Vocal Voices

It looks as though England (via the UK) is about to get the galaxy's shortest and most expensive high-speed rail "network" once phase two of the HS2 vanity project is finally scrapped.

The whole thing was never actually needed in a country where the major conurbations are all about 100 miles apart, some of the biggest are only 40 miles from each other.

The money would have always been better spent upgrading / doubling the East and West main lines to Edinburgh and Glasgow, as well as creating east-west lines from East Anglia to the S. West and Wales. We could also have had a proper mainline between the Humber and Mersey joining England's five major cities after London and Birmingham, and two of its major ports. An upgrade of Edinburgh to Glasgow would have not gone amiss, either.

Workingman wrote:The whole thing was never actually needed in a country where the major conurbations are all about 100 miles apart, some of the biggest are only 40 miles from each other.

Exactly! The initial cost was supposed to be £15 billion, the final cost is now estimated to be north of £100 billion(and the rest!) and we haven't laid one yard of track!
£20 billion spent already and who knows what the final bill would be?

I suspect they'll finish up building the link line from the main route to Birmingham north to Hansacre, where it will feed into the existing Stafford - Crewe - Liverpool / Manchester line.
So you would run at conventional high speeds from Lancashire to Hansacre, and then the ultra-fast high speeds down to Old Oak Common.

But there's the rub. Who on earth wants to go to Old Oak Common? You'd have to change trains there to get into central London. Surely they need to build the Old Oak Common - Euston section, but that seems to be heavily delayed / in doubt. Anyone wanting to get into central London would just continue to use the current conventional tains from Lancashire / Birmingham to Euston via Milton Keynes and Watford.

The whole thing is a complete farce. As one commentator has put it, we're simply going to wind up with a High Speed Line running between Aston and Acton ......

Ossie, complete farce just about sums it up!

Frank, the West certainly needs it, and badly!

It's official: HS2 to Manchester is scrapped. What 'The North' will now get is a new project named "Network North" - whoopee!

The fully electrified line would see trains make the journeys from Manchester to Hull in 84 minutes, to Sheffield in 42 minutes and Bradford in 30 minutes.

Manc to Hull = 77 miles, to Sheff = 33 miles, to Brad = 28 miles. The journeys between these cities will be at sub 30MPH. Leeds and Liverpool, once connected, will have similar journey times to these other cities. It will be quicker to go by car. Nothing is mentioned about rail improvements to the North East and Scotland above this super-duper, super-slow, Northern Network.

However, Manchester will still get HS2 trains, but they will be on the existing West Coast Main Line (WCML). This flies in the face of the original "need" for HS2 which was to remove Inter-City trains from the WCML and ECML in order to free up room for more commuter services and freight.

Ah but, HS2 will now go to Euston. Gotta look after London don't you Mr Sunak?

Workingman wrote:Ah but, HS2 will now go to Euston. Gotta look after London don't you Mr Sunak?

Oops that was wrong.

Risky Sunhat wants £6.5bn of private investment for it to happen.

Yep, work stopped on that last February; I think the cost over-run was already approaching 100%?

It is actually something different than being reported.

Sunak is reportedly selling the parcels of land for the HS2 northern extension. This is nothing more than a short sighted claw back of money already spent in order to try and balance a budget which has not balancing.

It is Sunak being an accountant rather than a leader. Investment in infrastructure which cannot be done by people is something Governments are there to do. It is something they should spend money on. It is not something they should cheese pare to make a technical budget situation which they can then try to use to gain votes.

Killing the HS2 northern extension is going to lose them more votes than any they could possibly gain on the budget. Sad fact is most people don't care about government budget issues but they do care about Governments living up to their commitments.

Apparently, home owners who reluctantly sold to allow for HS2 are to be allowed to buy back their properties - but at current market price Talk about rubbing salt in the wound

Despite the BBC trying to portray the loss of HS2 as a big issue, it really isn't.

At least not around here. Local politicians may have wanted it. If you live to the north of Leeds you might have wanted it.
Because you wouldn't have had any of the negatives to put up with. In areas like mine, negatives is all we would have got.

But thousands of people between London and Birmingham have already suffered thse negatives. Loss of their homes, road closures, disruption from the building works and the destruction of countryside.
The same would have applied to thousands of people between Birmingham and Manchester, and for thousands more between Derby and Leeds. That western leg would have stopped at six staions too; it could never have been high speed, it was making too many stops!

In these areas the cancellation of HS2 is nothing but a relief.