Well people like to complain that we have no high speed rail and why can't we be more like France or Germany or somewhere else that isn't the UK. The media like to report this as the Great British malaise then one day some politicians accidentally took it all seriously and committed to billions of pounds of spending. Shortly afterwards St Barts hospital was overrun with barristers whose palms had burnt from all the rapid rubbing. The general anti state community in the UK (read most of the establishment) proceeded to find every single way to make this seemingly good idea more expensive and painful. The bill finally turned up everyone **** the bedsheets and decided the good idea was a bad idea and the media got a fresh story from yesterdays news to bleet on about. All of the poeple who complained about not having something French or German like then complained about how much it cost. Then the man in charge said maybe I don't want to spend quite that much on a train set and the people got another chance to complain about the thing they wanted then didn't want getting cancelled, because it cost more than they really did or didn't want to pay. Depending on which way the wind is blowinng.
There are many groups of people with differing opinions on aspects or the whole of the project, to infer there is only one opinion that shifts infantilises the individual.
Capacity is what (would) have made HS2 a success, the speed thing is always easy sell to the public but largely mute.
It could also be characterised as additional parallel capacity that is immune to knock on effects from other network users unlike the existing lines.To reduced the commute by a massive 12 minutes compared to the current infrastructure
Actually yes, the top operating speed of 225mph is faster than anything in France or Japan. One could argue we dont need that speed, its caused all sorts of issues with the routing, a slightly lower speed would have delivered many of the benefits at far lower cost.
I believe these are effectively the same speed as the French TGV, HS1 was built to that standard for interoperability. The Japanese SC Maglev is about 100mph faster it uses electro dynamic suspension type maglev which is highly fault tolerant because induced current from movement creates the lift. So in the event power was lost the forward momentum would make it float until the speed has dropped low enough that it drops onto some wheels. Super clever system, but would be expensive per mile because the track has to act as a linear induction motor would also one assumes require quite substantial electrical equipment along it's length to work. But it would be really fast. The same fundamental technology could be updated in the future to vac tubes which increases the speed further.
They are not.
