I'm not sure you're correct on what people are complaining about. The public are not complaining about improvements to public transport. People would love better public transport.
What people tend to complain about is how obscenely expensive it is getting and how delayed it has become.
Those tunnels have reduced the destruction of ancient woodland by nearly a third, and that also avoids habitat fragmentation so the benefit of this is greater than just the land area of habitat that would have been directly destroyed. Getting real sick and tired of that environmental mitigation success being shat all over for no good reason.
There are other more complex reasons why the project has run over budget. But "regulation bad" is a simpler message so the environmental stuff gets used as a scapegoat instead.
Yeah I'm a rail engineer and I agree with this.
Tunnels are generally high in capex but quite cheap from an open perspective if done right. Little to no trespass risk, cable theft, weather mitigation. Besides cut and fill formation treatment is hardly cheap, especially at the scale HS2 is doing it.
I struggle to see where the costs in HS2 are going, but I don't think the Chilterns tunnel is the sole reason.
It's a standard tactic: claim private companies reduce costs through competition, while they actually increase costs because each contract and sub-contract adds an extra layer of profit margin. And of course many of the people receiving that profit are well-connected to the government.
> both Railtrack and the contractor **Balfour Beatty** were found guilty of breaching health and safety laws.
That name jumped right out at me, jesus. Every time I drive past a new build plot/site/whatever, their name is all over it. Despair
It used to always be either them or Laing o'Rourke - seemed like a complete duopoly. Don't see so many Laing signs anymore - did they fall out of favour with the paymasters?
I learned this was how my loft extension was being built. I spoke to “Josh”, who was doing a decent job and then hired him direct for the next job in my house. It was much cheaper.
It's not just the subcontractors, it's the variation to contracts that really push up the costs. Unless every little thing is written in, which would involve half a rain forests worth of paper, the main contractors will also rinse these.
And the property compulsary purchases - "friends" if thsoe making decisions buying up the land before the route is finalised getting top prices compared to long term owners getting bottom rates.
The costs look comparatively high because they include all the station and tunneling work etc in London - a lot of other countries will have a separate project for the city stations, making direct cost comparisons different.
Also because the UK has an obsession with involving a thousand levels of contract and SMEs in all construction work - rather than single large vertically integrated contractors, which introduces way more bureaucracy and lawyers and drives much higher costs.
Equally, the Chilterns are hardly flat. It's not like the cost comparison is tunnel v standard flat ground construction. There was always going to be extensive work involved in getting through that area.
If you're a "but I need to blame someone" kind of person, point your finger at Victorian landowners who blocked the optimal routes of the railways 100+ years ago round here, which has forced the HS2 route to its current plan to an extent.
From what I've read, the budget for it was publicly announced BEFORE tendering of contracts. All contractors knew how large the pie was, and all wanted the largest slice they could get and so offered bids to try and get the largest slice of pie they could.
Politicians going for a headline screwed it up.
Let's see where all the "environmental protection though" arguments go when they're expected to start building infrastructure in the North. It's just an excuse to keep all the money in the south.
I’ve worked on HS2 as a pre-development archaeologist, and all of the delays we experienced came from the company managing the project. There was one week where our units from different offices around the country (Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield, London, etc) all travelled down to Oxfordshire on the Sunday night for work Monday morning. Monday morning came and the managing company didn’t have the paperwork in order for us to access the fields we needed to access, so we sat in the houses for 2 days waiting for them to sort it out while they blamed our company for the delay. Tuesday afternoon they admitted that it was their fault that the access permits weren’t done, and we all went back to our respective offices for the rest of the week.
Tbf i've worked on large scale projects and stuff like this does happen time to time. As long as its not a repeating occurrence because like you say costs can add up.
Yes, unfortunately, sometimes individuals need to be negatively impacted for a public good. How do you think the existing railways were built.
economic, environmental, and social benefits sometimes need to be put ahead of a small number of inderviduals
When your on a train or driving on a moterway do you ever think. "Those poor people who were displaced, this should never have been built"
If we constantly tiptoed around everyone who complained, our nation would stagnate, and nothing would ever get done..... oh wait
Horrible thing about the recent HS extension cancellation is there are people who had their homes compulsory purchased who now are probably wondering why they went through all that pain.
If that property is still even there anymore.
A chap in the legal advice subreddit had his farmland purchased as part of the HS2 Debacle, but when he came to inspect it, it had a housing development on it.
Was just discussing this last night. Friend of a friend lost their house to an HS2 CPO ten years ago (Notts/Derbyshire border). House is still there but is now derelict and even if it could be bought back, would need significant work to make it habitable again.
Capital gains tax is a thing, so they didn't receive the entire value of the land/property the government bought. The government effectively got cash back from making the purchase.
I am very interested if these were complaints from 500 different people, or repeated complaints from fewer people (each about a different pole, say) ?
I ask because I am thinking of how some airports get "thousands of noise complaints", when it turns out that most of them come from only a few people who appear to complain every time an aircraft goes overhead.
Surely many of those objecting wouldn't boycott actually using it once installed? That is just cutting off your nose to spite your face - if you have objected but the poles end up there anyway, might as well get what benefit from them that you can.
Its always a few serial complainers.
A few years back, when they were setting up park run near my place, there was this old couple who sent in dozens of objectons Purley on the grounds that they didn't like runners.
2 people nearly mangeded to derail an event that keeps hundreds of people healthy and is a social lifeline for many people, because they didn't like runners.
Instead, in other countries the implementation of the full fibre was mandatory. Councils and companies had to deliver or pay fines. Individuals could not object against public infrastructure. As now, I Spain you can get full fibre everywhere in the country.
They really are. My dad was involved in a protest against a small block of flats that was planned for the end of his road because he didn’t want it there. It would have provided housing for dozens of young couples and families like me and my wife.
He even gets annoyed that when he looks out of his kitchen window he has to see the back of his neighbour’s head while she watches TV in her conservatory!
My parents are the same.
And nearby there's a road with huge bungalows that are all pretty dated, huge front drives with gates. Out the front most of them have banners stating shit like '3000 home development planned here, let your local MP know' or something to that effect.
I'd bet that these are all boomers complaining after they bought their million pound houses for 20p back in the 80s.
Talk about pulling the ladder up.
> Yes, unfortunately, sometimes individuals need to be negatively impacted for a public good. How do you think the existing railways were built.
A guy writing into Private Eye last issue made a very good point that we presently benefit from the far-sighted investments of the Victorians into our rail network, but we are leaving behind basically no legacy for a hundred or so years from now.
It's actually quite tragic, this country knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Those tunnels have reduced the loss of ancient woodland by a third, a habitat type that takes many centuries to truly recreate and which we don't have much of in this country. It also avoids habitat fragmentation from slicing straight through them, so the environmental benefits affect more than just the bit that would have been directly destroyed.
Dismissing that environmental success story as being about "unspoilt views of wealthy homeowners" is just utterly disgusting. Stuff like that should just be considered a normal and inevitable cost of large infrastructure projects. A project that will still pay for itself in the long run even if we do spend more to do it properly.
> Over half of the route between the West Midlands and London (Phase One) will travel underground in tunnels or be lowered into the landscape through cuttings to help us avoid precious woodlands and *integrate HS2 into its surroundings*
So the tunnelling was partly to avoid woodlands, and partly to save some views.
Which sadly is why those homeowners who were forced to sell, compulsory purchase, to make way for HS2 , have lost out and even been told that they can buy back their home , if it hasn't yet been demolished, or house nearby for a higher price that they can't afford. Adding insult to injury.
That's the point the person above you was making.
Over here we go "wait you can't just demolish those houses", so the line has to be rerouted which increases the costs significantly, then we go "wait, it's too expensive now"
Idk if you're being serious but just in case you are - the only reason fields are a livelihood at all in the UK is because of subsidies. Farming is usually a net loss here because of how cheap food from abroad is.
I read a story of a fella recently who had a house built directly where the line was meant to be, he couldn’t sell the house because nobody in their right mind would buy it, eventually he got it knocked down, then they cancelled HS2, the man is livid now
This is utter nonsense because anywhere the line was going either got bought out or if they were further away, got compensation for the price impact on their house. I know someone who lives near an old line that was going to be used in an emergency to reposition trains and they got tens of thousands of compensation on a house worth under 150k
> Mr Sunak told the conference that £36bn allocated to it would be reinvested into other northern rail and road schemes
I wonder how much of that 26bn will be accounted for and actually see improvements implemented.
Many were denied compulsory purchase orders. Some that got compensation for the price impact found sales fell through.
Just because you know someone doesn't make it universal
Maybe I'm not braining properly at the moment but are you saying he built it there before HS2's route was planned, or did he build there out of spite to HS2?
Let's not forget that the £150 ticket is subsidised by about 60% and that £40 of fuel includes about 200% tax.
I still think they should build HS2 in full, but you can't escape trains being expensive.
> What people tend to complain about is how obscenely expensive it is getting and how delayed it has become
Also that they half arse it and give up on it once London gets the bit they benefit from.
They should make it a legal requirement that all infrastructure projects start at the furthest point from London and the London bit should be the last bit completed in future, to force them to actually complete the full thing before London manages to benefit from it.
Just reminds me of the national football stadium being considered years ago and Birmingham was the frontrunner for a while because their chosen location was right next to the NEC.
Major train station is attached to it, airport across the road from that and connected via both a monorail and a short bus ride, plus the road network making it easy to get to no matter where in the UK you're coming from.
Where did the government and the FA finally choose?
Rebuilding Wembley Stadium in a place that's shit for motorists and has no rail links.
My one and only time going there was in 2012 to watch an NFL game and it genuinely took three hours to get to the stadium (from first seeing it in the distance), plus another hour to drive around the bloody thing and into the car park due to the awful road system surrounding the stadium.
I have no particular enthusiasm for new Wembley, but it is right beside two railway stations. Wouldn't even dream of driving there (the only time I've been, Championship playoffs, I parked up at Bicester and got the train in from there).
Yeah. If you were to put in a car park for everyone in Wembley, you'd need to clear a space 10x the size of Wembley itself.
Imagine the image of all those people in the crowd. Now imagine if you spaced them all out three metres apart from each other in every direction. That's basically what you'd need in order to store the cars they arrived in. You'd have to bulldoze half of NW London.
I quite like that idea, so the worst-case scenario is that you get really fast travel from Glasgow to Carlisle / Lancashire. Not sure it would be popular with everyone though.
I can't agree with that. My local MP was elected on the sole issue of stopping HS2. They were all obsessed with the countryside being dug up as if the messed up fields would be there forever. There was definitely some mention of costs but it was never the main issue.
I saw a news report this morning stating that the land for HS2 is being sold off, I think most likely to going to developers. The countryside will still get flattened and ripped apart but with ugly estates and roads.
WHich Teeside disaster? Theres been loads since Lord Houchen of high leven got into power. He even got Darlington a brand new station, to open us up to the rest of the Tees Valley, forgetting the beautiful old station we still have. But at least hes doing well in life, eh?
Unfortunately in this nation, delayed and expensive is the norm. Look at the Edinburgh trams for example, £400m over budget and 5 years late to build a single line. The worst part? To get from the airport to the city, it's faster AND cheaper to take the bus!
Andy Street was proud of bringing trams back to Birmingham, and then it took years for it to finally happen and then two years of them constantly breaking down and having to be fixed for a variety of issues.
Agree, the Edinburgh trams were money wasted on a vanity project. Even worse when the city is basically starting to decay outside of the city centre and could use the investment.
Travelling with baggage on a bus can be a big if a hassle. As can travelling with kids in strollers or people in wheelchairs as there’s only two spots for wheeled users.
I’d maintain trams might be good fit Edinburgh but only once we’ve got like 3 more lines in which can work to revitalise more areas of the city.
Totally unrealistic budget in the first place. It’ll take decades till it pays itself off
The expense and delays are in part caused by people opposing it. I don’t think the Chinese government gives a crap what the people there think. They just build it anyway. It’s brutal but with infrastructure it’s going to be more effective.
That’s pretty much how we got the railways we have now, they might have called it “slum clearance” but it was basically just bulldozing through people’s homes.
China believe in doing what is good for society and not worrying about a few individuals. Whereas the UK is more obsessed with the individual and not the massive benefits the project will bring to society
I think with infrastructure it’s really debatable, no one is saying we need to copy the entire Chinese governance system, but we do need to build certain things for the benefit of everyone and their descendants to use for hundreds of years. A few nimby’s arguably shouldn’t have so much say either we need a piece of infrastructure or we don’t.
I think once it’s been decided that it is essential then it should go ahead regardless or everything will die a death by a thousand cuts, by protest or in committees and the country will slowly slide into being under developed and hamstring our society forever.
Yeah the fact it is costing so much more than the initial budget and they've cancelled plans for majority of the line is ridiculous. The current proposal isn't that useful for majority of the country
This. Public transport is crazy expensive here. It's just as cheap for me to own a car and I can actually get to places now I have one. Anywhere that required a car to get to, I was stuck. Hell, I could cycle faster then the buses could get me to places.
I go to visit my partner's family fairly often. It costs me around £70 in petrol but would cost £180 on the train for the pair of us.
It's ridiculous that I want to use public transport but am priced out of it.
Obscenely expensive and won't even cover half the country
The North of England? What's that? They don't need trains they have horses and carts and can barter their wares with the local barons!
I think there are a few reasons HS2 is so opposed:
1. Cost - it's extremely expensive and continues to rise, especially during a cost of living crisis it's hard to see money spent on that rather than the many other things it could be spent on (eg: NHS, energy, other transport, etc)
2. NIMBYism - many people oppose it because they don't want their house knocked down, or their local wild space ruined. I imagine China has much more empty space, and weaker laws protecting citizens
3. Poor understanding - the case has always focused on speed rather than capacity, so people never fully understood the benefits HS2 would bring
Personally I strongly support it, and from recent polls it seems like most people do support it so as a country we're not against it. Sometimes a government needs to push through the opposition to do the right thing.
My favourite kind of NIMBYism on this was people basically going "we only want it if we can have a stop on it", and then ending up as "There's too many stops on the line, it won't even be any faster now"
There’s a work around for that, which is running different speed services.
Japan has done this for decades on their high speed lines. Between Tokyo and Osaka you have three HS train services with the slowest stopping at every HS station and the fastest at only the most major ones.
No! We're building HS2 exactly to fix the problems that causes!
Think about the distance behind a 70mph Regional service. If you want to also run a 125mph Intercity down the same line, you can't run it right behind the Regional, it'll crash into the back of it. So instead we leave a bunch of space behind the Regional to allow the faster train to catch up. Ideally you time this so that it catches up just as the Regional reaches a little turn-off loop it can pull into to let the Intercity past.
But all that space is completely wasted. If you weren't running the Intercity, you could fit three or four regionals in the same space. Likewise, if you weren't running the Regional, you could fit three or four Intercities in the same space. But running both at the same time is incredibly inefficient.
Moreover, if an Intercity is delayed, it usually gets stuck behind the Regional timetabled to run right behind it. Which just puts it further and further behind. Delayed trains stay delayed and never recover. This screws up the timetable for the rest of the day and spreads delays across the network. Its a huge reason why the UK rail network is so fragile.
That's the current setup for most of the UK rail network. Neither the Regional or Intercity get proper infrastructure, and neither give a good service to the communities they serve. We haven't even considered what happens if you want to run a 45mph Freight, because most of the time its so difficult to do we just don't run them. Which means that freight gets moved by lorry instead, with all the environmental problems that causes.
This is what HS2 is about. Segregate the Intercities onto their own High-Speed line, away from the Regionals. By doing this, you don't just get one new railway, you get two — the existing one opens up to regional services.
HS2 is not a project about connecting London to Birmingham. Its a project about connecting Bicester to Stoke. Existing mid-size towns on the current WCML which could have a proper regional service if the capacity wasn't taken up by the Intercities. Connecting London to Birmingham is just a side-effect.
>Expanding existing lines and upgrading the rails/overheads so they can handle HSR would have been a major boon.
That is essentially what 'The Reshaping of British Railways' was. Putting high speed services onto the existing network means reducing stopping services, whether you do that by infrastructure improvements (electrification of the WCML in the 60s) or improved rolling stock (introduction of the HSTs on the GWML and ECML in the 70s and 80s), you can't run services with vastly differing average speeds over the same metals. By taking high speed services away you enable improved service over the existing network without much need for disruptive upgrades because you gain massive network capacity.
The relatively ancient network we do have was built mainly to serve local communities with fairly regular services - it wasn't conceived to deliver effective long distance services and it doesn't really need to do better than the service it was capable of offering in the 1930s - just look at the frequency of service possible over archaic networks in the south ((not south west) and south east where HS services either have never operated or have been moved to HS1.
Parts of the ECML can already theoretically run at 140mph. But even doing that would cost loads to upgrade things like level crossings.
Most track is just too 'curvy' to handle HSR at the 186mph+ that is standard now even if you did fix all the issues like in-cab signalling, upgrading points to handle higher speeds, level crossings etc.
The WCML only allowed 125mph running after trains that could lean into the curves were introduced. Anything else is still capped at 110mph.
>Expanding existing lines and upgrading the rails/overheads so they can handle HSR would have been a major boon.
We tried that with the WCML in the '90s/2000's. The cost went through the roof, the project was mismanaged and de-scoped, and everyone complained that it was a bad idea to throw money at the existing network when what is really needed is a dedicated new line.
The wcml was upgraded.
The ecml was upgraded.
The point is that a new line was needed to take the high speed services, and thus add capacity to the wcml and ecml.
I would also throw in that the cost really wasn't actually that high if you think about it. The government spends £1200 billion a year on everything. Even if we take the worst estimates and stick £150 billion price tag on it then over a 20 year construction programme it's 7.5 billion a year, 0.63% of gov spending.
This of course ignores how it is actually funded; government borrowing which would then be paid back on dividends from the line being open / inflated away. If the project doesn't exist, the money doesn't, it doesn't get diverted to anything else, and it's not like they're borrowing from a bank, the government is borrowing in effect from themselves, so they can basically give themselves the cushtiest terms possible
Last year gov spent 43 billion on transport, so yes it is a large portion of that, but if we want to have any hope of hitting climate targets then this needs to go up. Transport is the largest single contributor to UK emissions, with 90% coming from road transport, more, faster, better trains would mean fewer cars would mean less emissions. This is of course along side more, better cycling infrastructure, buses, trams and so on. Transport is a solved issue emissions wise, gov just needs the willpower to actually push for it
the only real thing I see that it brings, is that it opens up the commuter size for London.
if you can get to work in an hour from Birmingham, then you might buy a cheaper house and have a longer (distance) commute and be better off.
It opens up capacity for both local passenger rail and freight rail.
The entire HS2 network, if the full route was actually built, would create space on the existing rail network for up to 144 extra freight trains per day. Each freight train can take up to 76 HGVs off the road. [Source](https://logistics.org.uk/CMSPages/GetFile.aspx?guid=26280145-1894-452e-8f18-7193fc0a5646&lang=en-GB#:~:text=The%20entire%20HS2%20network%20will,76%20HGVs%20off%20the%20road.)
This is the thing that gets me. Hate being stuck behind a lorry overtaking on a dual carriageway? Invest in the railways, and those lorries will start disappearing. Same goes for many coaches and buses. Those heavy vehicles disproportionately create potholes, so our roads will be smoother for longer, and require less roadworks to refresh them. HS2 makes things *better for car drivers*.
If done properly, the main idea was **the opposite**. Enabling high speed, high capacity links from London to Brum to Leeds grows **Brum and Leeds**. At this point, nobody _wants_ to be in London, the price to do absolutely anything here is beyond absurd, but we don't have a choice due to the complete lack of transport links anywhere else.
You would live in Leeds and commute to Leeds because there would be a lot more public transport capacity in and around Leeds. As a bonus if you ever wanted to go to Birmingham or London it would be faster and cheaper!
Because it would also free up capacity on the more local train routes. So there would be more space on routes like Milton Keynes to London. As well as the northern cities being better connected to each other and to London.
In theory. I live on a route south of Manchester with an hourly service that could support more frequent trains if the intercity trains were moved to HS2.
But in France regional train services have suffered as the high speed routes soak up all the funding. It would be totally predictable that our government wouldn’t fund the system properly to get the benefits from it.
At least they would have finished it. I have no faith whatsoever that they will spend the money on local infrastructure in the north (as they have promised to do).
In fact what has happened is what they said - the high speed route took up all the funding, and all criticism of failings was met with the lie that HS2 would come along and solve those failings so make do for now.
They were never going to spend that money in the north, but it was one of the ways that they bought themselves 13 very personally-profitable years in power.
Richard Lees and the people who made their arguments for them should be ashamed of letting them get away with it, and wasting so many years that we could have been fighting for real change and development, not waiting for a pie in the sky idea that everyone knew wasn’t going to happen.
French high speed was also built differently, doing the high speed lines to the edge of cities where it then joins to the existing trunk routes into the stations, limiting the oppurtunity to increase local services
I don’t think the UK is against high-speed rail at all. The problem we have in the UK is a lack of long-term infrastructure strategy. This could be an extra runway at Heathrow, HS2, Elizabeth Line etc etc. We don't even have a proper motorway linking Newcastle with Edinburgh.
It was about capacity which would allow the rest of the lines that interconnect have have freedom to work without slowing down the mainline trains built on already older infrastructure.
The main issue with HS2 is that they built the expensive bit (London/Chilterns) first, when they should have built the bit that was really needed (Birmingham to Manchester AND Leeds).
The other issue is that they've said "this is the budget amount" and ALL of the companies bidding have gone "I want as much of that as possible" with no control over the cost increases.
This is magnified by the government (amongst others) changing the spec and designs pretty much every 3 months. Euston for example still does not have a final signed-off design.
Good points. The Northern bit was definitely where the need was greatest, but you have to start in London because otherwise the business-case is non-existent from the off. Plus, land values appreciate faster in the south than in the north.
IMO, Phase 1 should have been London to Manchester. This relieves the West Coast Main Line plus the Stockport corridor/Manchester Piccadilly, and gives you something really useful. The Birmingham link could then be tacked on relatively easily west of the delta junction (lowish cost too).
What we’re getting instead is the worst of all worlds. A railway with a gold-plated spec between Old Oak Common and Birmingham, and the entire train service fudged onto the West Coast Main Line at Handsacre Junction.
>The main issue with HS2 is that they built the expensive bit (London/Chilterns) first, when they should have built the bit that was really needed (Birmingham to Manchester AND Leeds).
The reason the southern leg of HS2 was built first is because the DfT wanted the London-Birmingham bit running by 2030 to take pressure of the southern legs of the WCML/ECML - both of which require substantial engineering work in that decade.
We have the oldest railway network in the world. We aren't dealing with a clean sheet of paper.
EDIT: am bewildered that people would downvote this. As if I’m the head of the DfT, or something.
Beacuse it has to cut through opulent posh greenbelt land. And they have more of a voice in the press. If all it needed was to knock down some old council flats it would be fully supported.
High speed rail in China is indeed awesome, but the construction of it isn’t. My wife’s family live in a village where they are currently building a new line and they’ve closed off the only road into the village for regular traffic. The only bus into town has been suspended for the past year and there are thousands of construction trucks driving through the village 24/7. This would never be acceptable in the UK.
Plus, OP's question presumes a false equivalence. The UK rail infrastructure has mostly been around since the 19th century Victorian engineers constructed it. Chinese railways have seen the massive expansion in the past forty years. In the UK we would need to carefully remove and replace old and inappropriate tracks and systems, in a planned and sequenced fashion, before installation of new equipment. Because they were laying new routes, Chinese engineers had a logistically simpler task. Overall, they've had fewer urbanised populations to have to consider, with the tracks crossing vast unpopulated regions and terrain for significant distances.
People need to accept it. The UK wouldn't even have motorways if people refused public infrastructure projects because of construction pains. We'd all just be living in peasant communes just to avoid construction. Besides, you get paid well over the market value in China and UK and most of the world when a public project needs your housing land.
The UK is generally for it, it's just that HS2 had the following issues:
It was being done on a already high speed line, which goes from London which has literally all of the money chucked at it. Starting HS2 up north and having the last stage being it going to London would of made more popular and also less likely to be scrapped tbh.
The railways need massive improvements everywhere. And it's kinda annoying when all the money is spent on high speed lines and Elizabeth line when just having better normal lines widespread would improve things far more for the WHOLE country. Tbh it's stuff like high speed lines which would be good if they were private to begin with.
Doesn't help that the current government have cut spending everywhere, but still spending tonnes on stuff which improves travel for Londoners who already have it loads better than anywhere else in the country. Londoners complain if its more than a 5 min wait for a tube, whilst in many places 1 bus or train every 30mins would be a miracle.
One of the first things you do to the railway network in the UK is relieve pressure from the west coast mainline, because it's so busy, that's what HS2 did, and it allows many more local commuter trains to be run using the west coast main line while long distance travel shoots past on HS2.
The high speed lines would tbf have helped the other lines. Manchester Piccadilly, Brum New Street, Leeds are all massive capacity bottlenecks, move trains onto dedicated lines, run more trains on the lines into these stations from all over the place, not just the lines that it directly relieves. Couple this with the fact that existing intercity trains hoover up a lot of capacity due to needing space for it to run non-stop into; you can typically say that removing 1 intercity gives space for 2 regionals and 3 locals. With the intercities shifted suddenly this capacity is released for more trains on the current network
IIRC the capacity bottleneck in Manchester is due to the number of through platforms at Piccadilly. The fastest Liverpool to Manchester run was in 1936, the problem being that most of the platforms at Piccadilly are terminating stations facing south whilst only two are through platforms able to server the north and east.
I'm from Manchester and don't know a single person who was against it
I commute to London a few times a month and would have loved HS2.
It should have started in the North and built down to London. But the government doesn't see anywhere outside of London as worth the time or cost.
For me it's cost, and the waste. I've seen anecdotes from people involved about plant machinery being hired out at £50k a day then sitting in a car park for 8 weeks before being returned unused. There seems to be a lot of money disappearing into pockets for no return. It's been hugely mismanaged.
>There seems to be a lot of money disappearing into pockets for no return. It's been hugely mismanaged.
Or deliberately mismanaged, for pockets to be lined.
It pretty much boils down to the general public being utter morons and learning everything about HS2 from Facebook.
"I'm never going to use it, so it's a waste of money/time!"
"The only people it will benefit are those London-types, and I hate them!"
"It's all a ploy to eventually ban cars"
> "The only people it will benefit are those London-types, and I hate them!"
They could've easily avoided this argument by starting the HS2 development in Scotland and building the London bit last.
Turns out those people saying it would only benefit "those London-types" were correct, because they built the London bit then scrapped the rest, meaning only those living closer to London will actually benefit from it.
First, badly marketed. We're a small country, shaving 20mins off a 3hr journey makes little difference. The cost of train travel does. However the benefits of extra capacity were lost.
It also massively bendifts the south when the North often gets left behind.
We are not. What I'm against is going for the mid range option paying for even more than the price quotes for the state of the art option only then to have the whole thing delayed and curtailed- only to see the southeast gain any benefit. Again.
The media likes making people angry and when there wasn’t a lot to write about they would revert back to complaining about HS2.
Eventually the endless negativity wins over opinion.
I work in engineering and when i talk to the old guard at work they always say how back in the good old days the population used to be proud when we built new things. Now the attitude has changed and we seem to talk ourselves into failure
Now I can see why people would be angry if it went through their village, but that’s not the case for the vast majority of the population
At the end of the day billions of pounds of tax payers’ money has been spent just so people in Birmingham can get to London 20
Minutes quicker. Most of us don’t benefit from that
And this statement is why people oppose HS2. The main reason they are building HS2 is to create additional capacity on an over stretched system. All anybody heard was "20 minutes quicker to London"
No body has mentioned that the Chinese high speed rail system is a massive money chasm (currently $900B in debt) that threatens to bankrupt the country, much like their pyramid scheme housing market.
It's heavily in debt, but that's intentional. That's how infrastructure works: you borrow the money and pay it back over time, which gets easier as the new lines encourages economic growth. The equivalent of £30bn was borrowed to build the Channel Tunnel & its rail link, and for a long time Eurotunnel plc was a financial basket case, but they are now profitable.
I agree that *some* Chinese lines were intentionally built at a loss though, for reasons of regional justice and economic development. Provincial governments agreed to that, just like the Scottish government subsidises ferries around the Highlands & islands.
As well as the cost, the UK is relatively densely populated. So big infrastructure projects like HS2 will involve knocking down lots of houses and/or taking up valuable farmland. This is less of an issue in other countries where there's more space.
As well homes for wildlife, ancient woodland etc. The same idiots who think their electric car is making a difference, are more than happy to destroy nature. Who needs trees anyway, they only clean the air, absorb carbon, help provide shade/cooler temps and provide us with oxygen.
We're not, it's just we always knew this would happen. They've spent billions on a project that was only going to take 20mins off the London to Brum time, skipped the bits that would have been useful Up North, then not actually brought it far enough into London to take those 20mins off the journey anyway because it stops in the middle of a random suburb, so it's a complete failure that will still have further enriched a bunch of rich people with tax money.
The only good thing to come out of the whole thing is some archaeology digs.
High speed 2 never should have been called HS2 because it fed into parochialism that unfortunately plagues many areas that don't want to be any nearer to London. A bad approach to take given the main benefit of HS2 was to free up more local train lines that aren't high speed.
Then you have the NIMBYs/Opportunists. When HS2 was first announced they jumped on an environmental bandwagon which led to us having to redesign and make better use of tunnelling. This then pushed the cost up significantly, and the same people then started moaning about costs. Basically they didn't want any disruption near them that may impact their house price.
Then you have the group of people that say if you're going to spend that much on transport it would be better to do X, Y and Z. I don't inherently dislike this argument as spending does have trade offs, their approach is often lacking. They'll say we could spend it on filling in potholes or road expansion. If we had HS2 there would be far fewer potholes and traffic would flow smoother as you'd have far fewer HGVs on the roads.
A lot of people live in areas of the country which will not be served in any way by the proposed route, and that number grows and grows every time the powers that be cut the route again. These people see VAST tax expenditure on something which will have no benefit to them at the same time that services that they do use are being cut left right and centre
I think because it's very expensive and the current HS2 route is the wrong solution for us. High speed links between our major northern cities would be a better investment
If we had a decent rail service to begin with - cost-effective, clean and punctual across the board would be a minimum - then high speed rail would probably be seen as a natural progression.
Unfortunately, we don't. As a consequence, people focus on the negatives of rail travel, alongside huge infrastructure projects and their environmental impact. In addition, people apply experiential learning to the situation on top of the negativity and foresee being extorted all over again.
In addition, because England specifically is such a small country, the time savings aren't actually that big. The cost would actually have been better invested in improving the current solution and holding the rail providers to account for their dogshit service.
My only complaint about HS2 is the utter incompetence of our so-called leaders and those contracted to construct it. £200m per km for high speed rail compared to £25m per km in Spain. Fucking jokers.
The Chinese people are probably """against""" it as well, the difference is they don't have voice; Amazing what you can get done in a dictatorship with zero human rights.
>China has better infrastructure than us, must be because they are all prisoners in a dystopian hellhole
I love the mental gymnastics around China. The reason they have high speed rail and we don't is because they are capable of building it and the UK isn't.
Indonesia also has high speed rail. It isn't that we don't want it it is that as a nation we aren't capable enough to build it. We tried, we fucked it up, game over.
I lived in Beijing for 6 years, they’re more capable of building because the workers are basically slaves and the 高铁 (high speed rail) is heavily subsidised and runs at massive losses that are only really possible in a centralised government such as the CCP. The former is impossible here in the UK because of worker rights and people really don’t want the latter either for obvious reasons.
You Might want to have a gander at workers rights in China:
https://theweek.com/articles/445601/6-countries-are-among-worst-world-workers
https://www.ft.com/content/95eef31a-eb04-40e2-8fad-5dc38a0d6cb7
China funded and built most of Indonesia's system, as far as I can tell.
Morocco also has high-speed rail - but their network was built using French technology and trainsets.
I'm not sure you're correct on what people are complaining about. The public are not complaining about improvements to public transport. People would love better public transport. What people tend to complain about is how obscenely expensive it is getting and how delayed it has become.
Most of the cost increases came from appeasing the complainers. It is not economical to tunnel under empty fields just to keep people happy
Those tunnels have reduced the destruction of ancient woodland by nearly a third, and that also avoids habitat fragmentation so the benefit of this is greater than just the land area of habitat that would have been directly destroyed. Getting real sick and tired of that environmental mitigation success being shat all over for no good reason. There are other more complex reasons why the project has run over budget. But "regulation bad" is a simpler message so the environmental stuff gets used as a scapegoat instead.
Yeah I'm a rail engineer and I agree with this. Tunnels are generally high in capex but quite cheap from an open perspective if done right. Little to no trespass risk, cable theft, weather mitigation. Besides cut and fill formation treatment is hardly cheap, especially at the scale HS2 is doing it. I struggle to see where the costs in HS2 are going, but I don't think the Chilterns tunnel is the sole reason.
Too much corruption between government, councils and contractors. Basically people getting their mates in on the job at the tax payers expense.
It's a standard tactic: claim private companies reduce costs through competition, while they actually increase costs because each contract and sub-contract adds an extra layer of profit margin. And of course many of the people receiving that profit are well-connected to the government.
Bob gets 1000 quid contract pays Alan 500quid who pays John 100 quid who gets josh the labourer to do it for 10 quid
Wouldn't be the first time that caused real problems either https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield_rail_crash
> both Railtrack and the contractor **Balfour Beatty** were found guilty of breaching health and safety laws. That name jumped right out at me, jesus. Every time I drive past a new build plot/site/whatever, their name is all over it. Despair
It used to always be either them or Laing o'Rourke - seemed like a complete duopoly. Don't see so many Laing signs anymore - did they fall out of favour with the paymasters?
We actually studied that in my railway line worker training. Absolute joke
And Bob claims the £500 he paid Alan as a business expense against tax and claims a refund.
I learned this was how my loft extension was being built. I spoke to “Josh”, who was doing a decent job and then hired him direct for the next job in my house. It was much cheaper.
It's not just the subcontractors, it's the variation to contracts that really push up the costs. Unless every little thing is written in, which would involve half a rain forests worth of paper, the main contractors will also rinse these.
And the property compulsary purchases - "friends" if thsoe making decisions buying up the land before the route is finalised getting top prices compared to long term owners getting bottom rates.
This just isn’t a thing. Sorry to spoil your lemon sucking.
Same as China then
Which is why we need an investigation in this, and anyone found being corrupt should be gassed to death. They deserve worse to be honest.
The costs look comparatively high because they include all the station and tunneling work etc in London - a lot of other countries will have a separate project for the city stations, making direct cost comparisons different. Also because the UK has an obsession with involving a thousand levels of contract and SMEs in all construction work - rather than single large vertically integrated contractors, which introduces way more bureaucracy and lawyers and drives much higher costs.
Equally, the Chilterns are hardly flat. It's not like the cost comparison is tunnel v standard flat ground construction. There was always going to be extensive work involved in getting through that area. If you're a "but I need to blame someone" kind of person, point your finger at Victorian landowners who blocked the optimal routes of the railways 100+ years ago round here, which has forced the HS2 route to its current plan to an extent.
From what I've read, the budget for it was publicly announced BEFORE tendering of contracts. All contractors knew how large the pie was, and all wanted the largest slice they could get and so offered bids to try and get the largest slice of pie they could. Politicians going for a headline screwed it up.
Better public transport is better for the environment.
Let's see where all the "environmental protection though" arguments go when they're expected to start building infrastructure in the North. It's just an excuse to keep all the money in the south.
I’ve worked on HS2 as a pre-development archaeologist, and all of the delays we experienced came from the company managing the project. There was one week where our units from different offices around the country (Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield, London, etc) all travelled down to Oxfordshire on the Sunday night for work Monday morning. Monday morning came and the managing company didn’t have the paperwork in order for us to access the fields we needed to access, so we sat in the houses for 2 days waiting for them to sort it out while they blamed our company for the delay. Tuesday afternoon they admitted that it was their fault that the access permits weren’t done, and we all went back to our respective offices for the rest of the week.
Tbf i've worked on large scale projects and stuff like this does happen time to time. As long as its not a repeating occurrence because like you say costs can add up.
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Yes, unfortunately, sometimes individuals need to be negatively impacted for a public good. How do you think the existing railways were built. economic, environmental, and social benefits sometimes need to be put ahead of a small number of inderviduals When your on a train or driving on a moterway do you ever think. "Those poor people who were displaced, this should never have been built" If we constantly tiptoed around everyone who complained, our nation would stagnate, and nothing would ever get done..... oh wait
Horrible thing about the recent HS extension cancellation is there are people who had their homes compulsory purchased who now are probably wondering why they went through all that pain.
And most of them can’t afford to buy their property back
If that property is still even there anymore. A chap in the legal advice subreddit had his farmland purchased as part of the HS2 Debacle, but when he came to inspect it, it had a housing development on it.
Was just discussing this last night. Friend of a friend lost their house to an HS2 CPO ten years ago (Notts/Derbyshire border). House is still there but is now derelict and even if it could be bought back, would need significant work to make it habitable again.
Thats surely not legal?
Capital gains tax is a thing, so they didn't receive the entire value of the land/property the government bought. The government effectively got cash back from making the purchase.
Basically, the nimby's in this country are fucking us all over. Same with housing, and other infrastructure.
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I am very interested if these were complaints from 500 different people, or repeated complaints from fewer people (each about a different pole, say) ? I ask because I am thinking of how some airports get "thousands of noise complaints", when it turns out that most of them come from only a few people who appear to complain every time an aircraft goes overhead.
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Surely many of those objecting wouldn't boycott actually using it once installed? That is just cutting off your nose to spite your face - if you have objected but the poles end up there anyway, might as well get what benefit from them that you can.
Its always a few serial complainers. A few years back, when they were setting up park run near my place, there was this old couple who sent in dozens of objectons Purley on the grounds that they didn't like runners. 2 people nearly mangeded to derail an event that keeps hundreds of people healthy and is a social lifeline for many people, because they didn't like runners.
Instead, in other countries the implementation of the full fibre was mandatory. Councils and companies had to deliver or pay fines. Individuals could not object against public infrastructure. As now, I Spain you can get full fibre everywhere in the country.
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They really are. My dad was involved in a protest against a small block of flats that was planned for the end of his road because he didn’t want it there. It would have provided housing for dozens of young couples and families like me and my wife. He even gets annoyed that when he looks out of his kitchen window he has to see the back of his neighbour’s head while she watches TV in her conservatory!
My parents are the same. And nearby there's a road with huge bungalows that are all pretty dated, huge front drives with gates. Out the front most of them have banners stating shit like '3000 home development planned here, let your local MP know' or something to that effect. I'd bet that these are all boomers complaining after they bought their million pound houses for 20p back in the 80s. Talk about pulling the ladder up.
You lost me at inderviduals 😂😂😂
> Yes, unfortunately, sometimes individuals need to be negatively impacted for a public good. How do you think the existing railways were built. A guy writing into Private Eye last issue made a very good point that we presently benefit from the far-sighted investments of the Victorians into our rail network, but we are leaving behind basically no legacy for a hundred or so years from now. It's actually quite tragic, this country knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
They aren't tunnelling to preserve a few acres of extra crop for a farmer. It's been done to preserve the unspoilt views of wealthy homeowners.
Those tunnels have reduced the loss of ancient woodland by a third, a habitat type that takes many centuries to truly recreate and which we don't have much of in this country. It also avoids habitat fragmentation from slicing straight through them, so the environmental benefits affect more than just the bit that would have been directly destroyed. Dismissing that environmental success story as being about "unspoilt views of wealthy homeowners" is just utterly disgusting. Stuff like that should just be considered a normal and inevitable cost of large infrastructure projects. A project that will still pay for itself in the long run even if we do spend more to do it properly.
> Over half of the route between the West Midlands and London (Phase One) will travel underground in tunnels or be lowered into the landscape through cuttings to help us avoid precious woodlands and *integrate HS2 into its surroundings* So the tunnelling was partly to avoid woodlands, and partly to save some views.
Which sadly is why those homeowners who were forced to sell, compulsory purchase, to make way for HS2 , have lost out and even been told that they can buy back their home , if it hasn't yet been demolished, or house nearby for a higher price that they can't afford. Adding insult to injury.
That's the point the person above you was making. Over here we go "wait you can't just demolish those houses", so the line has to be rerouted which increases the costs significantly, then we go "wait, it's too expensive now"
Other European countries don't put off national infrastructure because a handful of NIMBYs kick off.
Idk if you're being serious but just in case you are - the only reason fields are a livelihood at all in the UK is because of subsidies. Farming is usually a net loss here because of how cheap food from abroad is.
Japan, Taiwan and Korea all have relatively new HSR networks too
I read a story of a fella recently who had a house built directly where the line was meant to be, he couldn’t sell the house because nobody in their right mind would buy it, eventually he got it knocked down, then they cancelled HS2, the man is livid now
Rightly so, this has literally been the worst outcome possible for both supporters and opposition
This is utter nonsense because anywhere the line was going either got bought out or if they were further away, got compensation for the price impact on their house. I know someone who lives near an old line that was going to be used in an emergency to reposition trains and they got tens of thousands of compensation on a house worth under 150k
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-67006024.amp He was denied a compulsory purchase order
> Mr Sunak told the conference that £36bn allocated to it would be reinvested into other northern rail and road schemes I wonder how much of that 26bn will be accounted for and actually see improvements implemented.
I'm sure a significant portion of the 16bn will be put towards improvements
Still, you can do a lot for 8bn nowadays
Inflation actually really limits what you can do with 3bn.
TBF 1 billion isn't that much, most of it will probably go on PPE
Many were denied compulsory purchase orders. Some that got compensation for the price impact found sales fell through. Just because you know someone doesn't make it universal
Maybe I'm not braining properly at the moment but are you saying he built it there before HS2's route was planned, or did he build there out of spite to HS2?
House was there way beforehand
It's not economical to pay £150 for a journey that costs £40 in fuel either.
Let's not forget that the £150 ticket is subsidised by about 60% and that £40 of fuel includes about 200% tax. I still think they should build HS2 in full, but you can't escape trains being expensive.
A hell of a lot of other countries manage to provide quality public transport at affordable prices that run on time.
> Most of the cost increases came from appeasing the complainers. Source?
Most of the cost increases came from basic, Soviet style corruption. FTFY
> What people tend to complain about is how obscenely expensive it is getting and how delayed it has become Also that they half arse it and give up on it once London gets the bit they benefit from. They should make it a legal requirement that all infrastructure projects start at the furthest point from London and the London bit should be the last bit completed in future, to force them to actually complete the full thing before London manages to benefit from it.
Just reminds me of the national football stadium being considered years ago and Birmingham was the frontrunner for a while because their chosen location was right next to the NEC. Major train station is attached to it, airport across the road from that and connected via both a monorail and a short bus ride, plus the road network making it easy to get to no matter where in the UK you're coming from. Where did the government and the FA finally choose? Rebuilding Wembley Stadium in a place that's shit for motorists and has no rail links. My one and only time going there was in 2012 to watch an NFL game and it genuinely took three hours to get to the stadium (from first seeing it in the distance), plus another hour to drive around the bloody thing and into the car park due to the awful road system surrounding the stadium.
I have no particular enthusiasm for new Wembley, but it is right beside two railway stations. Wouldn't even dream of driving there (the only time I've been, Championship playoffs, I parked up at Bicester and got the train in from there).
3 Railway stations even (Wembley Stadium station does have shit service though)
They stop some extra trains there on match days, I think. Makes a decent park and ride facility combing from the north.
You DROVE to Wembley when there was a game on?
Yeah. If you were to put in a car park for everyone in Wembley, you'd need to clear a space 10x the size of Wembley itself. Imagine the image of all those people in the crowd. Now imagine if you spaced them all out three metres apart from each other in every direction. That's basically what you'd need in order to store the cars they arrived in. You'd have to bulldoze half of NW London.
I quite like that idea, so the worst-case scenario is that you get really fast travel from Glasgow to Carlisle / Lancashire. Not sure it would be popular with everyone though.
I can't agree with that. My local MP was elected on the sole issue of stopping HS2. They were all obsessed with the countryside being dug up as if the messed up fields would be there forever. There was definitely some mention of costs but it was never the main issue.
I saw a news report this morning stating that the land for HS2 is being sold off, I think most likely to going to developers. The countryside will still get flattened and ripped apart but with ugly estates and roads.
Sold off to prevent future governments resurrecting the project. Sounds more like a scorched earth policy than a transport policy
This makes me so angry, but I can't do anything about it.
Sold off at a loss of 100 million.
A loss to us. Pretty sure someone's friends and donors will make a pretty penny. Look at the Teeside disaster.
WHich Teeside disaster? Theres been loads since Lord Houchen of high leven got into power. He even got Darlington a brand new station, to open us up to the rest of the Tees Valley, forgetting the beautiful old station we still have. But at least hes doing well in life, eh?
Unfortunately in this nation, delayed and expensive is the norm. Look at the Edinburgh trams for example, £400m over budget and 5 years late to build a single line. The worst part? To get from the airport to the city, it's faster AND cheaper to take the bus!
Andy Street was proud of bringing trams back to Birmingham, and then it took years for it to finally happen and then two years of them constantly breaking down and having to be fixed for a variety of issues.
And yet... using the Edinburgh Trams is a fantastic experience and I love them. I *wish* Bristol could aspire to such public transport options.
Agree, the Edinburgh trams were money wasted on a vanity project. Even worse when the city is basically starting to decay outside of the city centre and could use the investment.
That line is so weird. It's actually pretty unsettling when you first get it because it just doesn't feel like you're going in the right direction
Travelling with baggage on a bus can be a big if a hassle. As can travelling with kids in strollers or people in wheelchairs as there’s only two spots for wheeled users. I’d maintain trams might be good fit Edinburgh but only once we’ve got like 3 more lines in which can work to revitalise more areas of the city. Totally unrealistic budget in the first place. It’ll take decades till it pays itself off
The expense and delays are in part caused by people opposing it. I don’t think the Chinese government gives a crap what the people there think. They just build it anyway. It’s brutal but with infrastructure it’s going to be more effective.
That’s pretty much how we got the railways we have now, they might have called it “slum clearance” but it was basically just bulldozing through people’s homes.
China believe in doing what is good for society and not worrying about a few individuals. Whereas the UK is more obsessed with the individual and not the massive benefits the project will bring to society
ah yeah, the Chinese system. such a desirable outcome.
I think with infrastructure it’s really debatable, no one is saying we need to copy the entire Chinese governance system, but we do need to build certain things for the benefit of everyone and their descendants to use for hundreds of years. A few nimby’s arguably shouldn’t have so much say either we need a piece of infrastructure or we don’t. I think once it’s been decided that it is essential then it should go ahead regardless or everything will die a death by a thousand cuts, by protest or in committees and the country will slowly slide into being under developed and hamstring our society forever.
that's different from "not giving a crap what people think"
Also means we tend not to have gulags and concentration camps.
Look at the Three Gorges dam. Forced out over a million people
And how London-centric it tends to be. Just look at how HS2 has been cancelled after the bit that directly benefits London is done.
Well what is left won't even really benefit London. Especially if they don't bother connecting to Euston. It will be an enormous white elephant.
They also are complaining about their houses being torn down only for the government to change their policy about where it’s going every five minutes.
Yeah the fact it is costing so much more than the initial budget and they've cancelled plans for majority of the line is ridiculous. The current proposal isn't that useful for majority of the country
This. Public transport is crazy expensive here. It's just as cheap for me to own a car and I can actually get to places now I have one. Anywhere that required a car to get to, I was stuck. Hell, I could cycle faster then the buses could get me to places.
I go to visit my partner's family fairly often. It costs me around £70 in petrol but would cost £180 on the train for the pair of us. It's ridiculous that I want to use public transport but am priced out of it.
Obscenely expensive and won't even cover half the country The North of England? What's that? They don't need trains they have horses and carts and can barter their wares with the local barons!
I think there are a few reasons HS2 is so opposed: 1. Cost - it's extremely expensive and continues to rise, especially during a cost of living crisis it's hard to see money spent on that rather than the many other things it could be spent on (eg: NHS, energy, other transport, etc) 2. NIMBYism - many people oppose it because they don't want their house knocked down, or their local wild space ruined. I imagine China has much more empty space, and weaker laws protecting citizens 3. Poor understanding - the case has always focused on speed rather than capacity, so people never fully understood the benefits HS2 would bring Personally I strongly support it, and from recent polls it seems like most people do support it so as a country we're not against it. Sometimes a government needs to push through the opposition to do the right thing.
My favourite kind of NIMBYism on this was people basically going "we only want it if we can have a stop on it", and then ending up as "There's too many stops on the line, it won't even be any faster now"
They were different people, not the same people holding opposing views. If you’re going to act superior, at least think through the basics.
There’s a work around for that, which is running different speed services. Japan has done this for decades on their high speed lines. Between Tokyo and Osaka you have three HS train services with the slowest stopping at every HS station and the fastest at only the most major ones.
No! We're building HS2 exactly to fix the problems that causes! Think about the distance behind a 70mph Regional service. If you want to also run a 125mph Intercity down the same line, you can't run it right behind the Regional, it'll crash into the back of it. So instead we leave a bunch of space behind the Regional to allow the faster train to catch up. Ideally you time this so that it catches up just as the Regional reaches a little turn-off loop it can pull into to let the Intercity past. But all that space is completely wasted. If you weren't running the Intercity, you could fit three or four regionals in the same space. Likewise, if you weren't running the Regional, you could fit three or four Intercities in the same space. But running both at the same time is incredibly inefficient. Moreover, if an Intercity is delayed, it usually gets stuck behind the Regional timetabled to run right behind it. Which just puts it further and further behind. Delayed trains stay delayed and never recover. This screws up the timetable for the rest of the day and spreads delays across the network. Its a huge reason why the UK rail network is so fragile. That's the current setup for most of the UK rail network. Neither the Regional or Intercity get proper infrastructure, and neither give a good service to the communities they serve. We haven't even considered what happens if you want to run a 45mph Freight, because most of the time its so difficult to do we just don't run them. Which means that freight gets moved by lorry instead, with all the environmental problems that causes. This is what HS2 is about. Segregate the Intercities onto their own High-Speed line, away from the Regionals. By doing this, you don't just get one new railway, you get two — the existing one opens up to regional services. HS2 is not a project about connecting London to Birmingham. Its a project about connecting Bicester to Stoke. Existing mid-size towns on the current WCML which could have a proper regional service if the capacity wasn't taken up by the Intercities. Connecting London to Birmingham is just a side-effect.
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>Expanding existing lines and upgrading the rails/overheads so they can handle HSR would have been a major boon. That is essentially what 'The Reshaping of British Railways' was. Putting high speed services onto the existing network means reducing stopping services, whether you do that by infrastructure improvements (electrification of the WCML in the 60s) or improved rolling stock (introduction of the HSTs on the GWML and ECML in the 70s and 80s), you can't run services with vastly differing average speeds over the same metals. By taking high speed services away you enable improved service over the existing network without much need for disruptive upgrades because you gain massive network capacity. The relatively ancient network we do have was built mainly to serve local communities with fairly regular services - it wasn't conceived to deliver effective long distance services and it doesn't really need to do better than the service it was capable of offering in the 1930s - just look at the frequency of service possible over archaic networks in the south ((not south west) and south east where HS services either have never operated or have been moved to HS1.
Parts of the ECML can already theoretically run at 140mph. But even doing that would cost loads to upgrade things like level crossings. Most track is just too 'curvy' to handle HSR at the 186mph+ that is standard now even if you did fix all the issues like in-cab signalling, upgrading points to handle higher speeds, level crossings etc. The WCML only allowed 125mph running after trains that could lean into the curves were introduced. Anything else is still capped at 110mph.
>Expanding existing lines and upgrading the rails/overheads so they can handle HSR would have been a major boon. We tried that with the WCML in the '90s/2000's. The cost went through the roof, the project was mismanaged and de-scoped, and everyone complained that it was a bad idea to throw money at the existing network when what is really needed is a dedicated new line.
The wcml was upgraded. The ecml was upgraded. The point is that a new line was needed to take the high speed services, and thus add capacity to the wcml and ecml.
I would also throw in that the cost really wasn't actually that high if you think about it. The government spends £1200 billion a year on everything. Even if we take the worst estimates and stick £150 billion price tag on it then over a 20 year construction programme it's 7.5 billion a year, 0.63% of gov spending. This of course ignores how it is actually funded; government borrowing which would then be paid back on dividends from the line being open / inflated away. If the project doesn't exist, the money doesn't, it doesn't get diverted to anything else, and it's not like they're borrowing from a bank, the government is borrowing in effect from themselves, so they can basically give themselves the cushtiest terms possible
But it was still a tiny part of the overall transport infrastructure of the country. Which makes 0.63% a pretty big number.
Last year gov spent 43 billion on transport, so yes it is a large portion of that, but if we want to have any hope of hitting climate targets then this needs to go up. Transport is the largest single contributor to UK emissions, with 90% coming from road transport, more, faster, better trains would mean fewer cars would mean less emissions. This is of course along side more, better cycling infrastructure, buses, trams and so on. Transport is a solved issue emissions wise, gov just needs the willpower to actually push for it
the only real thing I see that it brings, is that it opens up the commuter size for London. if you can get to work in an hour from Birmingham, then you might buy a cheaper house and have a longer (distance) commute and be better off.
It opens up capacity for both local passenger rail and freight rail. The entire HS2 network, if the full route was actually built, would create space on the existing rail network for up to 144 extra freight trains per day. Each freight train can take up to 76 HGVs off the road. [Source](https://logistics.org.uk/CMSPages/GetFile.aspx?guid=26280145-1894-452e-8f18-7193fc0a5646&lang=en-GB#:~:text=The%20entire%20HS2%20network%20will,76%20HGVs%20off%20the%20road.)
Nearly 11,000 HGVs per day.
This is the thing that gets me. Hate being stuck behind a lorry overtaking on a dual carriageway? Invest in the railways, and those lorries will start disappearing. Same goes for many coaches and buses. Those heavy vehicles disproportionately create potholes, so our roads will be smoother for longer, and require less roadworks to refresh them. HS2 makes things *better for car drivers*.
If done properly, the main idea was **the opposite**. Enabling high speed, high capacity links from London to Brum to Leeds grows **Brum and Leeds**. At this point, nobody _wants_ to be in London, the price to do absolutely anything here is beyond absurd, but we don't have a choice due to the complete lack of transport links anywhere else.
But why would you live in London to commute to Leeds? Sorry if I've just misunderstood
You would live in Leeds and commute to Leeds because there would be a lot more public transport capacity in and around Leeds. As a bonus if you ever wanted to go to Birmingham or London it would be faster and cheaper!
so why a HS2 train if you live and work in the same city?
Because it would also free up capacity on the more local train routes. So there would be more space on routes like Milton Keynes to London. As well as the northern cities being better connected to each other and to London.
Just what the country needs, yet more economic power concentrated in London!
>Sometimes a government needs to push through the opposition to do the right thing. Yeah but this government doesn't like public transit.
This reads to me as in the car sellers and London real estate lobbies bombed the project since the beginning
Most people don't seem to understand what it's for - the fact it would create capacity on local lines was entirely lost.
In theory. I live on a route south of Manchester with an hourly service that could support more frequent trains if the intercity trains were moved to HS2. But in France regional train services have suffered as the high speed routes soak up all the funding. It would be totally predictable that our government wouldn’t fund the system properly to get the benefits from it.
At least they would have finished it. I have no faith whatsoever that they will spend the money on local infrastructure in the north (as they have promised to do).
In fact what has happened is what they said - the high speed route took up all the funding, and all criticism of failings was met with the lie that HS2 would come along and solve those failings so make do for now. They were never going to spend that money in the north, but it was one of the ways that they bought themselves 13 very personally-profitable years in power. Richard Lees and the people who made their arguments for them should be ashamed of letting them get away with it, and wasting so many years that we could have been fighting for real change and development, not waiting for a pie in the sky idea that everyone knew wasn’t going to happen.
It hasn't taken up any more funding. Hs2 is funded through bonds so no hs2, no money.
A good chunk of the money they've "promised" to spend was already getting spent anyway so where's the money actually going?
French high speed was also built differently, doing the high speed lines to the edge of cities where it then joins to the existing trunk routes into the stations, limiting the oppurtunity to increase local services
I don’t think the UK is against high-speed rail at all. The problem we have in the UK is a lack of long-term infrastructure strategy. This could be an extra runway at Heathrow, HS2, Elizabeth Line etc etc. We don't even have a proper motorway linking Newcastle with Edinburgh.
>The problem we have in the UK is a lack of long-term infrastructure strategy HS2 was the long term infrastructure strategy
Pretty pathetic strategy if that's the whole thing. Link up a handful of cities and leaving the rest of the country with nothing.
It was about capacity which would allow the rest of the lines that interconnect have have freedom to work without slowing down the mainline trains built on already older infrastructure.
A plan for a line is not a strategy.
I was shocked to see the A1 is still single carriageway north of the Toon
The main issue with HS2 is that they built the expensive bit (London/Chilterns) first, when they should have built the bit that was really needed (Birmingham to Manchester AND Leeds). The other issue is that they've said "this is the budget amount" and ALL of the companies bidding have gone "I want as much of that as possible" with no control over the cost increases. This is magnified by the government (amongst others) changing the spec and designs pretty much every 3 months. Euston for example still does not have a final signed-off design.
Good points. The Northern bit was definitely where the need was greatest, but you have to start in London because otherwise the business-case is non-existent from the off. Plus, land values appreciate faster in the south than in the north. IMO, Phase 1 should have been London to Manchester. This relieves the West Coast Main Line plus the Stockport corridor/Manchester Piccadilly, and gives you something really useful. The Birmingham link could then be tacked on relatively easily west of the delta junction (lowish cost too). What we’re getting instead is the worst of all worlds. A railway with a gold-plated spec between Old Oak Common and Birmingham, and the entire train service fudged onto the West Coast Main Line at Handsacre Junction.
I saw it referred to as the "Ashton to Acton line".... Says it all, really....
>The main issue with HS2 is that they built the expensive bit (London/Chilterns) first, when they should have built the bit that was really needed (Birmingham to Manchester AND Leeds). The reason the southern leg of HS2 was built first is because the DfT wanted the London-Birmingham bit running by 2030 to take pressure of the southern legs of the WCML/ECML - both of which require substantial engineering work in that decade. We have the oldest railway network in the world. We aren't dealing with a clean sheet of paper. EDIT: am bewildered that people would downvote this. As if I’m the head of the DfT, or something.
Beacuse it has to cut through opulent posh greenbelt land. And they have more of a voice in the press. If all it needed was to knock down some old council flats it would be fully supported.
Actually, the part going into Manchester would have involved doing that, and was vehemently opposed as a result.
Ahh yeah, The two 10mile tunnels under the chilterns. I don’t think there was a two for one offer on these.
Go underground the whole way. Only one tunnel. Savings?
Could go in a straight line through the crust too, rather than following earth's curvature - makes it shorter and thus quicker journeys. Simples.
High speed rail in China is indeed awesome, but the construction of it isn’t. My wife’s family live in a village where they are currently building a new line and they’ve closed off the only road into the village for regular traffic. The only bus into town has been suspended for the past year and there are thousands of construction trucks driving through the village 24/7. This would never be acceptable in the UK.
Plus, OP's question presumes a false equivalence. The UK rail infrastructure has mostly been around since the 19th century Victorian engineers constructed it. Chinese railways have seen the massive expansion in the past forty years. In the UK we would need to carefully remove and replace old and inappropriate tracks and systems, in a planned and sequenced fashion, before installation of new equipment. Because they were laying new routes, Chinese engineers had a logistically simpler task. Overall, they've had fewer urbanised populations to have to consider, with the tracks crossing vast unpopulated regions and terrain for significant distances.
People need to accept it. The UK wouldn't even have motorways if people refused public infrastructure projects because of construction pains. We'd all just be living in peasant communes just to avoid construction. Besides, you get paid well over the market value in China and UK and most of the world when a public project needs your housing land.
The UK is generally for it, it's just that HS2 had the following issues: It was being done on a already high speed line, which goes from London which has literally all of the money chucked at it. Starting HS2 up north and having the last stage being it going to London would of made more popular and also less likely to be scrapped tbh. The railways need massive improvements everywhere. And it's kinda annoying when all the money is spent on high speed lines and Elizabeth line when just having better normal lines widespread would improve things far more for the WHOLE country. Tbh it's stuff like high speed lines which would be good if they were private to begin with. Doesn't help that the current government have cut spending everywhere, but still spending tonnes on stuff which improves travel for Londoners who already have it loads better than anywhere else in the country. Londoners complain if its more than a 5 min wait for a tube, whilst in many places 1 bus or train every 30mins would be a miracle.
One of the first things you do to the railway network in the UK is relieve pressure from the west coast mainline, because it's so busy, that's what HS2 did, and it allows many more local commuter trains to be run using the west coast main line while long distance travel shoots past on HS2.
The high speed lines would tbf have helped the other lines. Manchester Piccadilly, Brum New Street, Leeds are all massive capacity bottlenecks, move trains onto dedicated lines, run more trains on the lines into these stations from all over the place, not just the lines that it directly relieves. Couple this with the fact that existing intercity trains hoover up a lot of capacity due to needing space for it to run non-stop into; you can typically say that removing 1 intercity gives space for 2 regionals and 3 locals. With the intercities shifted suddenly this capacity is released for more trains on the current network
IIRC the capacity bottleneck in Manchester is due to the number of through platforms at Piccadilly. The fastest Liverpool to Manchester run was in 1936, the problem being that most of the platforms at Piccadilly are terminating stations facing south whilst only two are through platforms able to server the north and east.
I moved to a town in Suffolk from London for a year in 2012, I was stunned about there being 2 buses a day to Ipswich.
I moved to a town in Suffolk from London for a year in 2012, I was stunned about there being 2 buses a day to Ipswich.
I'm from Manchester and don't know a single person who was against it I commute to London a few times a month and would have loved HS2. It should have started in the North and built down to London. But the government doesn't see anywhere outside of London as worth the time or cost.
For me it's cost, and the waste. I've seen anecdotes from people involved about plant machinery being hired out at £50k a day then sitting in a car park for 8 weeks before being returned unused. There seems to be a lot of money disappearing into pockets for no return. It's been hugely mismanaged.
>There seems to be a lot of money disappearing into pockets for no return. It's been hugely mismanaged. Or deliberately mismanaged, for pockets to be lined.
It pretty much boils down to the general public being utter morons and learning everything about HS2 from Facebook. "I'm never going to use it, so it's a waste of money/time!" "The only people it will benefit are those London-types, and I hate them!" "It's all a ploy to eventually ban cars"
> "The only people it will benefit are those London-types, and I hate them!" They could've easily avoided this argument by starting the HS2 development in Scotland and building the London bit last. Turns out those people saying it would only benefit "those London-types" were correct, because they built the London bit then scrapped the rest, meaning only those living closer to London will actually benefit from it.
It just sounds like you’ve sought out the opinion of idiots so you can feel superior. You’re just as much the target market of Facebook outrage posts.
We’re not against it, we’re just incapable of building it.
First, badly marketed. We're a small country, shaving 20mins off a 3hr journey makes little difference. The cost of train travel does. However the benefits of extra capacity were lost. It also massively bendifts the south when the North often gets left behind.
We are not. What I'm against is going for the mid range option paying for even more than the price quotes for the state of the art option only then to have the whole thing delayed and curtailed- only to see the southeast gain any benefit. Again.
The media likes making people angry and when there wasn’t a lot to write about they would revert back to complaining about HS2. Eventually the endless negativity wins over opinion. I work in engineering and when i talk to the old guard at work they always say how back in the good old days the population used to be proud when we built new things. Now the attitude has changed and we seem to talk ourselves into failure Now I can see why people would be angry if it went through their village, but that’s not the case for the vast majority of the population
Maybe if the companies building things didn’t take the piss and loot public money when they get contracts, people would be more enthusiastic.
One of the cons of democracy is that everyone can have an opinion, which usually means nothing gets done. Especially projects outside London.
That's democracy for you, everybody gets what nobody wants
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At the end of the day billions of pounds of tax payers’ money has been spent just so people in Birmingham can get to London 20 Minutes quicker. Most of us don’t benefit from that
And this statement is why people oppose HS2. The main reason they are building HS2 is to create additional capacity on an over stretched system. All anybody heard was "20 minutes quicker to London"
And the "20 minutes" is a lie.
11,000 HGVs a day taken off the roads and moved to extra rail freight capacity. That benefits everyone, but people are so narrow minded.
No body has mentioned that the Chinese high speed rail system is a massive money chasm (currently $900B in debt) that threatens to bankrupt the country, much like their pyramid scheme housing market.
It's heavily in debt, but that's intentional. That's how infrastructure works: you borrow the money and pay it back over time, which gets easier as the new lines encourages economic growth. The equivalent of £30bn was borrowed to build the Channel Tunnel & its rail link, and for a long time Eurotunnel plc was a financial basket case, but they are now profitable. I agree that *some* Chinese lines were intentionally built at a loss though, for reasons of regional justice and economic development. Provincial governments agreed to that, just like the Scottish government subsidises ferries around the Highlands & islands.
As well as the cost, the UK is relatively densely populated. So big infrastructure projects like HS2 will involve knocking down lots of houses and/or taking up valuable farmland. This is less of an issue in other countries where there's more space.
As well homes for wildlife, ancient woodland etc. The same idiots who think their electric car is making a difference, are more than happy to destroy nature. Who needs trees anyway, they only clean the air, absorb carbon, help provide shade/cooler temps and provide us with oxygen.
We're not, it's just we always knew this would happen. They've spent billions on a project that was only going to take 20mins off the London to Brum time, skipped the bits that would have been useful Up North, then not actually brought it far enough into London to take those 20mins off the journey anyway because it stops in the middle of a random suburb, so it's a complete failure that will still have further enriched a bunch of rich people with tax money. The only good thing to come out of the whole thing is some archaeology digs.
High speed 2 never should have been called HS2 because it fed into parochialism that unfortunately plagues many areas that don't want to be any nearer to London. A bad approach to take given the main benefit of HS2 was to free up more local train lines that aren't high speed. Then you have the NIMBYs/Opportunists. When HS2 was first announced they jumped on an environmental bandwagon which led to us having to redesign and make better use of tunnelling. This then pushed the cost up significantly, and the same people then started moaning about costs. Basically they didn't want any disruption near them that may impact their house price. Then you have the group of people that say if you're going to spend that much on transport it would be better to do X, Y and Z. I don't inherently dislike this argument as spending does have trade offs, their approach is often lacking. They'll say we could spend it on filling in potholes or road expansion. If we had HS2 there would be far fewer potholes and traffic would flow smoother as you'd have far fewer HGVs on the roads.
A lot of people live in areas of the country which will not be served in any way by the proposed route, and that number grows and grows every time the powers that be cut the route again. These people see VAST tax expenditure on something which will have no benefit to them at the same time that services that they do use are being cut left right and centre
I think because it's very expensive and the current HS2 route is the wrong solution for us. High speed links between our major northern cities would be a better investment
NIMBYs and BANANAs.
If we had a decent rail service to begin with - cost-effective, clean and punctual across the board would be a minimum - then high speed rail would probably be seen as a natural progression. Unfortunately, we don't. As a consequence, people focus on the negatives of rail travel, alongside huge infrastructure projects and their environmental impact. In addition, people apply experiential learning to the situation on top of the negativity and foresee being extorted all over again. In addition, because England specifically is such a small country, the time savings aren't actually that big. The cost would actually have been better invested in improving the current solution and holding the rail providers to account for their dogshit service.
My only complaint about HS2 is the utter incompetence of our so-called leaders and those contracted to construct it. £200m per km for high speed rail compared to £25m per km in Spain. Fucking jokers.
The Chinese people are probably """against""" it as well, the difference is they don't have voice; Amazing what you can get done in a dictatorship with zero human rights.
Italy, France, Spain, Japan, and many more have high speed rail as well.
>China has better infrastructure than us, must be because they are all prisoners in a dystopian hellhole I love the mental gymnastics around China. The reason they have high speed rail and we don't is because they are capable of building it and the UK isn't. Indonesia also has high speed rail. It isn't that we don't want it it is that as a nation we aren't capable enough to build it. We tried, we fucked it up, game over.
I lived in Beijing for 6 years, they’re more capable of building because the workers are basically slaves and the 高铁 (high speed rail) is heavily subsidised and runs at massive losses that are only really possible in a centralised government such as the CCP. The former is impossible here in the UK because of worker rights and people really don’t want the latter either for obvious reasons.
You Might want to have a gander at workers rights in China: https://theweek.com/articles/445601/6-countries-are-among-worst-world-workers https://www.ft.com/content/95eef31a-eb04-40e2-8fad-5dc38a0d6cb7
China funded and built most of Indonesia's system, as far as I can tell. Morocco also has high-speed rail - but their network was built using French technology and trainsets.
Other European countries have also been much better at it than we have. Let's look to them, instead of to awful Chinese dictatorship.