Why are people opposed to HS2? (And other HS2 discussion)

[The Ham]

The original business case was for 18tph, which HS2 now say probably won't run. It is now likely to be 14tph. Read the link I posted- especially Lord Berkeley's letter. Or don't.

Funny how you were criticising me for saying the benefits were "might" and "could", and now you're saying we can't say for certain until everything is finalised. Make your mind up!

No, what I'm saying is that until we know what services those 14tph run we don't know if there's going to be a reduction in the frequency of services to individual stations.

Without knowing that we can't be sure that the drop in services are going to have the impact which is being suggested.

I've already highlighted how Manchester could see a lowering of capacity which is unlikely to have a significant impact on the capacity. However by making that change it could allow another destination to have a service.

Likewise 1tph could run London, Birmingham Curzon Street and then onto Scotland (much as 1 of the 2 services to Scotland goes via New Street). Scotland would still have the ability to have 2tph from London (1 would be longer than the other but still a faster than the current fast service) but you could have that second service use the path of one of the 3 Birmingham services. If you say ticket prices a bit lower on the longer service then you could still carry as many passengers, the ticket income might be down a bit but probably not but much. You'd also save the cost of having to run a whole extra service from Birmingham to head to Scotland.

This would either reduce your costs of running the services. This then benefits your business case.

As such the loss could be fairly small, or at least smaller than would be implied by the loss of those 4 London services. As rather than it being a do from 18 to 14 is actually a drop from 24 services (18 to/from London plus 6 to/from Birmingham) to 20 services which is a 16.6% drop in the number of services. However even that's simplistic as it could be that it allows more Birmingham to elsewhere services to be run. This could have an impact, but it's only the delay of going into and back out again of Curzon Street and not the loss of the whole service.

 

[The Ham]

There is a value attached to speed and frequency. That value is a benefit. If you reduce the speed and reduce the frequency, that value decreases and the value of the benefit decreases. That, in turn, reduces the BCR.

And when your BCR is 1.1, as HS2's now is estimated to be with the massive cost overruns (before construction has even properly started!), small incremental reductions in the benefit can fatally sink the business case. With the numbers we're talking about, even a 1% reduction in the value of the benefit is about a billion quid.

If speed and frequency do not have a value, we may as well save a fortune and build a classic 125mph line.

Are you suggesting that there's a billion pounds of benefit just from passengers to/from Crewe with the fairly small passenger numbers which pass through that station?

 

[KeithP]

If speed and frequency do not have a value, we may as well save a fortune and build a classic 125mph line.

If we are going to build any line at all, wouldn't it be a good idea to future proof it in some way? Maybe by building a line capable of higher speeds and frequencies. The incremental cost would be relatively small.

 

[Bletchleyite]

You could get higher, not lower, frequency on a 125mph line.

Personally I would support reducing it to 186mph as a classic LGV, or even 140. The latter would save a fair whack of money as 80x and Pendolinos would be able to run at 140 on it, avoiding the need for any orders of complex HS stock.

TBH I don't overly care as long as it goes to Euston and we get our "6-tracking" south of Northampton.

 

[GrimShady]

I'm just imagining the conversation that could have taken place in the 1820's ...

Stephenson: I've got this great idea. I want to build a railway from Liverpool to Manchester. Just like the Stockton and Darlington one. But this time I want to build it linking two cities and for passengers. We can run some of those new steam engines on it to transport people faster than ever!
Financial backers: No, don't bother. It's only going to benefit two cities. It won't benefit London, or Leeds or Sheffield or Birmingham or Glasgow. Unless you can come up with a plan that benefits all those cities at the same time, it just won't be worth building anything!

Error in logic: 1820 it was an emerging technology and much more difficult and labour intensive to construct. Also your forgetting railway mania where everyone wanted a piece with a few short years of Stockton & Darlington. How long did a national network take 80 years? Many of it chopped away in the 60s as unnecessary due to no overall control or plan when built. Then there's the gauge question. Lots of intricacies not known or ironed out yet.

2019 proven technology capable of delivering a national network built easily by powered machinery as many other countries have shown us. No HS mania this time! We could have a national network in 20 years if we out our minds to it. Sadly.....no.

 

[GrimShady]

The same could be said about the motorway network, Preston bypass 1958 and the A1 upgrade is still happening as well as motorways that were never built. Why would you expect a complete network in one go?

Yes entirely true and look at the mess of the road network with overall thought out into any of it.

That's the problem over here, road and rail being forced to complete with each other instead of compliment.

 

[GrimShady]

How would you define a major city? Does Plymouth count? In which case what about Belfast which has a larger population?

If we are incluthen1 Preston, should there be a route to Reading and if so which other cities should link to it?

Are we going to look at existing passenger usage?

Even if we manage to decide all that which cities should get their new railway line first? Surely the largest two cities should be those which are linked first, should they not?

How long will it take from the first services being started to when the last pieces being opened? If it's going to decades then how do we know that future HS lines won't get built in the same timeframe providing much if not all of the same benefits?

Finally, given that price is something which HS2 gets hit over the head with, then any mega scheme is likely to scare people off, is it not?

Whilst I agree that there's probably a case for creating more of a strategy for what future rail schemes we're likely to need/should consider looking at, in not sure that it being a single mega project is the best way to go about this.

Ham I would have thought the way forward here is to to come up something like a national trunk route that runs the length of the nation, south to north (as far as possible) with provision of future support for multiple tracks, let's say for example sex till you get to the Midlands, quad from there funneling down into dual by the time your in Scotland. The lines don't have to run directly into the city centre, simply join the existing network. Glasgow and Edinburgh can share the same trunk route.

It's clear from the start that HS rail to the central belt is desirable as is the English northern cities. There's always going to be a demand there so let's have one team working south, one working north and connect outside Leeds for example. From here you can then add cities/areas that are desirable. Glasgow/Edinburgh/Newcastle/Liverpool are a given. If it turns out the need is there for Inverness/Aberdeen they can be tagged on to the top of the network confident of capacity available at the southern end of the network.

The West Country and Wales will of course need their own spur. Similar rules apply.

One of the reasons this project is required Is due to the lack of foresight when planning (understandable) sections of WCML in the first place. The whole line is made up of little different bits all patched together to provide something it was never intended for.

Also I don't think the funding issue or squabbling would be there if it was clear the majority of the country would have access to the HS trunk route. The view up north is it's yet another Southern project that half the country won't see. You could change that instantly by renaming it, HS Stage 1 or whatever takes your fancy empathising that's this is part of a wider scheme.

While all the lawyer's, councillors, panelists and politicians are getting their money's worth out of the project down south our lot could be getting on with doing the same thing here.

A 20 year span to complete the majority of the route should easily be achievable. I'm all for HS rail as long as we all get decent use out of it. The environmental reason alone is worth it while. We can get on with using the Victorian network for freight once again.

Cost suddenly becomes less of an issue as it's shared (which is the current case) BUT everyone gets something from it. Do it now before costs spirals out of control in the future which means those at end of the line will end up with sod all or cancelled.

You don't build a bridge from one end, you meet in the middle. We also don't build ships from the keel up anymore, we do it sections and fit them together. The result is a project that takes half the time. How is this achieved....overall planning.

 

[GrimShady]

That's not the same as HS2 going to Stirling with a spur to Devon, which is what your post suggested.
So you build HS2, then you can build HS3 (which could go to Stirling), then HS4 (which could go to Penzance), then HS5 (which could go to Norwich).

Apologies but I would have thought a fellow enthusiast would have been able to visualise something like that without specific details for each city but yes of sorts.

 

[Aictos]

Ah of course, he's a HS2 critic so he must be wrong



The costs have been underestimated by HS2- a projected £35bn cost is looking more like £85-90bn at 2015 prices- and the benefits have been overstated. Each revision lowers the benefits and increases the costs.

But even using HS2's own figures the benefits are £92bn at 2015 prices. Which is great when you're spending £35bn, but not so great when you actually spend £92bn.

If costs go up any more- and let's face it, they will, even the NAO have said so- then it's going to have a BCR of less than 1. And as we know, a BCR of less than 1 means we'd have been better off scrapping it.

It seems HS2 is more about faith than facts.

Keep drinking the Kool-Aid.

Seriously? Kool aid now, can you just stop with the childish insults?

I never said he was wrong because he’s a critic, I did say that as a critic he’s hardly going to be praising the project so can you stop posting such rubbish as you make yourself look silly,

And yes while I do support HS2, it’s not because I drink kool aid nor am a fanboy but it’s because I understand that it’s needed to increase capacity on our railways and make them fit for the 21st century and not leave them as they are.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Ham I would have thought the way forward here is to to come up something like a national trunk route that runs the length of the nation, south to north (as far as possible) with provision of future support for multiple tracks, let's say for example sex till you get to the Midlands, quad from there funneling down into dual by the time your in Scotland. The lines don't have to run directly into the city centre, simply join the existing network. Glasgow and Edinburgh can share the same trunk route.

I quite like the sound of that journey. I'm not sure I'd want to stop at the Midlands though

 

[The Ham]

Ham I would have thought the way forward here is to to come up something like a national trunk route that runs the length of the nation, south to north (as far as possible) with provision of future support for multiple tracks, let's say for example sex till you get to the Midlands, quad from there funneling down into dual by the time your in Scotland. The lines don't have to run directly into the city centre, simply join the existing network. Glasgow and Edinburgh can share the same trunk route.

It's clear from the start that HS rail to the central belt is desirable as is the English northern cities. There's always going to be a demand there so let's have one team working south, one working north and connect outside Leeds for example. From here you can then add cities/areas that are desirable. Glasgow/Edinburgh/Newcastle/Liverpool are a given. If it turns out the need is there for Inverness/Aberdeen they can be tagged on to the top of the network confident of capacity available at the southern end of the network.

The West Country and Wales will of course need their own spur. Similar rules apply.

One of the reasons this project is required Is due to the lack of foresight when planning (understandable) sections of WCML in the first place. The whole line is made up of little different bits all patched together to provide something it was never intended for.

Also I don't think the funding issue or squabbling would be there if it was clear the majority of the country would have access to the HS trunk route. The view up north is it's yet another Southern project that half the country won't see. You could change that instantly by renaming it, HS Stage 1 or whatever takes your fancy empathising that's this is part of a wider scheme.

While all the lawyer's, councillors, panelists and politicians are getting their money's worth out of the project down south our lot could be getting on with doing the same thing here.

A 20 year span to complete the majority of the route should easily be achievable. I'm all for HS rail as long as we all get decent use out of it. The environmental reason alone is worth it while. We can get on with using the Victorian network for freight once again.

Cost suddenly becomes less of an issue as it's shared (which is the current case) BUT everyone gets something from it. Do it now before costs spirals out of control in the future which means those at end of the line will end up with sod all or cancelled.

You don't build a bridge from one end, you meet in the middle. We also don't build ships from the keel up anymore, we do it sections and fit them together. The result is a project that takes half the time. How is this achieved....overall planning.

A point of order, not all bridges are built from both ends, in fact there's quite a few which are single span and are just lifted into place. Whilst Bailey Bridges are only ever built from one end.

Whilst I agree that a joined up strategy is needed, I'm not sure that it would make the arguments about HS2 go away.

Let's take for instance the building of a HS line through to Scotland. Under the 24tph (18 starting from London and 6 starting from Birmingham) proposal it was suggested that there would be a total of 3tph heading to Scotland.

If that's all, is it really worth the extra cost or could we provide some upgrades to provide the extra capacity needed for the time being and leave that to do later and look at doing (say) NPR or alternatively the HS2 line to Manchester?

I'm not suggesting that it's not something which needs doing, but rather is it something which needs doing from the start?

In fact would it not be better as part of HS East which creates a new HS line from London to Scotland via, or with spurs to, Cambridge, Leeds, York Newcastle?

Now that would make sense to start in both the North and in the South (although even then I'm not sure that at each end would be the best start points) as when each section was ready to start taking services it could reduce journey times for trains already running on the network. As an example build a section from York to Newcastle and it could be used by the HS2 services to improve the Newcastle journey times, whilst at the same time build the line from London to serve Cambridge and you could at broadly the same time start to serve that Southern end.

Although there's the problem that if you try and bring too many small sections into use you end up with doing a lot of extra work by building junctions which aren't needed in the future. Which is one of the reasons for suggesting that they build through to Crewe in one go once the line to Birmingham is built.

Then there's the question of which regions are the most passengers:
View media item 3603
Just based on the above table which regions should see new HS lines first? Should it be the likes of the NE and Scotland?

Alternatively should it be the North West (double the numbers of passengers than both the NE and Scotland combined) and Yorkshire and Humber (50% more passengers than both the NE and Scotland combined)?

In fact it could be suggested that the South West is more deserving on a new HS line than Scotland and the North East. Especially given that a line from London to Bristol would be about half the distance as a line from York to Edinburgh.

In fact for the 210 miles of new HS track you'd need to get from York to Edinburgh could build a new HS line to Salisbury where it splits to serve Bristol and a second line to Taunton. Add in the distance between Glasgow and Edinburgh (a further 47 miles) and you could get to Cardiff. The only problem then it's rather than serving a market of 20 million passengers (Scotland and the NE) you're now serving a market of 35 million passengers (SW and Wales).

Now whilst it's true that Cardiff isn't the whole of Wales, this is also true of Edinburgh and Glasgow at they are not the whole of Scotland.

By serving Salisbury, Salisbury then acts as a hub for travel to the South Coast and other local areas.

Whilst it is also true that the cost of building a line out from London would also be more costly than through the less well populated NE, you could reduce some of those costs by using Old Oak Common as your London stop, but with the ability to use HS2 services to get to Euston (something which wouldn't be possible if HS2 didn't serve Euston).

In fact you could then have that HS line running through OOC and on towards a stop on the HS East line (with a change to a different Central London station) before joining up with HS1 to run on to Ashford.

By doing so it would bring a lot of places to within one change of a Eurostar service and allow a lot of people to travel between a lot of regions without having to go into a central London station.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Error in logic: 1820 it was an emerging technology and much more difficult and labour intensive to construct. Also your forgetting railway mania where everyone wanted a piece with a few short years of Stockton & Darlington. How long did a national network take 80 years? Many of it chopped away in the 60s as unnecessary due to no overall control or plan when built. Then there's the gauge question. Lots of intricacies not known or ironed out yet.

2019 proven technology capable of delivering a national network built easily by powered machinery as many other countries have shown us. No HS mania this time! We could have a national network in 20 years if we out our minds to it. Sadly.....no.

No, I would say the analogy still holds. The point is that it's not reasonable to expect the Government to commit upfront to the many hundreds of billions of £ required to build a national high speed network without first seeing how the concept pans out on a more limited scale - just as, back in the 1800's it would not have been reasonable to expect to construct an entire railway network without first seeing in practice how railways work out on a smaller scale. Sure, railways were a lot more revolutionary in concept in the 1830s than high speed rail is today, but that's a difference of degree rather than principle.

Build HS2 as planned, see how it pans out. And if it's even half the success in terms of drawing in passengers that most business models seem to be predicting, you can pretty much guarantee that within a few years of its opening, intense political pressure will be building up to extend it to places like Bristol and Newcastle and Edinburgh - and as a result, before too long, we'll have a national network. But if you take the line that, we shouldn't build it at all unless we are committed to a national network upfront, then you can virtually guarantee that nothing will ever get built.

You seem to be advocating that we take an approach to railway building that - in my own field, software development - is known as the waterfall model: In other words, plan out upfront exactly what your amazing completed app is going to look like in several year's time and then build it. That model has fallen out of favour in software because it sounds great but rarely works in practice, partly because it requires you to do too much planning when you don't have the benefit of any experience of seeing how your ideas work out in practice, and partly because when you plan too much upfront, you can't take account of changing technologies or changing user requirements. I'd argue that planning out upfront what your amazing completed high speed network is going to look like in 30-40 years' time in the way you seem to be advocating would almost certainly fail for exactly analogous reasons - even if you could persuade a Government to commit upfront to the extraordinary amount of money that building it would require.

 

[Ianno87]

Error in logic: 1820 it was an emerging technology and much more difficult and labour intensive to construct. Also your forgetting railway mania where everyone wanted a piece with a few short years of Stockton & Darlington. How long did a national network take 80 years? Many of it chopped away in the 60s as unnecessary due to no overall control or plan when built. Then there's the gauge question. Lots of intricacies not known or ironed out yet.

2019 proven technology capable of delivering a national network built easily by powered machinery as many other countries have shown us. No HS mania this time! We could have a national network in 20 years if we out our minds to it. Sadly.....no.

Which countries (plural) would those be, then?

 

[class26]

You are really struggling with your HS2 PR-waffle.

Already reduced in speed because there was no way to get HS2 out of Euston at the original planned "High speed", Liverpool is fobbed off with conventional lines and at an even slower speed!

HS2 has gone from being genuinely high speed to not quite but still, and if you're in Liverpool, you've not even got high speed at all. Just a sad annex to high speed. A gesture.

Bald Rick, you are good at spinning it but admit defeat here. Liverpool does not get HS2. It gets an apology of a service, at a lower speed, at on conventional, non-HS lines.

Joining the argument, I fail to see how you can state "not even got high speed AT ALL" when 80% of the journey will be on the high speed line. This is simply playing with words that most politicians in the present election campaign would blush !!!

 

[Gareth]

Presumably, you're using mileage for your 80% figure. Journey time-wise, Liverpool trains are slated to spend a bit under an hour on HS2 and a bit over half an hour on conventional lines which gets us to less than two thirds.

And it's the speed that matters for Liverpool. The city isn't going to get the added capacity that dedicated infrastructure into the centre is going to give the regional capitals

Liverpool-London will be a bit over half an hour quicker than at present. No bad thing in itself. But when you look at relative speed with other key centres in the North, it looks less of a good deal. Journey time-wise, Liverpool will be notably further from London than either Manchester or Preston, compared to ballpark parity today (half an hour difference in Manchester's case). It'll also be further away than Leeds, rather than closer, as it is today. How significant this may affect the city's economy and ability to compete is debatable and hard to quantify but it can't be spun as a positive.

Also, all service assumptions I've seen over the years suggest no Liverpool-Birmingham services via HS2. Manchester ends up an hour closer to Birmingham and Leeds a good 40 minutes or so. These are bonkers figures, considering the distances involved and the geography of these cities in relation to one another.

 

[Senex]

Also, all service assumptions I've seen over the years suggest no Liverpool-Birmingham services via HS2. Manchester ends up an hour closer to Birmingham and Leeds a good 40 minutes or so. These are bonkers figures, considering the distances involved and the geography of these cities in relation to one another.

But the basic design of HS2 is as a "London and ....." railway, with links between provincial cities as some thought of cobbled afterthought. Thus Manchester to Birmingham will be a curious Z-shaped route involving two branches from the main line which unashamedly goes from London to a junction with the WCML near Wigan point straight towards Glasgow—just like the present WCML with all the principal intermediate points on branches (and the eastern branch doesn't head for Leeds but goes to Church Fenton, with Leeds as a great city on the end of another branch). (And the Manchester branch, with a maximum speed of only 230 km/h, will scarcely be a genuine high-speed line.)

 

[Gareth]

Ah, that's reassuring.

 

[GrimShady]

A point of order, not all bridges are built from both ends, in fact there's quite a few which are single span and are just lifted into place. Whilst Bailey Bridges are only ever built from one end.

Whilst I agree that a joined up strategy is needed, I'm not sure that it would make the arguments about HS2 go away.

Let's take for instance the building of a HS line through to Scotland. Under the 24tph (18 starting from London and 6 starting from Birmingham) proposal it was suggested that there would be a total of 3tph heading to Scotland.

If that's all, is it really worth the extra cost or could we provide some upgrades to provide the extra capacity needed for the time being and leave that to do later and look at doing (say) NPR or alternatively the HS2 line to Manchester?

I'm not suggesting that it's not something which needs doing, but rather is it something which needs doing from the start?

In fact would it not be better as part of HS East which creates a new HS line from London to Scotland via, or with spurs to, Cambridge, Leeds, York Newcastle?

Now that would make sense to start in both the North and in the South (although even then I'm not sure that at each end would be the best start points) as when each section was ready to start taking services it could reduce journey times for trains already running on the network. As an example build a section from York to Newcastle and it could be used by the HS2 services to improve the Newcastle journey times, whilst at the same time build the line from London to serve Cambridge and you could at broadly the same time start to serve that Southern end.

Although there's the problem that if you try and bring too many small sections into use you end up with doing a lot of extra work by building junctions which aren't needed in the future. Which is one of the reasons for suggesting that they build through to Crewe in one go once the line to Birmingham is built.

Then there's the question of which regions are the most passengers:
View media item 3603
Just based on the above table which regions should see new HS lines first? Should it be the likes of the NE and Scotland?

Alternatively should it be the North West (double the numbers of passengers than both the NE and Scotland combined) and Yorkshire and Humber (50% more passengers than both the NE and Scotland combined)?

In fact it could be suggested that the South West is more deserving on a new HS line than Scotland and the North East. Especially given that a line from London to Bristol would be about half the distance as a line from York to Edinburgh.

In fact for the 210 miles of new HS track you'd need to get from York to Edinburgh could build a new HS line to Salisbury where it splits to serve Bristol and a second line to Taunton. Add in the distance between Glasgow and Edinburgh (a further 47 miles) and you could get to Cardiff. The only problem then it's rather than serving a market of 20 million passengers (Scotland and the NE) you're now serving a market of 35 million passengers (SW and Wales).

Now whilst it's true that Cardiff isn't the whole of Wales, this is also true of Edinburgh and Glasgow at they are not the whole of Scotland.

By serving Salisbury, Salisbury then acts as a hub for travel to the South Coast and other local areas.

Whilst it is also true that the cost of building a line out from London would also be more costly than through the less well populated NE, you could reduce some of those costs by using Old Oak Common as your London stop, but with the ability to use HS2 services to get to Euston (something which wouldn't be possible if HS2 didn't serve Euston).

In fact you could then have that HS line running through OOC and on towards a stop on the HS East line (with a change to a different Central London station) before joining up with HS1 to run on to Ashford.

By doing so it would bring a lot of places to within one change of a Eurostar service and allow a lot of people to travel between a lot of regions without having to go into a central London station.

Quite correct I should have made mention of large bridge projects which is fitting with the current discussion.

I would argue that winning traffic back from the airlines is of vital importance to any HS endeavour, the central belt that is which probably has more to gain from the scheme that Birmingham.

Build them all concurrently or at the least slightly staggered, all valid points you have just made. The title of the thread was why are people opposed to HS2 because the view is that it only a one section of the country will benefit. Trying convincing the SNP anti english mob up here that it's nothing other than and English project soley for England. The only way round this is to show the nation comparative levels of investment in their infrastructure. Also as I mentioned before, we all know the outcome of this, the cost is going to spiral out of control which will then reduce of the scale of the original project meaning that in the future they'll be nothing for anyone else after "The HS2 fiasco".

 

[GrimShady]

No, I would say the analogy still holds. The point is that it's not reasonable to expect the Government to commit upfront to the many hundreds of billions of £ required to build a national high speed network without first seeing how the concept pans out on a more limited scale - just as, back in the 1800's it would not have been reasonable to expect to construct an entire railway network without first seeing in practice how railways work out on a smaller scale. Sure, railways were a lot more revolutionary in concept in the 1830s than high speed rail is today, but that's a difference of degree rather than principle.

Build HS2 as planned, see how it pans out. And if it's even half the success in terms of drawing in passengers that most business models seem to be predicting, you can pretty much guarantee that within a few years of its opening, intense political pressure will be building up to extend it to places like Bristol and Newcastle and Edinburgh - and as a result, before too long, we'll have a national network. But if you take the line that, we shouldn't build it at all unless we are committed to a national network upfront, then you can virtually guarantee that nothing will ever get built.

You seem to be advocating that we take an approach to railway building that - in my own field, software development - is known as the waterfall model: In other words, plan out upfront exactly what your amazing completed app is going to look like in several year's time and then build it. That model has fallen out of favour in software because it sounds great but rarely works in practice, partly because it requires you to do too much planning when you don't have the benefit of any experience of seeing how your ideas work out in practice, and partly because when you plan too much upfront, you can't take account of changing technologies or changing user requirements. I'd argue that planning out upfront what your amazing completed high speed network is going to look like in 30-40 years' time in the way you seem to be advocating would almost certainly fail for exactly analogous reasons - even if you could persuade a Government to commit upfront to the extraordinary amount of money that building it would require.

There's really not a lot of difference here between building a line of 125mph and 186mph, we're building a railway, we know how it works they've been around 200 years. I understand exactly when your coming from i.e. software. Each software package is an entity in its own right, the IT world changes so quickly it's impossible to build software in this fashion unless it's modular, even then it'd ancient history 2 years down the line. HS Rail does not suffer from this huge leap in technology every year, it's a fairly constant technology that slowly refines maybe every ten years. The Maritime world is the same.

How can you expect the rest of the country to cough up billions for something they'll never see?

 

[GrimShady]

Which countries (plural) would those be, then?

Oh the usual pathfinders France, Germany, Japan even Spain's been at it.

It took us over ten years just to build HS1, shocking!

 

[Clip]

How can you expect the rest of the country to cough up billions for something they'll never see?

They already do for other projects around the country including roads and hospitals so its a bit of a straw man argument

 

[Ianno87]

Oh the usual pathfinders France, Germany, Japan even Spain's been at it.

It took us over ten years just to build HS1, shocking!

Absoultely none of them have built entirely country-wide high speed networks in the space of 20 years.

Japan started in the 60s, France in the late 70s/early 80s, Germany's high speed network is very piecemeal, and Spain's is hardly comprehensive.

 

[GrimShady]

Absoultely none of them have built entirely country-wide high speed networks in the space of 20 years.

Japan started in the 60s, France in the late 70s/early 80s, Germany's high speed network is very piecemeal, and Spain's is hardly comprehensive.

Is there any reason we can't based on the wide experience these nations have?

 

[Ianno87]

How can you expect the rest of the country to cough up billions for something they'll never see?

Because it is a benefit to the overall productivity of the country as a whole. Businesses that develop on the line of the HS2 route will buy from business not located on HS2, etc. etc.

 

[Ianno87]

Is there any reason we can't based on the wide experience these nations have?

It's exactly what's happening right now with HS2.

 

[GrimShady]

Because it is a benefit to the overall productivity of the country as a whole. Businesses that develop on the line of the HS2 route will buy from business not located on HS2, etc. etc.

Good luck convincing them of that hence the reason this thread was started.

Edit: The Beijing–Guangzhou HS line was built over a 15 year period and is around the distance we would need in the UK for a grand scheme. The Chinese don't seem to have any issue with pressing ahead while we dither year after year, consultation after consultation.

 

[Geezertronic]

Good luck convincing them of that hence the reason this thread was started.

Edit: The Beijing–Guangzhou HS line was built over a 15 year period and is around the distance we would need in the UK for a grand scheme. The Chinese don't seem to have any issue with pressing ahead while we dither year after year, consultation after consultation.

Do the Chinese care for NIMBYs or do they just press ahead regardless?

 

[Ianno87]

Also, this happened in China (killing 40 people), attributed in part to design defects:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenzhou_train_collision


Suggest the Chinese approach to building may not be the most prudent to follow...

On 23 July 2011, two high-speed trainstravelling on the Yongtaiwen railway linecollided on a viaduct in the suburbs of Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, People's Republic of China. The two trains derailedeach other, and four cars fell off the viaduct.[3]40 people were killed,[2] at least 192 were injured, 12 of which were severe injuries.[4]This serious traffic disaster was caused by both the critical defects of design and the rough management of the bullet train company.[5]

 

[GrimShady]

Also, this happened in China (killing 40 people), attributed in part to design defects:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenzhou_train_collision


Suggest the Chinese approach to building may not be the most prudent to follow...

Vs Railtrack, privatisation and gauge corner cracking that caused how many deaths and endless strife?

Any idea how many men lost their lives in the construction of the British network since day one, not including signalling and driver error?

The idea is to learn from their mistakes.

 

[Ianno87]

Vs Railtrack, privatisation and gauge corner cracking that caused how many deaths and endless strife?

Any idea how many men lost their lives in the construction of the British network since day one, not including signalling and driver error?

The idea is to learn from their mistakes.

By 2011, the Chinese had plenty of mistakes globally to have learned from (30 +years of high speed line operation in othee countries)....and didn't. Let's learn what *not* to do from them.

Which means taking time to plan and build things out properly, not some sort of crazed railway mania.

It's not realy acceptable to accept killing people as a form of experimentation in the name of progress.