Recent content by squizzler

Another day, another XC overcrowding thread. What is there left to discuss that has not been covered 100 times before?

As somebody currently living in Jersey I see the appeal. But I think it is wrong headed to use it as an excuse not to sort out the inequality that exists on the island, by bussing in what I'm sure the powers-that-be consider an expendable workforce from the EU. But fortunately that plan is...

You would have to be a "fist of quality" grandmaster like Roger Ford.

It seems to me that Boeing has become like AnsaldoBreda was a decade back, during the period when they forgot how to build trains and had to be brought by Hitachi. Although this time the Japanese may not be able to repeat the trick: Mitsubishi recently shut down their own aviation subsidiary and...

Maybe so, if we decided Russian oil was not so unpalatable as we previously thought.

The horrific situation in the holy lands gets me down, so perhaps it is better to divert the mind thinking of a relatively trivial thing related to our own interest in transportation. If the major oil producers in the middle east were to place an embargo on oil to the West, what would happen in...

You should give WNXX a go. We are a bit more feisty there than the so-called political realists that inhabit this forum. HS2 is inevitable and nessasary in a growing and/or greening economy. As I see it, we are either a nation that will grow and/or green our economy and need an HSR system. Or...

You know full well that nothing is certain till the fat lady sings, but that is the general mood music. Combined with the undeniable logic underpinning a continuous link between Northern Powerhouse Rail and HS2. International investors have been vocal about the need for the UK up its game with...

Oh no I mean that, if I were an executive in HS2, I would be absolutely foot dragging on undoing work on phase 2 that would have to be redone when the programme restarts under the next government. Which yesterdays by-election makes even more probable.

The new infrastructure report is getting some coverage. I think world events demonstrate the need for a proper transport system rather than hoping people bring their own car everywhere. If the Arabs will turn off the taps in the next few days it will look pretty stupid to have curtailed the...

Go back further (I’m talking the days of Adonis as transport guru towards the end of Labour in the noughties) and I remember Wolmar confidently predicting that there will never be high speed rail north of London in the UK. Well we will have soon. And that is something to build from. When Chris...

Presumably the Northern Powerhouse Rail will be built to the same standards as adopted for HS2: structure gauge, platform height and length, ETCS signalling and all the rest. Having two islands of state-of-the-art trunkline makes the an entirely unforced error of a gap between them all the more...

The current commitment to finish HS2 to Birmingham and Northern powerhouse rail creates two islands of modern trunk network: this gap in the high speed geography will be so absurd that its bridging becomes inevitable.

HS2 will keep rolling north, into Birmingham and the East Midlands. Freight operators need to keep plugging it. In a generational project, what does it matter to lose a year?

It is funny that the government have adopted crank rhetoric on “15 minute cities”. I understand that this revolves around a belief the government are trying to restrict mobility to the elites and contain the lower orders to their neighbourhoods. Does anyone else sense some projection going on...