[Closed] HS2 - again.

project - Member

We had a purpose built link all electrified between Sheffield and Manchester called the woodhead route, now closed dismantled and used by natioanl grid and the water companies for a cablee pipe run,

We also had fast DMUS, running liverpool to hull, now we have slower dmus, running to leeds and stopping everywhere, no expresses.

We need better direct links from North Wales to South Wales, links accross the country to Norwich and east anglia

and lots more and a lot cheaper than hs2.

See East West Rail...

The whole structure of the rail system has been concentrated around London since Beeching: there is not even a direct line between Oxford & Cambridge any more. A dozen years ago there were plans to reinstate the dozen missing miles around Buckingham, but those plans were cut.

The Cross-Country lines are too slow. It takes 4 hours for the 220 mile from Bristol to York, as opposed to 3 hours for the (really good) 200 miles from London to York.

Electrification of the Liverpool Manchester chat moss line is on the go

using second hand life expired units from down south,also there are capaicty issues at lime street, and manchester.

for anyone that missed it there was quite an interesting 2 part series on BBC2 called "mind the london gap" - researched and presented by Evan Davis. It's still on iPlayer and in it he made the case for a three things:

1. London is a "superhub" - much of the investment it attracts would go to other global superhubs if we didn't have it - not elsewhere in the UK. So we need to service the demand it creates (jobs, transport connections etc.) or lose it altogether (financial services contributes 2/3 of the cost of the NHS each year in employment and corporation taxes) so the sums involved aren't trivial. That means investment in transport infrastructure at a faster rate than the rest of the country (though seeing as most stamp duty is collected in London this seems fair enough).

2. Even though we have a superhub, we still need a national hub as well - a super size city that drives growth outside of London. In the programme he explored the possibility of creating fast links between Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield and creating a single corridor of faster growth

3. Economic growth is driven by fast transport connections / interconnections and scope for co-locating with competitors as well as other industries.

Following the logic in the programme, HS2 seems a bit of a no-brainer as a way of evening out growth and allowing the North West to attract inward investment. In the big scheme of things the £36B capital cost (net of the £14B contingency) is chump change when spread over 20 years and similar to the capital profile of Crossrail which is already showing that development happens right across the length of new transport connections, not just the London end... just the same as the Jubilee Line Extension in the late 90's.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03xhcjg/Mind_the_Gap_London_v_the_Rest_Episode_1/

robdixon - Member

1. London is a "superhub" - much of the investment it attracts would go to other global superhubs if we didn't have it - not elsewhere in the UK. So we need to service the demand it creates (jobs, transport connections etc.) or lose it altogether

That's a hell of a logical leap- yes some business is naturally drawn to these hubs, but the reason London's excessively large (and the other cities of the UK excessively small) isn't down to that- it's down to other industries which could be more distributed, not being distributed.

Now imagine a London where, let's say a million people and an equivalent proportion of these non-central jobs have relocated elsewhere. It's still a superhub- Greater London would still be the second biggest urban area in Europe, frinstance, and still the most concentrated urban population in western europe. But you relieve a lot of that pressure on services, accomodation, and human capital. So London becomes a better place to live and do business in many ways.

Meanwhile the other cities that benefit from this relocation will be stronger, lifting the country as a whole which in turn benefits London. The world bank says doubling the size of a city increases its productivity by 3-8%- and doubling the size of Birmingham wouldn't require you to halve the size of London. Over a longer timescale, it doesn't really require you to do anything to London- it just requires that we stop treating half the country as a feeder for the big smoke.

robdixon talks sense to me...and evan davis.
we have ancient infrastructure in this country and it's about time we stepped up as a country and invested in it further. there will be northern links in time, and vince cable was saying at the weekend that these should be brought forward. again, i agree with that.
lots of nimby-ism when the channel tunnel and CTRL were proposed, but there's no doubt what a good thing it was, is there?

[i]mostly, when you give engineers a realistic challenge, they'll do a fantastic job.[/i] Absolutely, & well within budget. 🙄

So how many actual people NEED to travel between london & birmingham as quickly as HS2 promises? & are the NEEDS of those commuters worth the ££££'s quoted? Seems too simple to me.

It seems the only objectors I've seen are the NIMBY brigade.

That's because you have ignored all the people objecting for other reasons 🙄

Hope that helps clear up your confusion.

fatmax - Member

we have ancient infrastructure in this country and it's about time we stepped up as a country and invested in it further.

True- so why start by duplicating existing decent links, at vast cost? I don't see anyone here saying "We shouldn't improve infrastructure"

so why start by duplicating existing decent links

To increase capacity and reduce travel time.

As for relocating businesses outside London - I can't see a way to do this. Letting it happen naturaly by not investing in London would be very damaging. Businesses would hang on until conditions were intolerable, so London would be full of businesses working at the limit of difficulty. Not conducive to productivity.

Anyway - there has been migration out of London for years. Down the M4 and M3 for example. Why do businesses go there? Because the transport links to London are good!

Why do we need fast links up here?

To get to retail centres quicker?

To get to boom-build high clusters of flats?

Engineering/manufacturing arent that close to train lines.

I went to a presentation by the Chairman of HS2. He admitted to us that it's being marketed all wrong.

The main need for it is the lack of capacity on the existing rail network. The WCML is already one of the busiest rail routes in Europe and demand is growing. The existing infrastructure can't easily be expanded due to platform lengths, bridge widths etc.

HS2 will provide a huge amount of increased capacity to some of the busiest rail network. In turn this will free up the existing lines for increased freight and local services.

It's HS2 because you might as well build high speed if you are going to build brand new hey!?

Agreed ^^
HS2 is about creating capacity, and not about speed. Do you really want to have another debacle like WCML upgrade?
How many years late? How many £Bn over budget?
I'd have thought all you leased silver German car drivers would be completely supporting HS2 as one of the things it'll do is encourage goods vehicles off the roads.

Shame they've forgotten about the NE again meaning industry will move else where resulting in job loses. Still as long as the London and the South is Ok that's all that matters.

The WCML is already one of the busiest rail routes in Europe and demand is growing.

It can't be, they haven't built anything yet!

(According to this thread, anyway - people are claiming demand follows capacity not the other way round......)

Mollie - the first section of rail now used by WCML was opened in 1837...
The biggest problem with current rail expansion is that there's little capacity left and almost no resilience. Surely anything that adds to both results in improvements to all?
And I'm not even working on HS2... Must phone a couple of people...

I know, aP, I was being sarcastic. People are claiming that HS2 is going to create demand that's not currently there - I'm saying (as are you) that demand is already there.Our parents did it like the clappers.

If you consider HS2 alongside HS3, 4, 5, 6 etc then it makes more sense. A new national transport backbone is needed.

Ah! You might need to smillie then 😉

molgrips - Member

To increase capacity and reduce travel time.

That's an answer to a different question than I asked, but thanks. Why improve infrastructure? Yes to increase capacity (travel time should be a much lower priority than volume). But why improve this part of our infrastructure in particular?

True- so why start by duplicating existing decent links, at vast cost? I don't see anyone here saying "We shouldn't improve infrastructure"

The problem with this is that upgrading existing routes would necessitate 15-20 years of closures every weekend and still wouldn’t create the same capacity that HS2 will bring on stream.

The UK population is due to rise by 50% over the next 30 or so years so we really need to start building out new capacity now just to meet the known future demand. The experience with Crossrail is that by the time it’s open, the capacity needed to serve 1m extra Londoners by the late 2020’s will immediately be consumed as the population has grown much faster than expected so the “unknown” growth in the population already necessitates Crossrail 2 being built.

The planning for Crossrail started in the early 1990’s which perfectly illustrates why the UK really has a problem – particularly so when compared to the likes of France who started to build a new high speed route from Paris to Bordeaux 3 years ago and are expecting to open it in 3 years time (similar length of track to HS2 but 1/3 of the time to build it).

The planning cycle means that much of the cost of infrastructure isn’t soaked up with concrete and steel but in endless consultations that just delay the inevitable and create years of misery for people who are stuck in houses they can’t sell until the details of compulsory purchase are agreed years later.

It’s fair to say that delivering a green field infrastructure project is much more efficient than trying to upgrade existing infrastructure – so with the team delivering Crossrail due to roll off in 3-4 years time it’s a perfect time to do HS2.

Assembling the combination of skills and working relationships needed to take on that sort of project and deliver it to time and budget takes years and in some cases decades of advance planning – so the UK has a relatively short window to make our mind up on HS2 - or risk the cost going up and delivery time slipping if we prevaricate as seems quite likely based on the intellectually retarded King Canute like position the likes of Ed Balls have taken to date.

Still as long as the London and the South is Ok that's all that matters.

Do you want some vinegar for that chip on your shoulder? How will a London-Birmingham/Manchester rail line benefit the South?

We're going over old ground here, but people don't invest in the NE because it's miles from anywhere and the links to London are poor, you can get to Paris/Brussels/Amsterdam/Munich etc etc quicker. HS2 will improve that situation, but the case for a 2 hour direct link to South Shields is pretty weak.

The issues we have are:

- the marketing aspect as said, HSR is about capacity as much as speed, we've got to do something
- our geography isn't really suited to HSR. We have one huge city, with a lot of much smaller cities, with good sized intermediate towns in between. HSR works so well in France (for example), because they have a number of large outlying cities with absolutely nothing between them. Lyon - Paris is a whisker under 300 miles, so about the same as Newcastle - London. The vast majority of TGVs don't stop, there are a couple of very small stations, but that's it. The ECML route to Newcastle goes through a lot of towns that folk would want trains to stop!

robdixon - Member

The problem with this is that upgrading existing routes would necessitate 15-20 years of closures every weekend and still wouldn’t create the same capacity that HS2 will bring on stream.

The UK population is due to rise by 50% over the next 30 or so years so we really need to start building out new capacity now just to meet the known future demand.

London commuter routes aren't the only place you can lay new lines, though, so again that's an argument for new lines rather than an argument for HS2.

But you make the more important point yourself- the population's due to rise all over the country, not just where HS2 is going to service. Trying to make London bigger won't accomodate that need- and as you say, increasing the ability to flow people into London just increases London's appetite further, it is just supply and demand.

It's all going to become like the Hunger Games; massive community of affluent city dwellers serviced by poverty stricken regions via high speed rail links.

London commuter routes aren't the only place you can lay new lines, though, so again that's an argument for new lines rather than an argument for HS2.

But they're (in the main), by far the busiest, why would you build routes which are already under utilised?

The UK population is due to rise by 50% over the next 30 or so years

Is it?

Trying to make London bigger

That's not what they are trying to do though. That's not what this is about.

Anyway njee20 speaks sense (as usual). The UK is a geographical oddity because the distribution of business activity is so uneven. And it always has been ever since Roman times.

maybe they're 'under utilised' because they're crap and slow.

?

if the trainline between townA and townB was improved, reducing journey times from over an hour, to 20mins, would you be surprised to see more people travelling on it?

Does anyone know how much money has been spent on invading Afghanistan,Iraq,Iran,Syria,Libya in the last few years?
I'm sure you could go Lands End to John o Groats up and down easily so money is not an issue. If the government want to find it they will