeking to mitigate it ASAP. Plus, can you imagine your Liverpool - Crewe train being delayed and missing the connection at Crewe onto the Paris train and so having to wait two hours with several trains to London passing through? That's the scenario with through trains to Europe! Changing between more frequent and reliable trains in London is the least bad situation for the most passengers.
It is *not* about capacity. Half the freight routes allocated are not taken up. Even Avanti West Coast does not use all its allocated slots. The network can absorb any capacity issues. HS2 is a novelty line. No more.
I'd say, build it in full as intended. If they manage to find a way to battle low-cost airliners, build the HS2-HS1 link + restart the Regional Eurostar project.
You mean pay China rates so they can take all the pay, instead of paying British who will pay 25% of it back in taxes, so £80bn is really £60bn. Chinese government also does what it pleases & their population has no right to give an opinion. It is the discussions & consultations which are responsible for a large amount of the costs.
@@TheRip72 so you think the cost. Is through consultation , take a good look at the videos on here look at all the plant equipment sat idle most days and weekends and there using the wrong equipment that's why it taking so long, they should be using big earth mover's not the crap there using on all the sites,
I think the UK hasn't planned very well for an integrated high-speed network. If we had done that, having a complete network to Scotland from the beginning, we would have been able to have double-decker trains linking to HS1, never mind European links!
You mean build the Northern bit which is less congested? The most congested section is between London & Rugby, which is why London-Birmingham is phase 1. "Northern Powerhouse" from Liverpool to Leeds is another project which is also being pursued. So the north is not being ignored or mistreated. It is simply served by different projects which get less media attention.
Building from the north is basically what they've done in California - an expensive white elephant that doesn't provide the wow factor needed to sell skeptics on spending gigabucks on HSR - putting people off wanting to finish the far more expensive bits that make the route really successful. The UK's plan was to build, while there was the political and financial capital, the expensive and controversial bit that - while on its own has a meh business case - provides both a wow-factor for skeptics and massively decent business case for extensions that mean it would be unbelievably dumb not to build them. Starting in the south was about making sure that the northern bits will happen and be useful rather than some southern-bias.
The primary reason for this line was NEVER to make a fast passenger service, but to free up 'ways' to allow a more efficient and rapid freight service. The incremental cost to denote it as High Speed had a marginal cost implication as it had to be designed to Interoperability Standards anyway. And this allowed an opportunity to market the idea to the public. The basic misunderstanding of the true purpose by subsequent politicians is just terrible, and allowed a false narrative to curtail the project. We are simply crap at any long term infrastructure execution in this country, CrossRail (Elizabeth Line) being one that was first looked at in 1940's , seriously proposed in 1989 and started construction in 2009, with core running in 2022, the Chinese built a new high speed rail infrastructure in just 9 years.
If I’m travelling from Birmingham to London, I don’t care if using HS2 will save me 20 minutes on the journey (35 minutes is a pipe dream). It’s been a colossal wast of money. Money that could have been spent on more important infrastructure projects.
HS2 is also planned to run European Loading gauge, which means the trains that run on HS2 may not run elsewhere in the UK, as its trains are narrower. Total cluster
Not quite right. The infrastructure will be built to European gauge, but the initial trains were always planned to be UK gauge. Had the full network been completed, then there would have been a captive Euro-gauge, HS only fleet, and a UK gauge to extend onto the classic network.
I don't think that's a bad thing, UK loading gauge is notoriously narrow and it really constrains the level of comfort we can offer on our trains, they're typically cramped with narrow seats. HS1 was built to a european gauge too.
Its looking increasingly like the Northern Leg will be happening (at least as far as Crewe)! www.lbc.co.uk/news/hs2-london-euston-to-crewe-labour/
Sadly, your hopes have been dashed as the PM's official spokesman said this week that they weren't considering resurrecting plans for HS2 to continue on to Crewe & Manchester which is excellent news as HS2 is an environmental disaster of epic proportions & Britain's biggest infrastructure mistake in half a century.
@@CRIMSONANT1Rubbish
@@Inkyminkyzizwoz .. what's "rubbish"?
The government HAVE said they won't resurrect ANY of the cancelled sections - FACT.
HS2 has been a disaster since day one - FACT.
the environmental disaster is all the journeys happening by car and plane that could have been done by train
@astrophilip .. research shows that even if HS2 had been built in full, traffic on the M1 & M40 would have reduced by less than 1% & it'll have absolutely ZERO effect on domestic flights.
HS2 to the original plans including goldborne link and sheffield meadowhall is needed drastically. Linking Birmigham, Derby Nottingham, Crewe, Liverpool, Leeds, York and Newcastle was a slam dunk
Yep, then the following plan for HS3 (Northern Powerhouse Rail) to link from west to east from Liverpool to Leeds (and I guess Hull deserves nice things too lol). HS2 was also support to originally join with HS1 in a mega station below Euston, Kings Cross, St. Pancras along with a full on rebuild of Euston and the warren of Underground interchanges for all the line that converge under there. Which is desperately needed even if they don't build HS2. Euston is NOT fit for purpose any more.
@@TalesOfWar Euston fails without HS2 and an incomplete HS2, I agree that the Euston Cross station is better. HS3 was very good with joining up with HS2 it wouldve given a good example for wales, scotland and east anglia to have it if another high speed line was to be needed.
stretched to Glagow.
would have brought down cost pe mileage as well as provide vital linkage between the nations
@@robsimpson1991 indeed
This was so hard to watch because it’s so accurate. I just want to yell at the politicians, particularly the conservatives - it was their job to manage the project, and they were the ones that were complaining about how much it cost. Unfathomable levels of incompetence.
I’m also furious with the Green party, who were passionately campaigning against this project despite the fact that it would’ve been fewer domestic flights, less cars on the road, and more freight by rail. Their environmentalist credentials gave license to driving the cost up and ultimately getting it cancelled.
I have no respect for the Green's after that, and finding out they've opposed the building of solar installations on multiple occasions. They're green in name only it seems. Kind of in the same vein of Greenpeace making everyone hate nuclear power back in the 70's and 80's and here we are now having abandoned the building of new plants in favour of extending the life of gas and coal in much of the world instead.
If the Green Party actually ran transport in the UK, it would be a hell of a lot better than under the Tories. They support HS2 being funded and completed in full. This is nothing but Tory scapegoating for their incompetence.
Didn't the Conservative government start immediately selling off the land it had already bought for the HS2 project at a loss without even seeking the permission of parliament who had to authorise the purchase in the first place just to make it even more exorbitantly difficult for the next government to restart/reboot the project? That is actually criminal. Like that should genuinely be considered treason.
They *tried* to sell the land but it doesn't work through the bureaurocracy that fast and I don't think much if any of the land actuall got sold before the new government came in earlier this year and stopped it pending further review iirc.
Hopefully they couldn't sell off much at all. HS2 needs to go forward and they need to lay the groundwork for expansion if they are to be a serious European economy.
@@BigBlueMan118yeah, no actual land has been sold off because Tories can't do anything correctly, not even self sabotage
Yep they thoroughly poison-pilled this. This video didn’t mention their car agenda.
Or - more importantly - the “cost per kilometre” of all the motorways they built. Or really, passenger-kilometre and kilogram-kilometre for freight. Motorways just have lower capacity for the same cost, or a higher cost to match the rail capacity.
The numbers never get mentioned in newspapers though, when complaining about government spending. I wonder why.
@@justwobert9850 Wow really that’s huge if true. Their corruption was inefficient? First I’ve heard this but would love to hear if Starmer can still cancel it.
build it as originally planned. nothing else will get done cheaper or faster
the main issue with the project has been constant government meddling to "cut costs", which anyone with a brain would realise would escalate costs wildly, not the uk government though.
also making trains faster cuts down on train hours meaning service can be delivered with fewer trains built, smaller land use for depots and staff costs decrease per train too. if the line is slowed the project will get more expensive in delivery & operations.
Yeah exactly, 100% agree with all of this. The line needs to get to Crewe AT A MINIMUM to even have a proper impact, then they need to just get on with the rest. Good project, poorly managed, can still be good.
I think the problem is that Most of the gov. officials are old. Therefore they arent't willing to spend so much money for sth. they dont get to use
@@EisenbahnenBw I think it is more like they want to be seen to save money. In reality they want to be seen to be seen to be saving money.
The cost savings from the upkeeping of fewer trains are negligible and vastly compensated by the higher maintenance costs of high speed rail lines, something which is rarely discussed because so far countries have only had to worry about their construction
@@abelsuisse9671 hence the use of slab track to cope with the higher speeds.
and the faster the line the lower the train hours & improvement in running costs which the strategic business case found would be well worth the investment
At the bare minimum, it should go to Euston and Crewe. That is at least a good basis to start building off of, later down the line
Crewe is a legendary place to change, always has been.
Sort out the choke points first... London is not a choke point.
@@oml81mm The amount of platforms are. Old Oak doesn't have the platform space
@mattevans4377 no idea where Old Oak is. However if it is a choke point then it should be sorted out as a priority. By "London" I meant the London terminus.
@@oml81mm It's just outside London
The recent bright idea suggesting HS2 is reduced from European to UK loading gauge at the same time as abandoning best practise for high speed concrete base in favour of ordinary ballasted track reveals all too clearly why this country seems incapable of delivering acceptable infrastructure.
Those charged with running this nation (into the ruddy ground as far as I can see) have evidently learned nothing from ballsup after ballsup, starting with the total lack of a strategic canal (never mind rail) network, via the gauge debacle through the bobawful mess for which the crook Marples let Beeching shoulder the blame and the cherry pickers' charter of 'privatisation' 30 years ago.
Never mind HS2, take the Portishead Branch. Mileage in single figures, over half the track still in situ (in need of replacement), single track and we're still waiting after over 20 years. In the same time China's (double track) high speed network has expanded by many thousands of miles without the benefit of any extant formation.
There are plenty of proper high-speed lines with balasted tracks.
In fact, Europe's fastest high-speed lines are balasted : LGV Est, LGV SEA, LGV BPL, LGV Rhin-Rhône, and LGV Méditerranée in France.
These lines are run at 320kph in daily operations, concrete tracks aren't necessary and used mostly on bridges and viaducts.
@@KyrilPG hs2 alightment and land acquisition is 330kph to 360kph operating speeds with the amount of tunnels & viaducts and ultra gentle curves it wouldn't be possible to use ballasted track without further increasing construction delays, costs and running costs when the line opens.
@@trainworms The lines mentioned were built to the 360 standard, and LGV Est, with balasted tracks, was used for the 574.8 km/h speed record in 2007...
This doesn't prevent transitions from balasted to concrete tracks at tunnel or bridge entrances, and save on construction costs.
Ballasting I can understand, even though it would be more expensive in the long run. Cutting down the loading gauge is just asinine though. It would cause a lot more problems for very little cost saving. Only the "classic compatible" trains could run beyond Birmingham.
@@KyrilPG Ballasted track is not a cost-saving over the 60 year timespan that is included in HS2 costs, due to the higher maintenance costs over that period. It's a short term saving, but a long-term more expensive option.
The UK is so cooked
It's worth noting that, while many of the main lines are capable of 200km/h operation, many of them _should_ be capable of 225km/h operation. It's been planned for so long that the first trains capable of that speed are now being phased out of service.
The main reason those trains can't run at those speeds is because they share tracks with trains that can't do more than 160km/h (or less) in places where they'd want the fast running, and there isn't the capacity to deal with that speed differential. It also needs a lot of effort with signalling and the like (the WCML upgrade ditched it to save money after massive overruns in both time and money) to meet the UK's legal requirement for cab-based signalling for faster than 125mph. And it saves maybe a couple of minutes (not least because a lot of the routes these trains run on aren't aligned in a viable way for 125mph) at most - not worth it.
@@sihollett Catching up with slower trains means that the cost of upgrading present lines would gain very little.
@@TheRip72 absolutely - that's why the plan is/was to remove the fast trains to their own tracks and has been since the WCML upgrade debacle.
Part of the reason it’s so expensive is
Because it keeps on being messed about with.
It would also be cheaper if we didn’t have a ‘feast and famine’ approach to infrastructure in this country.
I reckon proportional representation would give us a more predictable investment strategy in the medium to long term. Wild swings in government position doesn't help with planning. That said, the tories were in favour of HS2, until they slowly drifted to the right, a drift which seems to continue unabated with Cleverly now out of the leadership race.
I suppose you could make an argument that Farage by proxy killed HS2.
@@Boopop1024I don't know, having a big majority can be more advantageous to pushing major things through
@@Inkyminkyzizwoz Even then, with a stonking Tory majority still intact, Ed Davey was demolishing walls as he won (in what wasn't a surprise) Chesham and Amersham outflanking the Tories to being the most extreme NIMBY party (ignoring the obvious winners the Green Party) and Boris scrapped planning reform and tacked hard NIMBY in response. Arguably it was Chesham and Amersham (who now, with the line's damage being done, want it to be as useful as possible to the country so the disruption wasn't in vain) turning from UKIP to the LibDems as their anti-HS2 vote and uniting the opposition to the Tories that killed the northern bits of HS2.
Best (and worst) thing about PR is that it gives a layer of insulation between individual politicians and the voting public it brings. Constant coalitions remove accountability to carry out pledges to the public and allow you to blame other parties in the Government for bad policies. And that you vote for party not individual means that the individual's reelection bid is to climb the party list rather than appeal to their constituents' desires. It does mean that stuff can be done - as long as the political class want it.
@@sihollett That depends on what PR system is use. An rules around list creation, for example the UK could keeping the same constituencies boundaries but allocate constituencies to each party to appoint someone base on the number of votes they got from that constituency.
@@InkyminkyzizwozI don't think so. The issue with our system is that it causes these massive swings. So you get one big left wing majority that builds something, and then a big right wing majority that tears it down/sabotages there build/underfunds it. With a more balanced majority I think this issue would stop because each tendency would be at least partially represented.
Building a big major project only to cancel it half way is a much bigger waste than building a medium sized big project and getting it done on time and letting it get to the end.
You're spot on about the capacity argument. One thing I'm sick and tired of hearing is people making out that it's all about 'saving 20 minutes'! Furthermore, one argument that seems to have become especially prevalent since the pandemic is claims that increases in home working will reduce the need for travel anyway. Well, the fact that rail passenger numbers are almost back to what they were beforehand suggests otherwise - besides, people said the same when the telephone was invented!
And I am, as the time saved is 40 mins minimum not 20 mins on HS2 from Birmingham to London
@@peterwilliamallen1063No, it is more like 20 minutes. Not that the actual figure matters - the people making that argument can't even seem to agree on what it is!
@@Inkyminkyzizwoz Nope mate, not sure where you got 20 mins from but it does matter, on offical HS2 ltd paper work and other offical sites it has been stated that the HS2 trains will complete the journey from Birmingham to London or vis vers in 50 mins, at the moment the average time by Pendolino from Birmingham to London is 90 mins, depending on the stopping sequence and the overall speed so 90-50 = 40 mins and this has been stated in official HS2ltd video's. The 20 min timing has cme from Chinese whispers where it takes only one person to incorrectly state the time and then every one is staing it. It is nothing to do with people making this statement of 20 ins, it is wht the Builders HS2 ltd state and they state 40 mins.
@@peterwilliamallen1063.. * OFFICIAL .. not "offical. *VICE VERSA .. not "vis vers". *COME .. not "cme". *EVERYONE .. not "every one". *STATING ... not "staing". *MINS .. not "ins". *WHAT .. not "wht". 😉
@@CRIMSONANT1 God you are a boring Fart arn't you James my boy, personlly I could not care too hoots about spellin matics , oops I mean about Spelling Mistakes just get your facts right about HS2, it's route through Birmingham and what is going as it is comming home it is comming home and yor White Nelly the trumper is now dead 😆😆🐘🐘🚄🚄👍👍
It's very difficult to directly compare UK and Italian/French/etc prices as UK prices for HS2 contain 60 years of maintenance, the trains and the stations - most other European countries just give the price for the railway tracks being constructed.
There was one HS2 'cost increase' (the one where it went from 30-something billion to 50-something billion) where they simply added the cost of the trains and changed the pricetag of the railway from the median estimated price (50-50 as to whether it goes over or under) to the 95th percentile price (5% chance of cost overruns). The route hadn't changed, nor the cost, it was just accounted for differently and the cost of HS2 apparently went up by nearly 50%! Of course, this has meant that contractors bids had higher prices than originally planned because the publicly-stated costs slated for that contract were higher - a phantom 'increase' in costs turning into a real one.
Comparing the costs is also silly because if HOW we cost things. Our costs include EVERYTHING. Including the really expensive things, the stations. Other countries chunk it out over multiple smaller projects all part of the same larger programme. That also makes it harder to cancel things because you'd need to cancel each individual project rather than just the whole thing like we do here. In France for example you'll have one part of the project being to build the actual lines between the cities, then another project will be building the stations or adding the platforms and infrastructure to existing stations for the new lines, then another for the "final mile" bringing things from outside to the actual city. It's a more modular approach management wise. We do the same thing here in terms of the engineering, but the way the thing is managed from the top down is what really causes so many of the problems we see whenever we do any kind of large scale infrastructure project here in the UK.
It also doesn't help that the way the system is structure isn't designed to do big projects. The tendering system relies WAY too heavily on smaller companies that can't scale for big things like this. Back in the past we'd have say Balfour Beaty who'd do the vast majority of the work, now it's tendered out to a hundred or more smaller companies who contract and sub-contract hundreds more for the bits they can't actually handle themselves, it makes managing things incredibly complex and expensive. There are genuine advantages of having massive companies that do everything, back in the day that used to be all in house at the government level. Something else sold off to the private sector. There are some things that private industry just can't possibly do without the state doing all of the heavy lifting first. Think the space programme with NASA in the USA or British Aerospace here, or BT when it was the part of the General Post Office.
That's a thorough and knowledgeable account. ✓✓
Two reasons for building to high speed standards: (1) the faster you go the more journeys you get out of the same fleet the more new capacity you create & (2) building a new trunk line to 1900s spec would be just silly.
The line needs to get to Crewe AT A MINIMUM to even have a proper impact, then they need to just get on with the rest. Good project, poorly managed, can still be good.
The missing link to Leeds is going to be very costly to the North, which is in dire need of infrastructural support. The pollies are focused on London and neglecting the rest of Britain.
@@JohnFromAccounting I dunno, I've seen rail experts predicting that once HS2 opens and people get a taste of just how much better it is than the existing line things will move forward with the other bits of HS2 pretty quickly.
@@BigBlueMan118 HS2 to Leeds and HS2 manchester are the two cheapest bits to build.
@@DavidKnowles0 maybe but they still cost more than joining the legacy network at Crewe
@@BigBlueMan118.. it'll be completely the opposite .. once people "get a taste" of how much the fares will cost, this monstrous vanity project will be dead in the water. It'll become nothing more than a glorified shuttle service between west London & Birmingham that only the elite will be able to afford.
The UK decided to make HS2 as straight as possible to minimise cost (less length less cost), which creates a high speed alignment almost by accident.
at 320kph the min curve radius in 4.5km ish
@@pedromorgan99 This is why we need engineers. I'm an economist, and say shit like "make train go straight so it go fast". You've got numbers and stuff.
There's also the happy geographical benefit of much of where it needs to go being along that straight line. Like the Eastern Sea Board in the US or Quebec to Toronto in Canada. Those places are crying out for a high speed rail connection, but there are different political forces at play there.
This is a very simplistic view on high speed rail in the UK, and by this I include lines like the West Coast mainline that isn't truly high speed. Firstly, whilst it's true that costs have increased massively due to decisions made as to the exact route of the line seems to get factored into the cost increases is inflation. The longer it takes you to build a railway line the more expensive it will become. The other thing that I think is often missed is that often in mainland Europe costs for both speed rail lines are for the track between the cities, not into the centre of cities (which often isn't and to be truly high speed anyway and may have to run on regular tracks for the final few miles of the journey) or the stations at either end (for new stations in between of course, but not the existing ones at end).
Secondly, you talk about the possibility of increasing capacity on the existing lines instead. The reason why HS2 took the form it did was because there just isn't the space to extend capacity on the West Coast Mainline without spending about as much as HS2. Thirdly, Northern Powerhouse Rail won't help reduce the time taken to travel to the Northern cities, especially past Manchester to cities like Leeds, because it isn't new track and so it will still have to share the lines with existing traffic.
In the end this whole project wasn't to reduce the travel time to London, but to increase capacity for local commuter trains, and maybe also provide better services between cities outside of London and the South East that has had massive investment in recent decades with the rest of the country getting very little. The East Midlands that is described as a deprived region of Europe is again completely ignored, as is South Yorkshire and arguably West and North Yorkshire as well, as well as the North East.
What I don't get though, even if the full project was unaffordable now why not just keep the plans in place, keep the plans that has been acquired, and just build it after the London to Birmingham leg has been completed? The reason is simple. The line ran through government held constituencies that opposed the line from the get go so by cancelling it they hoped to keep hold of those seats in parliament. The whole project should have been built from Manchester and Leeds heading southwards and not from London going north. That way if the money ran out at least the most important part of the project would be completed to Birmingham and people could continue journeys on to London from connecting stations.
Finally, even if nothing more than is currently in progress of being built gets built a connection up to Crewe, just south of Manchester, needs to be built, avoiding the biggest bottleneck on the line around Stafford and Stoke. Not doing this is criminal in my opinion and is basically economic sabotage. The problem with the UK is that it's too London centric which causes massive inequality in the country that needed to be addressed. Yes, London is a world city, it's the capital, it has the largest population, it needs high quality investment in its infrastructure, but you can't only spend government there or you just build up bigger problems that are even more costly to overcome further down the line.
Oh, and one other thing you forgot to mention is HS1 wasn't built when the Channel Tunnel was finished. Train services from the continent sped through Northern France and through the Channel Tunnel and then had to crawl through Kent on not even West Coast Mainline style high speed lines to get to London, but slow commuter lines, and this went on for over 20 years after its completion!!! I think this just says it all.
Extend HS2 to all the Midlands major towns as well as Glasgow and Edinburgh but cost effectively by minimising tunnels, over designed bridges and viaducts. Britain is likely to need rail for a few more centuries and construction will not get any cheaper in the future. If Britain is to descend further into mediocrity then do as Rishi Sunak intended and make HS2 a complete waste of resources by only extending to Birmingham. If Britain is to ever turn the corner and progress then build a spine - of high speed rail.
"over designed bridges and viaducts. Britain is likely to need rail for a few more centuries"
The former comes from the latter! The main reason why we have 'over designed' on HS2 is that it's aiming to be there at least 100 years later without needing any serious and costly refurb. They don't want the Thame viaduct failing after 115 years like the Nuneham Viaduct did a couple of years ago (and a shed ton of 60s road viaducts have basically done over the last decade).
@@sihollett The main problem is the excessive extent of the tunnels, bridges and viaducts which is more of a routing problem no doubt because of politics. Simpler designs for structures can be equally durable. The architecture of the Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian and German high speed lines is more utilitarian.
@@YinandYangandGreen The cost of making stuff look nice is a few percent, just like the cost of making it superfast rather than just fast.
The engineering isn't the problem or even the reason things cost so much. It's the assholes who don't want it to be anywhere near their house or who are asking insane amounts for the land to build it over (or under). We do have a genuine problem in this country in terms of available engineers though. We don't have enough to build it any faster than it's already being built. We just don't do enough large scale infrastructure projects in this country any more. Go to somewhere like France and it's a rolling programme. You go from one project to the next and it doesn't end, because they're always building something new or improving something old. There's a reason a lot of the engineers and project managers working on HS2 are French.
If you expand it to all the major Midland Towns it won't be a High Speed Railway
The National Infrastructure Commission (an executive agency of the Government that provides advice on Infrastructure) released a big report this week about why the UK is so bad at building infrastructure.
It referred to many challenges, but one that it really called out on HS2 for, was planning and development consents. Even though HS2 has had multiple long Hybrid Acts passed by Parliament to approve it, it has *so far* required over 8,000 other planning consents and approvals from hundreds of public bodies and local governments.
Another example of this is the proposed Lower Thames Crossing (a road tunnel linking the M25 in Essex to the M2 in Kent). The planning permission process for this new road has already cost more than £300m, which is more than the actual building costs of the world's longest road tunnel (the Lærdal tunnel, in Norway).
I'm pretty sure that report was a think tank the week before last, rather than a QUANGO last week, but it's all true.
@@sihollett I'm sure there are think tanks saying the same sort of things (because they are in fact true) - but the National Infrastructure Commission did release a report "Cost drivers of major infrastructure projects in the UK" on October 10th.
It's a great (though depressing) read if you haven't seen it yet.
I would be happy for a 200 km/h extension to Manchester if that means we can actually have a new independent corridor!
To be honest I think that just finishing the project as it was is still the best solution. You can argue to make the construction SLOWER to spread the costs throughout the years, but changing the projects will ultimately make everything cost more.
As for the Italian comparison, High speed projects in Italy are usually much cheaper for two main reasons:
> salaries are less than half than British ones
> high speed rail links always merge with the traditional lines near the stations, which makes the HS absolutely useless - they may separate the lines in the future but that would be an extra additional cost that is not in the initial cost.
The fact the birthplace of the railway does already have a bunch of "Pretty Fast Trains" doing up to 200 km/h on their lines does help explain why support for this was so slushy, I guess. I really didn't know that part. Nor did I have the overview that this is all about capacity with high speed being a "nice to have" and sexy-to-the-public selling point as opposed to a dire need, in a country whose cities, in the scheme of things, are not that far apart. Plus of course there was the NIMBY thing you've described- that part I did know- and even there, I must admit that some of the NIMBYs had a point, like those who demanded that a famous patch of old growth English forest in the way of the planned route be tunnelled under rather than bluntly carved straight through. Anyway, good summary, old chap! I love the footage that you've used to illustrate it which is often very scenic.
While the station-to-station journey times on the WCML and ECML are competitive with car and plane, we also need to remember that a lot of journeys will include connecting legs from suburban or regional stations at one or both ends. So while flying along at 200km/h is quicker than driving at 110km/h, by the time you've fannied around on local trains/buses it might not be quicker after all - speeding the main bit of the journey up to 300km/h will offset that.
Adding more tracks to existing lines would be *waaay* more disruptive. For a start, most the overbridges and underbridges would need to be rebuilt. They often go through towns and villages, which would mean a lot more compulsory purchase and demolition needed. Services on those lines would need to be suspended or reduced during possessions. And because we need to relieve both the East and West routes, both lines would need extensive upgrades, instead of one new route running up the middle that barely touches existing tracks.
Bristol gets a mention! 😊
200 million per kilometer is equivalent to the costliest parts of Paris' huge new deep underground metro expansion (Grand Paris Express) currently under construction, including stations, systems, trains, depots, and maintenance centers...
Despite having many tunnels, HS2 is still mostly built on the surface and in the countryside, not deep under a very densely built city through very poor soil conditions...
Also, one of the latest high-speed lines opened in France in 2016, LGV SEA, was built for less than 8 billion euros, including several stations' overhauls and a bunch of environmental mitigation features. It's a little over 300 kilometers in length, plus 30 km of access ramps and connection tracks. So, about 330 kilometers of new high-speed lines.
If HS2 is restarted (hopefully so), they really should ask the French or the Spanish, or both, to manage the project and do the work.
High-speed lines and other transportation infrastructures in France and Spain are built for a mere fraction of the cost and mostly in time (or reasonably late).
The anglosphere should just stop trying to build these things on their own, they can't.
The French, certainly, were heavily involved in the route creation process for HS2. The price issues are systemic, government created, ones that are basically politically impossible to remove. (the planning system, that government funding is subject to political whims, etc).
The costs here are mostly down to politics and a general lack of organisation or structure in place for large scale projects. France has been on a rolling infrastructure build practically since the end of WW2. They have everything in place to do stuff like this and a huge pool of engineers to do it. We... don't.
HS2 needs to, at MINIMUM, go the distance from *Euston* to Birmingham.
All this talk of HS2 ending at Old Oak Common is wild to me. Shoving passengers onto the already wildly packed Liz Line (Crossrail) simply won't work.
It's a pity you didn't look at the time savings futher north. Glasgow and Edinburgh were due to get trains to London in 3h30, at which point the air routes become uncompetitive and we'd see massive reduction in flights, freeing space at London airports for intercontinental routes instead. That then justifies the highest speeds as the closer you get to 3 hours, the more of that business shifts to rail. Once you get under 3 hours the air traffic collapses. Famously Madrid to Barcelona went from 80% air to 80% rail when the AVE line opened.
The most crucial sections to build are now the line to Euston (as you rightly pointed out) and the Phase 2a line to Crewe as this bypasses the two track Shugborough Tunnel (put in originally to keep the Nimby owner of Shugnorough Hall happy - history repeats!). Its this 2 track section and Colwich Junction (which has no flyovers) just to the south of it which constrain the whole of the main line from London to Glasgow and everywhere in between.
On the East Coast there is an equivalent bottle neck at Welwyn where the 2 track Digswell Viaduct breaks the 4 track line and worse Welwyn North station (served every 30 mins by local trains) further reduces capacity. The alternative to HS2 via Leeds is to widen this bridge and the two tunnels north of it. Railtrack proposed this. There was uproar locally as there are some very nice houses close to the railway here and they were NIMBYs in bold block capitals.
The Sunack cuts failed to provide any solution to these two major issues, so either the decision was made in ignorance of this or they simply didn't care about rail, perhaps not surprising given Sunak's £40M per year helicopter habit.
I really hope some rational decision making will be made soon to get the project back on track in full.
The problem with the HS2 project was due to its implementation strategy and political considerations. By starting construction in the South, the project incurred substantial cost increases early on, largely attributed to efforts to appease NIMBYs in Conservative-held areas. This approach led to the project significantly exceeding its budget. Had construction commenced in the North, as initially promised as part of the "leveling up" agenda, the project might have faced a different trajectory. The North, generally more receptive to the project due to its potential economic benefits, might have presented less resistance, potentially resulting in lower costs for mitigation measures. Moreover, starting in the North could have created a stronger economic imperative to complete the London connection, making it politically challenging to abandon the southern portion. This approach might have generated more momentum for the project, potentially making it less susceptible to cancellation or significant cuts. Part of the original justification for HS2 included reducing the wealth inequality between the North and South, improving connectivity, and stimulating economic development in the North. These goals align with the argument for initiating construction in the North. While speculative, such an approach might have resulted in less accommodation of southern NIMBYs, thereby reducing costly rerouting. It could have also led to lower overall costs due to more receptive communities in the North and potentially fostered stronger political will to complete the entire project, including the crucial London leg.
Interesting points. The planning certainly began with the blind assumption that of course it had to meet London or what would even be the point? The question being, I suppose, would there be passengers enough to justify a high speed line connecting a string of northern cities to each other?
I'm sorry as a resident of Amersham I am both outraged and appalled by the idea that my neighbours are "NIMBYs in Conservate-held areas" - they are BANANAs (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone) in Lib-Dem-held areas. ;P
The initial cost had a lengthy tunnel under the Misbourne Valley (the obvious route between London and Birmingham, but every attempt from the Grand Union Canal to the M1 was pushed away from it by the locals while people on less optimal routes were begging for the transport link and so got it) - having a tunnel there has nothing to do with why costs have spiralled (and has reduced the spiralling in the areas it goes under due to a lot of that spiralling being due to HS2 paying for councils to have planning staff dedicated to throwing spanners in the construction works making it take longer and cost more, whereas if you are underground you have less influence from the council) - the tunnels are being built to budget.
At bare minimum, HS2 needs to go to Crewe and East Midlands Hub to get at least some of the capacity benefits
Good video, but with one note: the Midlands-North West Rail link that the metro mayors have proposed would still be high speed rail, but it would be with a top speed of 300km/h rather than 360km/h, and there would also be a few other cost-cutting measures such as using ballasted track rather than slab tracks although the exact details need to be confirmed because, as you pointed out, it's still just a proposal at this stage!
Compared to spending 20 odd billion on revamping the houses of Parliament, a brand new railway of hundreds of miles long for 80-100bn doesn't seem that bad...
Brit here! IMO, the best way forward is to maximise the benefit without overblowing the costs even more is to A. Complete it to Euston (OBVs) B. Complete it to just past the bottleneck of Crewe C. Link it to HS1, so we can have truly long distance HSR. Of course we need to talk about the economic benefits, but it is also crucial to talk about the environmental impact. People knock of concerns about destroying ancient woodland as simply NIMBYism, yet the sharp decline in biodiversity is truly alarming in the uk, and these trees are crucial to preserving it. We also need to talk about embedded carbon, which means that this project will not contribute to the green transition, but hinder it.
Also, building it to 360km/h is absurd, and inflates the cost unnecessarily.
Linking to HS1 is a net negative, rather than a benefit-maximiser. It's not as bad as a Heathrow spur (there, even if it magicked into existence and cost nothing, it would be a negative to run trains on it instead of to London), but the costs far outweigh the benefits.
@@sihollett Running to London, and running to mainland Europe don't have to be mutually exclusive
@@APAG They are mutually exclusive when London demand fills all all the paths as London capacity is reduced by European service that most of the small amount of demand won't use as its too infrequent and doesn't serve their origin-destination pair directly (so changing in London is a much better option).
@@sihollett This is true, should the situation stay the same, but having such a centralised country - i would say - is a bad thing. The connection of the north to Europe, should be part of a wider plan to reduce our economic dependence on London. Of course this on its own won't change the situation, but our current idea that everything has to be about London is unsustainable.
Besides, if sacrificing some capacity to Euston means a service every couple hours to Europe exists, I'm all for it.
@@APAG London isn't going to go away - we've had decades of trying to disperse its economy across the country, and yet it's still there being overly-dominant. Where we've been successful in dispersing the economy from London are places where there are high quality links to London (and promises to make them much much better with HS2) and the business on offer there. Treasury to Darlington, BBC to Salford, etc. 'Rest of South East' economic powerhouses like Reading, Milton Keynes, etc work due to their fast and frequent links to London - rather than pulling people out, those links bring businesses in. Making London links worse in favour of a leisure-focussed direct train to Paris every couple of hours - than they could be is not a good way to grow the North and make it an effective economic counterweight to London!
I'm also not sure how building a rail scheme where only about 1 in 6 passengers were modelled as not travelling to/from somewhere in SE England (half the number that wouldn't even leave SE England!) is going to end the dominance of London and the South East. HS1-HS2 link is a scheme that boosts Kent and the Thames Valley far more than it does the North.
Bureaucracy keeps getting in the way. The cost overruns are more related to political nonsense than they are to actually building the railway.
Cancellation seems to be costing hundreds of millions. Hundreds of millions to do less. I saw something like a £200 million change to the train order.
But absolutely - 'can you redesign Euston for the fifth time' when they've already bought the most expensive thing (the land) and cleared most of it is just wasting money given the cost of planning in the UK. You might save 50 million in concrete, but you've spent 60 million looking for it.
The UK and California... injecting confidence in the Anglo world and inspiring Australians that we too can develop a high speed rail service which we can raise as a fresh idea just before every election...
The Midlands-Northwest rail link does call for HSR, it would just be built to 300 kph standards rather than 400.
The West Coast mainline trains can only run at 200km/h because they are tilt trains. Unless special high speed tilt trains are built, the time savings on HS2 will be lost by running at less than 200km/h once the trains get beyond Birmingham.
The usual go would be for the UK to build a fleet of expensive high speed tilt trains, and then reinstate the rest of HS2, making the those trains obsolete. Since they would already exist, they'd probably continue to be used, but without tilting. Passengers would then suffer the fact that tilt trains have to be narrower (to allow for tilting).
Disclaimer, I now live in Australia, where 160km/h is regarded as fast, and rarely achieved.
HS2 Trains will travel at 225 mph from London Euston to Birmingham and Lichfield then when the new extension from Lichfield to Manchester is open they will trvel at 185 mph
There are several fundamental problems with HS2 - we could start with its acronym HS (for High Speed). It should have been labelled HC2 (HC for High Capcity), from the outset because that was the primary objective for any new rail line north of London - to create additional new capacity for future expansion of rail travel, thereby facilitating significant modal shift away from private car and short haul air travel.
However, quite apart from that semantics blunder, there are a number of obvious flaws in this, potentially game changing transport strategy;
1. HS2 should always, as a mandatory requirement, have been constructed to link directly to HS1, thereby facilitating through services to the European mainland direct from provincial UK cities (and back again).
2. HS2 could have performed this essential function by construction of an combined underground through terminus between Euston and St. Pancras.
3. HS2 should always have been constructed with junctions facilitating North-South and East-West services operating seamlessly between both the new and existing networks, in other words, servicing other UK provincial population centres, exclusive of London.
4. HS2 should always have been planned as the first element of a much wider NEW UK-wide network of lines to supplement the existing conventional network, thereby separating fast transit express services from slower commuter and freight rail services on a much wider pan-UK scale.
5. Finally the massive problem of seemingly out of control budgetary practice - how is it that France can plan, construct and open two new rail lines (LGV BPL & LGV SEA, christened on the same day in July 2017) that, combined, constitute a larger network in total to that proposed in the original HS2 plan, ie. phases 1, 2a, 2b and 2c (Eastern & Western Arms), and bring them in on time for a total cost under 15bn€, or about £13bn - yes, I know there are some significant differences between projects on either side of La Manche but they don't account for a minimum four fold chasm in cost overruns!!!
Compare and contrast rail journeys in the UK with those in mainland Europe - here in the UK you can board a single direct train service in Aberdeen and alight at Penzance but the 1245km (778miles) journey will take you 13.5hours - on the other side of La Manche a very similar1257km rail journey between Torino (Piedmont, Northern Italy) and Lamezia (Calabria, Southern Italy) is also possible using a single direct service but the Frecciarossa 9583 departs Porto Nuova @08:00 and arrives in Lamezia Centrale station @17:28, 9.5 hours later, or to put in another way, a full 4 hours less in overall travel duration. What's more when the currently planned High Speed Line from Salerno to Reggio Calabria opens in 2030 this will reduce the overall travel time for the same distance by at least another hour!
Whatever happened to Britain's "White Heat of Technology" revolution trumpeted by Harold Wilson back in the mid 1960s?
Hs2 is now being built into London Euston and the Metro Mayors of the West Midlands and Greater Manchester are looking at plns to build a hi speed line from Lichfield to Manchester now using Metro Concil fumds and private momey
The hell you mean "save"? It's being built and they're making huge progress.
It would be interesting to see a proper cost breakdown of HS2 and comparison to similar European or Asian projects. Not simply dividing the cost/km of the headline figures
I just had to ask because I'm a huge fan of your videos! But what video editing software do you use? I love the motion lines that you use! ❤
I use DaVinci Resolve
12:40 “could potentially be done with a cheaper regular rail line” but what does that mean? There’s no such thing really. If you build a new alignment it has all the same costs of clearing land and buying land. If you put slow trains on it then you’d have TWO parallel lines running slow trains. But you clearly don’t want to mix slow trains and fast trains - the timetable loses frequency. So would you try putting fast trains on the old line? That’s poppycock with the lines being aligned in the 1800s for steam trains. (The curves are added on purpose to help them).
Bottom line is, NOBODY builds lines for steam trains anymore, so ANY new line is going to be a high speed line. Whether it’s high speed or “very high speed”, it’s always going to be straighter than the old lines just because of what century we are in. Sorry!
A Ground News sponsorship would've been fitting for this video
Is this ur first non australia or nz rail vid?
They just need to do whatever it takes to get the original plans done. There's just a completely lack of long term vision for this country.
Midland north west rail link is high speed, not regular rail, it’s just a slower high speed, 300km/h instead of 360
I want to bump moustaches with citymoose. 🥺
Would it not have been cheaper to go onto Leeds from Manchester rather than having an eastern leg? You'd also tick off a lot of Northern Powerhouse Rail too. Thoretically it could then go onto York, Newcastle, Edinburgh then Glasgow improving the Transpennine routes too...
That was an excellent and concise assessment of where we are at. Given that the reason to build is increased overall capacity, not speed in itself, the political decision to go for a line speed of 360 km/h when everyone else was doing 300 km/h was pure vanity (“my train goes faster than yours”). Higher speed requires gentler curves, heavier engineering and most significantly, with so much of the line in tunnel, larger diameter tunnels with more pressure-relief shafts. It also led to specification of concrete slab track for much of the line, which is about twice as expensive to build as ballasted track (though cheaper to maintain). The Manchester/West Mids mayors’ HS2-lite proposal is for 300 km/h - high speed by any standard - running on ballasted track.
Yeah that would be fine for an HS2.
Conservatives would still be against it wouldn’t they? Same same to them. Daily Mail too.
France had opened Phase 1 of LGV Est with a design speed of 350kmh in 2007. Madrid to Barcelona opened in 2008 with a design speed of 350km/h. HS2 was designed with a 400km/h design speed and a 360km/h opening-day top speed in 2009 with an opening date 20 years down the line. It wasn't vanity, it was literally the standard tech of the time.
Eurostars can do 320km/h on TGV Nord, which opened in 1993 - 300km/h wouldn't have even been the previous generations' tech. There's no vanity with the speed they picked other than the leaving of a legacy where we do our best to leave a legacy that future generations don't have to pay a fortune fixing due to our myopia.
And the ballasted track by the Mayors has been criticised within the industry for being a short-term saving that will cost in the long run as maintenance is much more intensive. Sure, if it gets it built rather than not built, the extra costs would be worth it, but it's everyone who knows about these things (including the people who came up with the proposal) know its a false economy.
It would be better to get the existing network into good order before worrying about vanity projects.
It has ben tried and failed and HS2 is not a vanity project as it is being built to speed up WCML services from London Euston to Birmingham and the North West so taking passenger services off the southern hlf of the WCML giving more spce for the ever increasing freight trins using the Southern Half of the WCML
Go anywhere as long as it's London but we all get to pay for it.
It needs to connect to Hs1, the Eurostar, so that it connects Birmingham to Paris
Do a video of Parrahub
This discussion starts (as often happens) by falling into the trap that UK rail does / should centre on London…. Becomes a London-centric issue, how long to travel to / from London etc.
There is much more than London in the UK… something successive governments (based in London, elected by voters in the London region…) have ignored, with most of the fairly limited infrastrucure spending over the last (many) decades being in the south east (London) region….Elizabeth tube line, starting HS2 in London… and perennial underspending in the north (still run on Victorian era train lines, are few direct train connections between the major northern cities, most northern cities have little to no city metro or trams..they operate mostly on buses, or easier to just drive!)
which is why large (northern) parts of the population feel shortchanged, that yet again infrastructure spending has been in the south (HS2…London to Birmingham) and then stopped (again!) before any spending in the North.
You wonder if HS2 construction had, instead of starting with the southern zone, started in the North and then headed south, it wouldn’t have been stopped? Would’ve had massively more economic impact in the northern regions, probably much cheaper per km up there (fewer NIMBYs of politically vital southern electorates), and London-centric political egos would’ve wanted to keep going to connect to London….couldn’t have the north having something better than the south!
Ultimately it’s Laughable / embarrassing debacle. From a history as railway pioneers (the Victorians built a massive rail system with relative ease…and, yes, cheap labour), the UK now can’t built 200km from Birmingham northwards across relatively flat and low cost (and generally NIMBYless) land without huge cost overruns, delays…because, again, they’ve spent all the money already… in the South
And it gets worse.. there was supposed to be a HS3 / Northern Powerhouse scheme too, connecting the (run north south) HS2 lines with new east-west improvements to massively improve connectivity across the North between the northwest (Liverpool, Manchester) and Yorkshire (Sheffield, Leeds, York) and across to Hull on the east coast. But…no HS2 is getting that far north to connect to now, and the whole HS3 / Powerhouse seems to being quietly forgotten about too. Back to the Victorian age we go!
Brunel would turn in his grave!
For any other European nation this project is a no-brainer.
I think in the UK as in Australia the imperative is build wider and more motorways.The land they take up and continual noise of traffic has become a fact of life.
We haven't built a new motorway in the UK for decades.
@@DavidKnowles0 Not quite - the A1(M) was only finished in North Yorkshire as recently as 2018. However the general thrust of your argument is true - the UK has spent the last 25 years only building new fast roads about 25 years after most other developed countries would have done so.
Belgium, Austria (both of which had half the motorway of the UK for less than half the area/population) and Italy (which had roughly twice the motorway for a similar sized country) are the only European countries (with motorways) that have increased their motorway percentage less since the year 2000.
Spent £100m on a shed for bats
Greeting to Australia from Britain.
I was totally against the construction of HS2 as planned, but as the bulk of the money has already been wasted, Sunak's decision to cancel the cheaper bits was imbecilic at best. Not that Sunak used trains when a helicopter or RAF plane was available (even for London-Newcastle)
What went wrong?
Firstly it was described by the government as World Leading- a red flag if ever there was, knowing the UK government's track record (pardon the pun) at doing anything on time, within budget and actually useful.
It was over specified in terms of speed- 360km/h, which means higher infrastructure costs and higher energy consumption during operation (the UK power grid is barely adequate now). Gold plating is the term used, and is also the reason that the Great Western electrification was truncated.
Boring tunnels to satisfy NIMBYs has added billions to the cost, and given that leisure travel is now higher than business travel, who wants to watch the inside of tunnels instead of scenery. Meanwhile, capacity enhancements in other parts of the country have been delayed due to lack of funds.
The link to HS1 would be the only way to provide an alternative to Manchester-Europe air travel. Having to get off the train at Euston and get a taxi to St. Pancras to get on a Eurostar is going to have zero effect on air travel.
The contracts and their lack of supervision were a licence to print money for the contractors, and the European suppliers of boring machines. Planning has been done on the hoof with frequent changes to the plans- You can almost hear the cash registers going "Kerching" in the builders' accounts departments.
Before anybody comments, I have written and administered contracts.
Under the plans of the present HS2, there were no plans to connect HS2 to HS1 on financial grounds as there is no call for train services from Birmingham and Manchester o Europe having adequat cheap flights from Birmingham and Manchester Airports and in sme wys quicker and HS2 is a Domestic Hi Speed line to be operated y Avanti West Coast Trains where as HS1 is operated by Eurostar only
lol, i have high speed train service for over 1000km to Central Switzerland.....
Yes and we only have 169km to travel so we don't bloody need high speed, just regular and reliable.
HS1 is really a branch of the French network. Brits don't 'do' HS rail.
Reopening Great Central Railway would have been better
How could they, most of the track bed does not exist any more
Lets assume the myth of the GCR - that there was a modern fast line from Sheffield (or even Liverpool) to Aylesbury that got closed and can be easily reopened (even though most of that is nonsense)...
From Aylesbury to London the line is really slow and there's not capacity for fast paths through Rickmansworth/Beaconsfield. Marylebone is a poorly-sited terminus that can't easily be expanded (ditto Paddington). You are going to have to build a new-build London to Aylesbury line, and something going to Birmingham (which the GCML didn't serve). Effectively you are going to have to build most of HS2 phase 1 anyway.
There is to much hype about 'high speed'' rail. Higher speed rail (150-200k/hr) doesn't require the necessary high engineering requirements that high speed (200-300k/hr). I do agree with Kyle, there are other options for less expensive 'higher speed' rail especially if building dedicated rail corridors or dedicated track on existing rail corridors.
Did you actually watch the video? It said if you are going to build new, then why not build it to modern standards, which can support faster travel than the 200kmh we have today? Also that you need a good reason to encourage passengers to use it. Getting there quicker is such a reason.
They looked in detail at 200km/h super-fast tracks along the WCML (which is already 4-tracked most of the way to Crewe, and 200km/h on the fast tracks - the interventions you talk about were done long ago!) and quickly found that was going to be more expensive than a greenfield line with 400km/h.
Similarly widening a motorway by a lane each way costs the same amount as building the same mileage of new-build 6-lane motorway due to having to work around the existing structures and traffic.
@@sihollett - I am aware of that the various option have been looked at. You can have a new dedicated 'higher speed' rail corridor that would be cheaper to build than a highly engineered 'high speed' corridor. At the moment the UK can't afford anything after 14 years of austerity by successive Tory governments.
@@TheRip72 - Yes I did watch the video. 'High speed' rail is gold plated 'nice to have' service that required higher engineering standards resulting in higher costs than higher speed rail. As seen with costs blow outs, can the UK after 14 years of austerity by successive Tory government's can afford to have a gold plated project or higher speed rail that could have included the Northern Rail project?
@@chrismckellar9350 They looked at lower speed (~250km/h) options. They saved about 3% of construction costs by dropping the top speed, but removed a load of benefits and increased operational costs.
Austerity started in 2008 as New Labour had run out of money. Austerity was the way of having money to spend. The UK Government has never been spending more.
No! Don’t measure all costs by kilometre! MOST of the costs are in the station - so what do you think those comparisons are using? Not stations!
It’s one of the biggest travesties of the project, that overdue station upgrades have been postponed and postponed by existing networks, leaving their old stations in an awful state until they’re needed to change for a new rail line. IT’S NOT THE LINE THAT COSTS THE MONEY.
Euston Station being an extreme example of safety upgrades that are long overdue - unlike Sydney Central, you can’t go to the platform until a few minutes before departure and there’s a terrible scramble when the platform numbers are finally displayed. The space there (for people, not just trains) is tragically poor.
For more information go see an expert TH-camr like Gareth Dennis’s channel.
I would love to share what came from floating in flood water and the two hours I gave to what if?
And yes it's cost effective and allows infrastructure to the dynamic of getting there.
I feel it's a blessing.
Cheers
10:48 Glad you mentioned the HS1 - HS2 Link.
I feel that it is one of the silent cuts to the HS2 project and gutted HS2 in terms of future potential. Basically forcing a reliance on changing through London if you want to get to Europe via rail from somewhere outside of London, such as Birmingham or Leeds. Which will likely have the negative outcome of making Euston and St Pancras even more overcrowded in future with large numbers of people having to use the stations to change between lines.
Running trains on such a link would have gutted HS2 in terms of future (and opening day) potential - taking not just the small amount of spare capacity, but also some of the already-allocated capacity to run through trains with little demand compared to other uses of those paths.
Euston and St Pancras will cope with the addition of number of passengers changing between HS1 and HS2, if you don't build the link. It's a rounding error amount of people at those busy stations.
Will Old Oak Common and Stratford cope with the increase of people changing there if you build the link? It's going to be a bigger number than you are adding to the terminals by not building, as you'd have both people changing from other HS1/HS2 trains onto the link (as the through trains can't serve everyone everywhere all at once), and a much larger number changing off the through trains to get to where they want to go (as the overwhelming majority on both routes want Central London).
no offence but you present a very shallow understanding here of the costs of HS2 and why they may or may not be high
Got any better videos mate im trying to get more info
HS2 is only half a job. It should have started in the North.
London-Rugby is the most congested section, so that is the first section to be targeted for relief.
Or do you think that Leeds-Carlisle would be a better place to start? The existing line there nearly closed in the late 80s.
@@TheRip72 HS2 should have started in Manchester. The east west connection from Liverpool through Manchester to Leeds would benefit 15 million in the regions of the North.
HS2 could have been built to the original specification on time and on budget by working with China's experts in high speed rail technology. As usual the UK is slow and expensive for infrastructure and regarded as a joke having postponed Heathrow expansion, HS2 and nuclear power plant construction.
Yes too many lines were closed under Beeching that's the problem now HS2 is just a waste of money
They could increase capacity dramatically by running stopping and express trains at the same time using sidings to make way for the express trains, currently it just alternates between stopping and express, so the train line is empty most of the time.
It doesn't just alternate between stopping and express. They flight trains so that you get several expresses, followed by several 'stoppers' (sorted by when they stop to maximise throughput), followed by a single empty path before the next round of expresses. There's 2 or 3 empty paths each hour out of Euston, with 12 in use. I guess they could be filled as long as you continue to flight stoppers (so trains stopping at Watford create a free path for a train stopping at Milton Keynes to fall back into, for example) and have two platform loops and through track at Watford Junction, holding the Watford stopper at Watford for 15 minutes before it can take the path of the next Watford stopper (as the first empty one). The status quo is much more efficient!
The WCML fasts have more trains running along them than every TGV line in France, despite having too many flat junctions and lots of trains that stop en-route. The costing-as-much-as-HS2-phase-1 upgrade of the 2000s and the related timetable optimisation have milked pretty much all you can out of the WCML.
@@sihollett I don't understand what your describing exactly, the dover to london victoria & st pancras line goes past my house, I think this is a busy line?
The 2 trains go a few mins apart, then nothing for half an hour, then only the victoria train, then nothing for half an hour, then repeat.
I can't help feeling it could have many more trains.
@@arkatub I can compare those.
West of Ashford, trains to St Pancras use HS1, so you must live east of there? Major destinations on that section are Margate, Ramsgate, Canterbury, Dover & Folkstone. Once east, on to the older Victorian lines, HS1 trains stop regularly, making progress slow. West of Ashford, trains to Victoria continue this stopping pattern, taking 2 hours to reach London instead of the 35 minutes on HS1. It converges with Several other lines on the way there, especially as you approach London
Compare that to the lines out of Euston which HS2 will relieve:
It serves Birmingham (2/hour), North Wales (1/hour), Manchester (3/hour), Liverpool (1/hour), Preston & Glasgow (1/hour).
That is 8 so far.
Glasgow is 400 miles from London so you cannot stop those trains at too many stations because they would take too long to reach their destination. They are usually fairly full anyway.
There are another 2/hour which run as far as Leighton Buzzard on the fast lines because there is no space for them on the slow lines. These are slightly slower than the others which therefore catch them up, so they need more space.
On the slower lines are trains to Tring, Milton Keynes & Northampton. It is also a busy freight route.
Trains from Croydon (2/hour I think) also join the line at Wembley & need to cross the fast lines to join the slow lines, so these need clearance in the timetable.
I am certain I have missed some services in that summary too.
There needs to be a little slack in the timetable because without it, a single delay caused by anything from a train fault to an unwell passenger would disrupt the service for hours.
So your comparison is similar to the line between Chester & Crewe: While that may not be heavily served, it merges with services from Liverpool Manchester & Glasgow further up the line...the part HS2 is intended to relieve.
@@arkatub We're not looking at the Ashford-Dover line with HS2. We're looking at the WCML - a far busier line. There's a flight of several trains 3 or 4 minutes apart, a 3 or 4 minute gap, and then another flight of trains. The fast lines had (pre-pandemic, before Avanti had all sorts of issues, mucking things up) 9 Intercity trains and 3 fast regional trains in each direction, each off-peak hour, with 3 gaps to allow stopping trains to stop or change to the slows.
HS2 simply has to get built in full at some point. The WCML can't take any more people and the ECML is getting there too. The UK Rail network is well over capacity and HS2 is one project meant to fix it; its an idea so old BR was drawing up plans for something like it. Getting expresses out of the way of the local trains makes everything faster and more frequent, mixing them just slow everyone down.
Arguments that the WCML is "full to capacity" rely on a discredited, out of date forecasting model which overestimates long distance passenger growth & isn't used for anything anymore except to justify the monstrous vanity project that is HS2. Network Rail's "New Lines Programme Capacity Analysis" shows that WCML capacity is kept artificially low by private operators wanting to maximise their profits.
A DfT analysis shows that in peak hours leaving Euston, WCML trains were loaded at just 52.2%.
The blatant corruption within HS2 Ltd that's recently been exposed proves they've been publishing misleading projections & exaggerated figures since day one of this disastrous project .. don't believe everything you read about so-called "capacity" issues!
HS2 failed because the line goes through the Conservative heartlands without any benefit to the people living in those areas
If like HS1 or crossrail, the line had been of benefit to people living in the southeast of England. The whole line would be opening within a year or so
If we can't, then shows the world three things:
1. That we are no longer a powerful and influential country (though I think this has been the case now for around eight years already)
2. How astonishingly corruot our Tory politicians were (and still are)
and
3. That we nor only are incapable of building large-scale infrastructure projects outside of London and the South East; but that we also do not possess world-class engineers anymore, with which to complete them.
But alot of the reasons lie with point no.2.
That's what more people (especially English people) need to realise and accept. I'm still not sure that enough do, even now.
You can't connect the UK "with Europe". We're situated in Europe. That's geography, not politics.
HS2 aside, I'm looking forward to a new golden age for rail transportation with Great British Railways, the new state-owned company taking over passenger services in the U.K soon. The past 30 years of privatized rail has been an unmitigated disaster, even Margaret Thatcher knew it wouldn't work.
Clearly, you've forgotten how dreadful British Rail was.😂
@@old.not.too.grumpy. Under BR, you could always catch your last train home. These days you cannot because it is often cancelled.
@TheRip72 lol I used to catch the train home from work in BR days..... I gave up and bought a car the trains always breaking down cancelled or someone was on strike...... think your looking at the past through rose tinned glasses 🤣
It's widely acknowledged that the biggest problem in rail in Britain right now is too much government interference (much worse than under BR). Until the DfT/Treasury/Cabinet Ministers micromanagement goes, things are not going to improve. The current (National) Government-run TOCs haven't seen any improvement since they were taken over by the state because the private company couldn't fulfil their contracts. The only positive difference of nationalisation is not paying companies' shareholders money. You don't get suddenly better upper management (and you might lose some good ones), you probably increase the oversight of the dreaded Treasury-brained bean-counters, you don't fix industrial relations (and politicise them more).
Nationalisation in and of itself isn't a solution, just as privatisation wasn''t in and of itself a solution in the 90s. Both are just ideological moves that may have some benefits and may have some problems, but they are more than cancelled out by other effects on the railways.
Tories were beyond bad, in all aspects of government. HS2 just a manifestation. So relieved to have new leadership, think they will at least realise we need to lever value from phase 1. No brainer
200 kph is not high speed.
🎸
Terminating it out in the suburbs of London would be ridiculous. And the Hs1-Hs2 link seems like a no-brainer to me. If anything else gets built, those 2 things are the minimum.
Of course, if you live in NSW, having disconnected, incompatible services which terminate nowhere in particular (NW Metro, WSA Metro, etc), are the standard operating procedure,l and it's depressing to see the UK a si8milar thing.
If money and planning were no object, this is what my vision for a fully national network of high speed lines would be:
- HS2 built in full as originally planned, and extended right up to Scotland. The Western branch continuing from Wigan would be Preston-Lancaster-Carlisle-Glasgow/Edinburgh and the Eastern one continuing from York would be Durham-Newcastle-Edinburgh-Dundee-Aberdeen
- HS3/NPR built in full as Liverpool-Manchester-Bradford-Leeds-York/Hull, plus an additional branch from Manchester to Sheffield (connection to HS2)
- HS4Air connecting HS1 and HS2 via Gatwick and Heathrow as briefly proposed
- HS5 branching off HS4Air just south of Heathrow to Eastleigh, from where trains could then run to Portsmouth and Southampton, with possible second phase to Exeter
- HS6 branching off HS2 just south of Birmingham Interchange, running as Bristol-Exeter (connection to HS5)-Plymouth
- HS7 from Heathrow (connection to HS4Air) to Bristol (connection to HS6)-Newport-Cardiff-Swansea
- HS8 branching off HS1 in the Thurrock area to Cambridge via Stansted and Peterborough/Norwich, with further extension as Peterborough-Leicester-East Midlands (connection to HS2)
The HS1 link was insanely expensive, would create capacity problems on the Overground (due to rerouting freight away from where), diverted HS1 and HS2 trains away from their main traffic destination and only a third of traffic would stay on the train across the whole of London. The cheerleading case for it by Greengauge21 had to have a trains-worth of people each hour happily walking 400m between Stratford and Stratford International, but no one walk the 500m between Euston and St Pancras, just to try and create traffic (only a third of which would cross the Channel, of which half of that would have boarded at Old Oak Common from local services).
The need to build passengers to justify the expense meant adding as many stops as possible to serve as many flows as possible. Manchester-Paris genuinely would be quicker via the more frequent services to/from the London terminals than with the 5 added stops making the journey half an hour longer.
If you want to throw money at a link between HS1 and HS2, spend a tenth of the money on an underground moving walkway between the two stations - with the added benefit of serving Birmingham-Brighton passengers as well as Birmingham-Brussels passengers with it. And there's a lot more Birmingham-Brighton traffic than Birmingham-Brussels.
I remember in the 90s Glasgow Central Station had prepared a Eurostar waiting area anticipating that direct trains to the continent were coming soon. So people have been promised this for about 30 years. Since then flights have got cheaper so perhaps not many people would travel for 8 or so hours to reach the continent, of course with high speed rail it would be much less than that menaing there would be demand. It is not unrealistic, though, that there woulld be appreacable demand from closer cities such as Birmingham. One of the main draws of rail travel over air is the convenience that it takes you straight into the city centre in one journey. If people have to alight at St. Pancras and go to another terminus wait for another train they would probably just say no thanks it is easier to get a flight. However you are right that for the size of the connection, the projected costs were unfeasibly high.
@@tomq6491 I agree that it sucks politically - but the only reason to have built it would be political and even the politics didn't add up. The question would have been "is it worth spending billions to give Manchester/Crewe/Leeds city centres and the East Midlands and West Midlands areas direct trains to Kent/Lille/Paris at the expense of being unable to serve, for example, Stoke and Stafford with HS2 trains to London?".
The whole UK, outside SE England, has enough traffic to (the whole of) Europe to fill 1 train every 2 hours (per air traffic, matching Greenguage's 1/6th of the traffic on the 3tph link). And most of it would have had to change trains anyway due to the inability to serve everywhere frequently (even if you serve central Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, etc with trains, you then need Manchester/Leeds passengers to change onto those trains, and you are looking at very infrequent trains that mean it's normally better to take the half-hourly-or-better train to London and the more-than-hourly train through the Chunnel).
Reduce the interchange penalty between St Pancras and Euston - linking every service at both and it would be far better at getting people on the railway than infrequent direct trains that take longer than changing in London.
@@sihollett The problem is many people will be already changing trains in somewhere like Paris. The more changes you introduce the less attractive the entire journey is overall, and the more attractive a direct flight becomes. To reduce the interchange penalty would take more than a moving walkway, you'd need to synchronise HS1 and HS2 services to minimise delays and reduce border friction considerably.
It's also about risk management. If the HS2 service is delayed, or cancelled, and someone misses their HS1 connection, there might not be an available seat for hours, you can't guarantee someone would just be able to hop on the next available train (Eurostar services require all passengers to have a seat and are often completely full especially during popular days). So every connection you need to add in buffer time to at least reduce the risk, which can end up meaning a journey that in theory takes less time actually takes more. At least on a direct train, even if it is delayed, you still have a seat and you will get there on that train.
@@sihollett I agree that they shouldn't spend many billions on it, but by that I mean it shouldn't cost that much for something that would only be a mile long, it is ridiculous that it would cost that much. Even if they made the rails of gold it shouldn't cost that much.
I think it would be wrong to look at current figures as a projection for the number of people who would go to Europe via train North or London, as if a service was easily available then they are more likely to use it. Across the water trans border rail travel is routine.
In addition, it could act as a cross thames link. Allowing for greater connections from say South East London and Kent to the North.
The idea that people could travel to the main station for an onward journey was the same argument that Beeching used as a reason to close down branch lines, and look how bad that turned out to be.
@@Croz89 Re: changing trains - most northerners would be changing trains onto the link anyway (lack of direct trains, poor frequency of the direct trains) as they wouldn't have direct service. And half the passengers using the link to go on the trains to Europe would be from West London/SE England using Old Old Common to board the trains as the through traffic from beyond is so marginal.
If you wanted to minimise changes, have a change in the massive megacity where 95% of the demand from both HS1 and HS2 is to: London. And there it can between a whole gamult of northern destinations and a whole gamult of Continental ones (and the more frequented, but less cool-sounding southeastern ones reached by Thameslink) with decent frequencies rather than infrequent trains between a few northern locations (Solihull, Toton, Leeds, Crewe, Manchester Airport and Manchester Piccadilly) and two continental ones (Lille and Paris). The UK border changes required for beyond-London trains from Europe (or different changes like both border controls at St Pancras) would enable the oft-talked about trains from London to Bordeaux and Frankfurt, as well as return of the Disney and Snow/Ski trains (the latter more frequently than before). Everywhere within HSR range of London served with one (far easier than Paris, even without a travelator) change in the Capital is what should be the aim here, not token trains that help a handful of people and hinder far more.
Re: risk management - there's a lot more chance that an HS2 train is late if there's trains coming off the French network polluting the performance of the line. A simple line with no reverse branching is much more reliable than a through line with far more imported delays. A signal failure at Edinburgh can muck up trains in Brighton thanks to Thameslink. Do we really want Manchester trains' reliability being reduced by a problem in Marseilles (and vice versa)? Risk management was down the list of reasons not to build an HS1-HS2 link, but it is still there as a reason not to do it!
Through tickets from outside London to Eurostar have always been forgiving about delays at either end, seeking to mitigate it ASAP. Plus, can you imagine your Liverpool - Crewe train being delayed and missing the connection at Crewe onto the Paris train and so having to wait two hours with several trains to London passing through? That's the scenario with through trains to Europe! Changing between more frequent and reliable trains in London is the least bad situation for the most passengers.
It is *not* about capacity. Half the freight routes allocated are not taken up. Even Avanti West Coast does not use all its allocated slots.
The network can absorb any capacity issues. HS2 is a novelty line. No more.
I'd love to see high speed rail link London and Scotland and being a nation building project.
I'd say, build it in full as intended. If they manage to find a way to battle low-cost airliners, build the HS2-HS1 link + restart the Regional Eurostar project.
Not at the cost its running up, china offered to build it for a lot less than its costing this country now😅,
You mean pay China rates so they can take all the pay, instead of paying British who will pay 25% of it back in taxes, so £80bn is really £60bn.
Chinese government also does what it pleases & their population has no right to give an opinion. It is the discussions & consultations which are responsible for a large amount of the costs.
@@TheRip72 so you think the cost. Is through consultation , take a good look at the videos on here look at all the plant equipment sat idle most days and weekends and there using the wrong equipment that's why it taking so long, they should be using big earth mover's not the crap there using on all the sites,
I think the UK hasn't planned very well for an integrated high-speed network. If we had done that, having a complete network to Scotland from the beginning, we would have been able to have double-decker trains linking to HS1, never mind European links!
HS2 is purely for the benefit of London. If it was to benefit the North of England, it would have been built from the north, south to London.
You mean build the Northern bit which is less congested?
The most congested section is between London & Rugby, which is why London-Birmingham is phase 1.
"Northern Powerhouse" from Liverpool to Leeds is another project which is also being pursued.
So the north is not being ignored or mistreated. It is simply served by different projects which get less media attention.
Building from the north is basically what they've done in California - an expensive white elephant that doesn't provide the wow factor needed to sell skeptics on spending gigabucks on HSR - putting people off wanting to finish the far more expensive bits that make the route really successful.
The UK's plan was to build, while there was the political and financial capital, the expensive and controversial bit that - while on its own has a meh business case - provides both a wow-factor for skeptics and massively decent business case for extensions that mean it would be unbelievably dumb not to build them. Starting in the south was about making sure that the northern bits will happen and be useful rather than some southern-bias.
The primary reason for this line was NEVER to make a fast passenger service, but to free up 'ways' to allow a more efficient and rapid freight service. The incremental cost to denote it as High Speed had a marginal cost implication as it had to be designed to Interoperability Standards anyway. And this allowed an opportunity to market the idea to the public. The basic misunderstanding of the true purpose by subsequent politicians is just terrible, and allowed a false narrative to curtail the project.
We are simply crap at any long term infrastructure execution in this country, CrossRail (Elizabeth Line) being one that was first looked at in 1940's , seriously proposed in 1989 and started construction in 2009, with core running in 2022, the Chinese built a new high speed rail infrastructure in just 9 years.
Moore Laura Wilson Sandra Wilson Barbara
If I’m travelling from Birmingham to London, I don’t care if using HS2 will save me 20 minutes on the journey (35 minutes is a pipe dream). It’s been a colossal wast of money. Money that could have been spent on more important infrastructure projects.
HS2 is also planned to run European Loading gauge, which means the trains that run on HS2 may not run elsewhere in the UK, as its trains are narrower. Total cluster
Not quite right. The infrastructure will be built to European gauge, but the initial trains were always planned to be UK gauge. Had the full network been completed, then there would have been a captive Euro-gauge, HS only fleet, and a UK gauge to extend onto the classic network.
I don't think that's a bad thing, UK loading gauge is notoriously narrow and it really constrains the level of comfort we can offer on our trains, they're typically cramped with narrow seats. HS1 was built to a european gauge too.
Islam will take over britainistan before HS2 gets done. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Deeply cringe comment
Idiot