why all the hate for hs2?
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Imagine for a moment you have a road, It's speed limit is say 70mph.
Now imagine for a moment you build a second road where the speed limit is 125mph and only vehicles that can do at least 60mph are allowed on it, and at the same time you might restrict the old road to 55mph.
Is the second road's only effect to allow you to arrive somewhere a bit faster?
What you've done is you've knocked some time off how long it will take you to get from A to B with the new road for the vehicles that are doing those speeds, but you've still got that older road that can now be used to take far more buses, trucks and other vehicles that can only do the lower speeds (and not having to worry so much about someone coming up behind them 20-50mph faster), or where your speed isn't as important as how much you're carrying in a vehicle.
This is the big thing about building HS2, it's not replacing the old line, it's not just making it a bit faster, it's an entirely new line that is massively increasing the capacity because you can run more slower trains closer together on the old line now, and at the same time run more, much faster trains on the new line.
In reality it probably more than doubles the capacity of the old line, because when you are running a mix of fast and slow trains on the same line you need a lot of time and space between them (and the fast ones can't run at full speed as much), and have to juggle the schedules very carefully, if you're running trains that are all roughly the same speed you can potentially run more trains and it's simpler to manage.
In short it doubles the rail track along that rough route, and the cost of doing it to suit modern high speed trains is a negligible difference between making the new tracks just up to the standard we had in the 80's and are trying to improve on (and by doing it to the best you can now, you're potentially putting back any major improvements/upgrades 20-40+ years, as opposed to having to do them in 10).
A lot of our rail infrastructure is still being upgraded to what was "the new standard" 20+ years ago, so you build anything new to the current best standard (IIRC railway upgrades tend to work in the span of a decade+ because of the disruption and cost of doing it to existing rail).
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@Werewolf - I understand the speed analogy, I just don't understand why it's so important to the rest of the UK to get people into/out of London a little bit more quickly - thats the bit thats not explained - what is the benefit to the rest of the UK to getting a few thousand people into London 15 minutes quicker?
I mean with modern 4G/5G allowing laptops to work anywhere, Work From Home etc etc, the HS2 feels like a very "80's old skool" solution to most of London's commuting issues, and thats the only thing I can see being cured by £100,000,000,000 of our money. Hell, I hasd to search a whole bunch of non-Government websites to find "what is the benefit of HS2" and everything just points back to "London gets more people, or same people faster" and "Extra Freight using old lines", and I hope thats worth the money.
Again, the decisions been made and the moneys being spent so what I think means absolutely nothing to anyone in the end
I mean with modern 4G/5G allowing laptops to work anywhere, Work From Home etc etc, the HS2 feels like a very "80's old skool" solution to most of London's commuting issues, and thats the only thing I can see being cured by £100,000,000,000 of our money. Hell, I hasd to search a whole bunch of non-Government websites to find "what is the benefit of HS2" and everything just points back to "London gets more people, or same people faster" and "Extra Freight using old lines", and I hope thats worth the money.
Again, the decisions been made and the moneys being spent so what I think means absolutely nothing to anyone in the end
Well it won't be worth it as with everything London-focused it just keeps making the country less versatile and rigidly opposed to any investment outside the M25.
A country that is effectively just an ivory tower surrounded by ghettos won't last long.
A country that is effectively just an ivory tower surrounded by ghettos won't last long.
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Gosh no, 70mph is in no way considered to be a high speed train. Even rural branch lines in my area get up to those speeds.
High speed is much faster, like I said, the only true high speed line we have is the Eurostar and it’s only 60 miles long.
As others have said the point is capacity not getting people to London 10 mins faster. Whether you think that is worth it or not is up to you.
It's not getting people in and out of london so much as the fact that it frees up the existing line for more "local" travel and heavy goods, and the fast new line can also carry some "light" goods potentially as well as a lot of people.@Werewolf - I understand the speed analogy, I just don't understand why it's so important to the rest of the UK to get people into/out of London a little bit more quickly - thats the bit thats not explained - what is the benefit to the rest of the UK to getting a few thousand people into London 15 minutes quicker?
I mean with modern 4G/5G allowing laptops to work anywhere, Work From Home etc etc, the HS2 feels like a very "80's old skool" solution to most of London's commuting issues, and thats the only thing I can see being cured by £100,000,000,000 of our money. Hell, I hasd to search a whole bunch of non-Government websites to find "what is the benefit of HS2" and everything just points back to "London gets more people, or same people faster" and "Extra Freight using old lines", and I hope thats worth the money.
Again, the decisions been made and the moneys being spent so what I think means absolutely nothing to anyone in the end
If for example the existing line is anything like as packed as many of the others for much for the time, being able to offload many of the longer run travellers to HS2 means that you free up a lot of capacity for more of the local passengers, make it more comfortable for all passengers, and have an increase in cargo capacity.
One of the reasons I hate travelling by train towards London is that invariably the train is utterly rammed (even now), the demand far outweighs capacity much of the time, but if you made it more comfortable and potentially a bit cheaper you could probably move a lot of people away from travelling by car.
In the long term even if everyone goes to work from home (really unlikely to happen) you end up with a new line that is still there for leisure, occasional travel, those that really can't work from home, and ultimately a lot of very high capacity heavy goods capacity that is far cleaner and "greener" than the equivalent number of trucks.
Ideally we should be building a lot of new rail capacity both for passengers (many people would rather travel long distances in comfort in a train than a car*), and freight, as a single freight train can easily carry as much as hundreds of articulated trucks between more local distribution points (thus moving that cargo off the roads, reducing pollution and road congestion along what are often very busy routes).
We've spent 60 years basically adding more and more lanes to existing roads, more and more new roads and bypasses to deal with the increase in road traffic, when if we'd spent a fraction of that money on rail we'd probably have much better condition roads (freight traffic is really bad for road surfaces), and much more pleasant driving conditions for when you do actually need to drive, with far fewer heavy goods vehicles travelling hundreds of miles every day between fixed points (meaning potentially cheaper and more efficient freight handling).
It's also worth noting that there are a huge number of jobs where "work from home" simply isn't feasible, for example you can't do factory, shop floor, warehouse, medical, or any one of thousands of other jobs "at home", and London needs those people coming in from the cheaper areas to live outside the city limits (as do most cities).
*And IIRC it's potentially not much slower to travel by reasonably fast train than by air, once you allow for things like the security checks etc you get with air travel.
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Soldato
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This. Another case of spend all the money on London and the surrounding areas and sod everywhere else.
It's the same with roads. How is the A1M only just getting upgraded from 2 lanes???
Cheers for the info, it shows my general ignorance on the subject outside of a very general misunderstanding on the topic as I knew very little about HS2 prior and this discussion forced me to do some research of my own.
I still can't help but feel that there are many, many more "unaware" people like myself out there and I can't help but feel that the Government haven't really done a good job informing people why it seems to be so important.
There is a really good video on the ‘B1M’ YouTube channel on HS2 which covers how it’s being built and why it’s so expensive.
But as @Werewolf said, if we had invested in rail like we did roads, we wouldn’t have these problems anymore.
Most rail lines going into most city centres need straightening and more lines adding. The huge issue is that the routes around rail lines are so developed, it’s not possible to build new lines without turfing loads of people from their homes and businesses and there is no political will to do that. Tunnelling is incredibly expensive.
As I’ve said I’m not pro or anti HS2 and in reality but it needs to succeed like Cross Rail has because if it doesn’t, I think it’s fair to say new rail in the U.K. is dead. I’d probably go as far as saying it already is because of the toxicity that surrounds U.K. infrastructure.
But as @Werewolf said, if we had invested in rail like we did roads, we wouldn’t have these problems anymore.
Most rail lines going into most city centres need straightening and more lines adding. The huge issue is that the routes around rail lines are so developed, it’s not possible to build new lines without turfing loads of people from their homes and businesses and there is no political will to do that. Tunnelling is incredibly expensive.
As I’ve said I’m not pro or anti HS2 and in reality but it needs to succeed like Cross Rail has because if it doesn’t, I think it’s fair to say new rail in the U.K. is dead. I’d probably go as far as saying it already is because of the toxicity that surrounds U.K. infrastructure.
I think one problem with this sort of thing is that it is quite hard for the general public to get their heads round big infrastructure projects i.e. things that take decades to come to fruition and cost huge sums of money they can't even visualise because of all the digits. Anything that takes more than 10 years or costs more than £10bn if you like.
As covered above there is also the perception it's just about getting people to and from London quicker, i.e. the city slickers ensuring they can live in a country pile whilst earning their millions in the big smoke (ironically I doubt it even helps much with that, it will be more about linking the small smokes to the big smoke rather than speeding up the trains from the unmanned platform in a quaint village). Things like better freight transport or reducing congestion isn't really publicised / thought about. So naturally with changing working practices (WFH/hybrid) people are going to challenge HS2 if they basically see it as a system to get workers to and from London (I appreciate this thread is over 10 years old when things were a bit different).
More generally I would say an issue with passenger trains is some routes are just highly inefficient (from a passenger travel time POV) due to closed/irregular service on certain lines (e.g. the west/east thing mentioned earlier in the thread, or say you want to travel north from Bournemouth to Salisbury or Swindon). But I can't see any good solution because of the sheer hassle/cost involved in building/reopening lines.
As covered above there is also the perception it's just about getting people to and from London quicker, i.e. the city slickers ensuring they can live in a country pile whilst earning their millions in the big smoke (ironically I doubt it even helps much with that, it will be more about linking the small smokes to the big smoke rather than speeding up the trains from the unmanned platform in a quaint village). Things like better freight transport or reducing congestion isn't really publicised / thought about. So naturally with changing working practices (WFH/hybrid) people are going to challenge HS2 if they basically see it as a system to get workers to and from London (I appreciate this thread is over 10 years old when things were a bit different).
More generally I would say an issue with passenger trains is some routes are just highly inefficient (from a passenger travel time POV) due to closed/irregular service on certain lines (e.g. the west/east thing mentioned earlier in the thread, or say you want to travel north from Bournemouth to Salisbury or Swindon). But I can't see any good solution because of the sheer hassle/cost involved in building/reopening lines.
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I get what you're saying, but bits of it are a bit glib.
If you look at Return On Investment, even back in 2013, when the line was anticipated to cost £26bn and set to link the centre of London with the centre of Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Heathrow and the HS1 network, the lifetime ROI was considered poor at £2 for every 1£1 spent:-
HS2 high-speed rail plan offers insufficient return on investment
Even government claims that a full scheme will bring £2 for every £1 spent are easily beaten by other rail and road projects
www.theguardian.com
Now costs have gone up by a factor of 5 or 6, and the benefits have been scythed (not going to Birmingham centre, not connecting to Leeds, or Heathrow, or HS1). I can't find the current figures but a while back there was talk of the ROI being less than parity. From what I have read, that's practically unheard of in infrastructure investment, and certainly not in projects of this size and cost.
In terms of it not being about commuters -there seems to be this merry-go-round. It was HS2 backers that lauded its speed initially. Then, when it became clear it wouldn't make much difference to journey times, it became all about capacity. Then when people pointed out it wasn't stopping in many places and was going to be ridiculously expensive, it became all about freight. Nobody's been able to explain why freight needs to be on a high-speed line, and it's not hard to see that this is all just revisionism plain and simple.
If you look at the Government's own business case from 2013...
[Withdrawn] High speed rail: a catalyst for high speed Britain
The benefits of high speed rail in Britain, including the advantages for passengers and the British economy.
...You can see it was all about passengers...
One problem is that it has employed a helluva a lot of people (just like any other, more cost-effective project would have done) and so a lot of people are invested in it and will not criticise it.
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HS2 was marketed as a passenger only line, the freight capacity comes from freeing up space on the WCML and other local lines but its another neglected area. Big upgrades are needed across the network which is at capacity. Whatever your views oringinally it is clearly not going to deliver value for money at £200 billion..
People think it is a northern thing but our rail connections here on the south coast from Portsmouth to London is not fast, connections west and east are poor as well with car travel being much faster and cheaper.
People think it is a northern thing but our rail connections here on the south coast from Portsmouth to London is not fast, connections west and east are poor as well with car travel being much faster and cheaper.
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Spending 100s of billions of pounds on new lines is an utter waste of time when the trains are being run by parasitic private entities (often foreign state-owned) leeching off the taxpayer, both directly through outrageous ticket prices, and indirectly through taxpayer subsidies.
What a revelation it would be if someone in government project planning just said, ok, this is what we think it's going to cost, let's triple that as our estimate and go from there.
It's like programmers that think they have 6+ productive hours of work a day
Just as an idea to put things into a little perspective on costs of tunnels, I saw on the news about a new power tunnel for London, just the tunnel to take power cabling (not including the cabling etc), and they were talking about a billion pounds for what looked like a ~3m diameter tunnel that went 20 miles (about a third the diameter of a train tunnel).
That almost certainly didn't require "buying" the land, or half the objections/problems that HS2 has had, and is basically just the cost of making an empty tunnel that doesn't have to withstand half the stresses/wear that an active transport tunnel for carrying humans would take.
Infrastructure is hideously expensive, but if done properly you're talking about the basic work lasting many decades, about half of our rail infrastructure in on runs that have been in use for 100+ years with modernisation every 25+ years.
Garnett, one issue i have with that guardian article is that it doesn't seem to specify the time period for the ROI, 2:1 is terrible if it's over the projected life of a railway line (baring in mind we're using railway lines that are in many cases ~50-100+ years old), but if say it's over the first ten to twenty years of it running that's not bad, especially as so much of the money being spent on it is going straight back into the economy with what is going straight back to the government via payroll taxes.
That almost certainly didn't require "buying" the land, or half the objections/problems that HS2 has had, and is basically just the cost of making an empty tunnel that doesn't have to withstand half the stresses/wear that an active transport tunnel for carrying humans would take.
Infrastructure is hideously expensive, but if done properly you're talking about the basic work lasting many decades, about half of our rail infrastructure in on runs that have been in use for 100+ years with modernisation every 25+ years.
Garnett, one issue i have with that guardian article is that it doesn't seem to specify the time period for the ROI, 2:1 is terrible if it's over the projected life of a railway line (baring in mind we're using railway lines that are in many cases ~50-100+ years old), but if say it's over the first ten to twenty years of it running that's not bad, especially as so much of the money being spent on it is going straight back into the economy with what is going straight back to the government via payroll taxes.
Caporegime
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That's all fine and dandy but why? The north is ripe for investment. 200 billion spent north of the 25 would have been far better than allowing more people to go to London.
As is the south west etc, it isn't all about the north although judging by the way many people drone on about it you'd think everywhere south of the Thames was paved with gold.
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well said. London is already too congested as it is
Caporegime
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The train goes both ways...?
It's not like the HS2 stops at Oxford, it goes to Manchester. Surely it would serve to bring people and wealth from London to the North as much as the other way round?
The aim is to connect the country surely?
It's not like the HS2 stops at Oxford, it goes to Manchester. Surely it would serve to bring people and wealth from London to the North as much as the other way round?
The aim is to connect the country surely?
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