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A new report says it could jump by £30bn over its present £56bn taking it to almost the £100bn many of us predicted. The new cost is almost three times the original when it was first mooted and it will inevitably rise further.

Even if we were living in times of plenty the costs cannot be justified. And in the UK the distances between our major cities, something like an average of 125 miles, mean that very little time savings can be made between them.

We would be better off creating an upgraded inter-city network between major and other cities with decent trains running between them - something the whole of the country could benefit from.

Massive. White. Elephant! The costs are ludicrously high for the short amounts of journey times that will purportedly saved.

I agree wholeheartedly with everything you said there.

Workingman wrote:We would be better off creating an upgraded inter-city network between major and other cities with decent trains running between them - something the whole of the country could benefit from.

Amen.
Before any vanity project like this is considered, the rail network from east to west needs to be vastly improved. Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds etc all need much better commuter train services. This would be much better and cheaper than a £100 billion high speed line.
Interestingly I saw a documentary on TV recently about the French Aerotrain project of the 60s and 70s. Get a train carriage, bolt a jet engine to it and stand back! It did more than 250mph and ran on an elevated concrete monorail.

cromwell wrote:... bolt a jet engine to it and stand back!

Just looked at the Liverpool to Hull route. It serves four of the UK top ten major cities, is 110 miles long and takes on average over 3 hrs end-to-end or 30 MPH!

A new report says it could jump by £30bn over its present £56bn taking it to almost the £100bn many of us predicted. The new cost is almost three times the original when it was first mooted and it will inevitably rise further.

And we're still in the planning stage. They haven't even laid a rail yet. Merely demolished Camden carriage sheds and disinterred a graveyard at Euston.

It's a complete vanity project and should have been scrapped years ago.

I sincerely hope Boris cancels it. Anyway, if we're going to have a Brexit-induced recession, we won't need all that extra rail capacity, will we?

TheOstrich wrote:It's a complete vanity project and should have been scrapped years ago.
I sincerely hope Boris cancels it.

Boris will not cancel it... it's for London, you know, and you do realise what he's like with bulldozers and heavy machinery - he runs away! It is what he does with 'problems', any problem.

But, yes, it is a vanity project, started by Blair.

At my age, I really couldn't care less, but I do think it's an unnecessary waste of tax-payers money
and that the money it will eventually cost could be more wisely spent in ways that would benefit more people.

Why didn't they just add a set of tracks along side the existing ones.
Where I live there used to be four tracks going into Manchester. One was for Express trains which did not stopp at the smaller station. The other was for trains which stop and good traffic. There is now only two tracks so if there is a problem. trains can be held up for several hours.
Also there is engineering work on the main west coast main line which means buses between Crew & Preston as there are only two tracks.
This will apply to HS2 if it ever functions so there will be massive hold ups if ther is a problem on the tracks.

TheOstrich wrote:And we're still in the planning stage. They haven't even laid a rail yet. Merely demolished Camden carriage sheds and disinterred a graveyard at Euston.

More than 318 HS2 officials are being paid salaries of at least £100,000. In one year alone HS2 spent £600 million on consultants!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... -year.html

I don't know about a high speed train, it's certainly a gravy train, and the gravy trainers will squeal like hell at any prospect of losing HS2.

WM, I agree. In almost a straight line across the country from coast to coast, you have Hull, Leeds, Bradford, Manchester and Liverpool. Thats a few million people right there and the links between the cities are not good. The motorway is the M62, built in the early seventies and carrying much more traffic now than it was ever designed to. The rail commuting infrastructure is probably much the same. It's certainly antiquated and in desperate need of an upgrade. This is where the money needs to be spent, not on getting to London 20 minutes quicker!

East to West does definitely need improvement! From Swindon eastwards we don't even have electrification