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Let your next career move come to you.

In a crowded field HS2 has got to be one of the Tories' stupidest failures

the whole business case of ripping up a chunk of London and digging tunnels and making new bridges and compulsory purchasing land, is that connecting London to the North of England would drive growth

Sunak's solution

stop at Birmingham so there are literally no benefits to all that cost

classic

To be fair it is one of the few projects they've undertaken which will be of equal value to the population whenever in the UK you are. South-East, Midlands, the North, fúck all use to anyone.

What I don’t understand with these big infra projects is why anyone thinks there is political gain in churning and gurning over whether to continue with them.

After initial approval, the political brouhaha is done unless you reopen it. Once signed off, just execute fgs 

Because most of the public don’t notice until they’re finished is why. There remains the fiction there’s a saving to be made in stopping. Tell that to flattened Euston.

Tbf it was a difficult choice for any incoming government.

The original idea was a colossal folly, an obscene waste of money and a horrendous attack on the environment with no discernible benefit, save knocking 10 minutes off a train journey to Manchester. The only purpose was to artificially create employment, and as a grandiose ego boost to those involved. 

On balance, given that the benefit of continuing would have been zero or virtually zero, pulling the plug now is probably the decision. He would be damned either way though. 

The case for HS2 was advertised but never made. In an electronic / remote economy you don’t need better trains between London and Birmingham. You need incentives to persuade large businesses to set up outside London. A service economy isn’t about freight, human or otherwise. It’s astonishing that this was approved with such an obvious lack of foresight. 

The only purpose was to artificially create employment, and as a grandiose ego boost to those involved. 

And to transfer billions of taxpayer ££ to private companies.  The taxpayer was always going to get eff all in return - 10 mins of a journey between London and B'ham, who cares. Given it was approved in the first place, it should have been cancelled years ago. 

Heh @ blaming Labour for this. Spurius and the country’s three other remaining tories getting increasingly mad desperate, faced with the prospect of getting negative seats

This runs v close to where I live and in some cases almost right next to the existing Marylebone to Snow Hill line 

I still think alot of the local opposition would have vanished if they'd just put a station in between London and Brum 

It is ultimately wholly pointless and a vanity project though . Longer trains and/or double deckers with redone bridges could have solved the capacity problem 

Labour are totally guilty of not opposing it and would have most likely done it themselves if they'd won in 2010 so no party political point to be made here. 

Lib Dems had their shock by election win locally by talking of opposition to it... quiet as a mouse about it when in actual coalition government of course 

"Heh @ blaming Labour for this. Spurius and the country’s three other remaining tories getting increasingly mad desperate, faced with the prospect of getting negative seats"

I'm Labour, but they literally invented the horrific waste of money and resources that is HS2.

An express link from Liverpool to Manchester to Leeds to Hull made more sense.

The lines between those cities are a national disgrace. The northern powerhouse idea has value. I am not a Tory but to be fair to osbourne he bought into the idea, not the bullshit ‘levelling up’ of Johnson which is about as effective as a wet fart. Seems simply to give some money to Tory constituencies in the red wall at best.

3-ducks24 Sep 23 11:56

...but they literally invented the horrific waste of money and resources that is HS2.

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inflation and the Tory grand scheme of 2016 to contract the jobs market has pushed up the cost

the whole original case makes sense if you link up the UK's major cities so you can in effect jump on a train, work away and get to London that afternoon for meetings etc and then home earlier than midnight 

air travel, even domesitc adds a ton of wasted time dicking about in queues and security and the general airport faff 

as you chop more and more cities the economic case makes less and less sense

and just running a line between birmingham and london is a complete joke and basically pisses all the sunk cost on new tunnels and birdges and such down the drain

 

The trains are a total fvkcing disgrace under this pretend government, like every other public service. There are countries much larger than ours that make this shit work. They just get on with it, grateful there’s a way of connecting everyone. Meanwhile the Brits all aspire to weekends in the Cotswolds or Cornwall reached by gas guzzler SUVs. FF actual s

So much money is spent on all these infrastructure projects in satisfying the most arcane requirements of the whole gamut of protesters.

Newts, badgers, bats, Yellow Liverwort, Smaller Crested Gripper, Swampy, Chris Packham, Justin Rowlatt, XR, the Chilterns Dogging Club, and all the rest all have their 15 mins of fame and have to be bought off.

Our Victorian forefathers, who built a railway from scratch largely by manual labour and the odd steam working machine between London and Manchester in about 4 years in the 1830’s, would be quite puzzled.

I'm Labour, but they literally[sic] invented the horrific waste of money and resources that is HS2.

either this is false or so misleading as 2 b pointless

the dft under labour proposed 2 assess the case 4 another high speed rail route. assessing the case 4 high speed rail seems eminently sensible and not in ne meaningful way being a case of “inventing” actual hs2 as a waste of money and resources.

the confirmation of route and the decision 2 go ahead, which r the substance of existing hs2, were made under the coalition

there absolutely very is a party political point to be made here and it’s scored against the tories by the entire rest of humanity 

sorry about that, and all

Remind me what the Labour policy is on this Laz...

Struggling to find any evidence of opposition in the upcoming election just like I am struggling looking at their past manifestos but I may have missed something .

It does kind of feel that we are far enough into it now that we may as well dig in with both feet and make the most of it even if it is a flawed and shyt idea 

Sunk costs and all that 

If trains could meaningfully make planes obsolete for shortish journeys including to the near continent then it will have done some good.

I imagine horrendous fares will see to that ambition though 

 

My understanding is that one of the points of this is to free up capacity on the WCML for freight. That still needs to happen regardless of how long it takes passenger traffic to recover. I suspect that’s still down because of strikes and unreliability. 

It is more about capacity than speed, and would definitely have been completed in full if they had started at the northern end.

Why a station between London and Brum, wtf is even there, Milton Keynes?

HS2 was always stupid, we are not a big enough country to require super high speed rail.    We should have spent the money on improving regional transport outside london and improving speed and capacity on existing main lines by adding extra tracks in places and having in cabin signalling (lack of which still means trains can only go at 125mph despite a top speed of 140mph)

HS2 limited to London to Birmingham is even more stupid.    It is not a particularly long distance in the first place and the limited time saving will only be of use to people whose actual final destination is central Birmingham, otherwise they will be better off using existing lines and not having to change.  Unless and until the Euston terminal opens the line will be even more useless because the time trecking out to a West London suburb will more than exceed the time saving.  In short it will be of benefit to nobody but those who happen to live in west london and wish to travel to central Birmingham.  Ludicrous.

Either finish the thing properly and extend to Manchester or cut losses pull down what has been done and re-wild.   Just stopping at Birmingham is the worst of both worlds.

Any conclusion about HS2 that says we should never have built massively needed train capacity is idiotic. 

The only questions it raises are how we can fix planning to allow the construction of vital public infrastructure without NIMBYs and their MPs being able to turn it into cost-exploding catastrophe. 

Given the Tory conference starts in Manchester this weekend, I would support the rail workers going all out on the strike action on that route. Rishi will just fire up the jet but the rest would be forced to take a magic bus or go via Doncaster.

Agree Guy and if they stop at Old Oak Common then, as well as the sunk costs, there will need to be large payments to contractors to get out of the contracts (I read £10b). Just crazy

"Any conclusion about HS2 that says we should never have built massively needed train capacity is idiotic." 

This country now has over capacity on peak time inter city trains - the routes I use still do not have as many trains as they did pre pandemic and the trains are never full.   Now that could not have been predicted when HS2 was conceived and signed off but this thing is primarily aimed at business travel not leisure travel and while leisure travel continues to grow business travel has gone through the floor.

Is that in London Guy? 

Non scientific study, but I did Manchester to Birmingham twice last week, all 4 trains had passengers standing for the entire journey.

was that cross country?  They have always been inadequate.   I have travelled on GWR LNER and  West Coast to and from London and they all seem relatively quiet at morning and evening peaks (still busy when prices come down from silly peak levels though)

The point of HS2 was always about freeing up freight capacity (or at least that is what was trumpeted at the time it was announced) it was never really about passenger numbers.

Possibly apocryphally and certainly anecdotally, traffic on my commute I would say is higher now than pre-covid. Lots of people back in the office but now not using trains to get there.

Also, worth noting that the "Northern Powerhouse" line relies in part on HS2 lines that were to be built between Crewe and Manchester (I think).

lots of nonsense on this thread

HS2 is about capacity and particularly freight capacity

we don't have too much rail capacity, we have tickets that are much too expensive, particularly at times when people actually need to travel

if we reduced tickets to a reasonable price lots of people would use their cars less and we would have full or overcrowded trains

reasonable people could disagree about whether HS2 was the best use of money before it started

but now it has started it must be built, and built properly, to get the undoubted benefits it will bring

and the longer it is delayed the more it will cost

eg the current mothballing of the Euston upgrade is expensive in itself and will add billions to the overall cost 

Pesto and Steph very good on this this week, and as I’ve said for decades. Britain has shockingly poor public transport infrastructure. It simply is too difficult to get around. The London commute canard is the obvious example. People so obsessed with living in the country but having to work in the City whilst paying no tax they will put up with shit transport for their entire lives. #feudalfailures

Public sector cannot self-deliver anything. Idiots recruiting idiots

Costs only go up if you don't run procurement properly with tight contracts and robust contract management

This is why nothing should be nationalised 

Bollocks. It’s all about management and oversight. You can’t privatise utilities, allow foreign ownership, fail to maintain standards and expect any sort of service. As with anything, if you want a boring effective service you have to have a boring hybrid framework.

piechucker28 Sep 23 07:40

Public sector cannot self-deliver anything. Idiots recruiting idiots

Costs only go up if you don't run procurement properly with tight contracts and robust contract management

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sounds fine

until the 200 miles of construction hits rock when you budgeted for soil or you realise that the soil in this part of the line contracts more in summer and expands more in winter due to moisture variations and then you realise your inflation assumptions got kicked sideways and you need to bump the price

and then you whack on top of that a goverment overspend for the year that sees a short term saving by slowing down the construction which adds 2 years onto the overall cost of the project (but who cares, cause it'll be post the next election) 

and of course every supplier you tender knows this and isn't signing up to contracts that will see them carrying the extra cost in the event of random out of scope events

Pesto on latest pod saying HS2 costs £400m per mile whereas the French same thing £24m, poss £42m. Point being Britain is fvcking useless at this stuff. Totally. Fvcking. Useless. 

As Tom Peck says, it costs so much because the Tories decided to build forty tunnels to keep blue voters happy in Oxfordshire, who are now going to vote lib dem anyway. Everything they touch turns to sh1t.

Bertha, central gov are poor contract administrators. There are pockets of good administration in local government but it's few and far between. As 3P implies, one needs to look at the detail of what is being procured and how

I'd love to actually see the numbers for how much they'd have to pay out to terminate various contracts early.  I suspect it's heading towards the amount it would cost to just do the work anyway.

I think there's now enough discontent amongst Tory MP's that they'll just build it anyway.

We also need to get more European in just telling people that infrastructure projects are going to happen rather than allowing the process to get bogged down with appeals from all kinds of niche interest groups.

No idea why they didn't just turn the East Coast mainline into a mega fast London - Leeds, Leeds to Scotland passenger line, the West Coast mainline into an electrified freight line that could use spare electricity capacity at night, and then do the various cross- country services suggested above e.g. Cardiff, Birmingham, Nottingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds. 

We seem to be obsessed with direct trains, and them finishing in city centres. If there's a relatively fast link into the City centre, which there is in London with e.g. Heathrow Express, HS1, who GAF if you have to spend 10 minutes getting off one reliable train onto another?  

Capacity blah blah blah, but surely you can achieve that by lengthening platforms, raising/re-building relatively lightweight bridges or re-routing local roads? 

lots of nonsense on this thread

- plus ca change

 

HS2 is about capacity and particularly freight capacity

- nonsense. If you want more conventional rail capacity then build, er, more conventional rail capacity. don't (attempt to) build a very high speed line (higher than all Euro counterparts except it'll never run at those line speeds due to energy costs so way spend the huge amounts extra on arrow straight alingments but hey let's not get sidetracked) on the presumption that this will abstract sufficient demand off conventional rail to free up capacity there. It won't. Why? There is excess supply over demand by some margin currently and in any case HS2's business case (stop laughing) is based on premium fares. There are already FOUR ways of getting to Brum via rail, the extra demand for a top premium option that may not even serve even vaguely central London is going to be slim. 

 

we don't have too much rail capacity,

- yes we do 

 

we have tickets that are much too expensive, particularly at times when people actually need to travel

- this is also true. not just too expensive but also still way too complicated and inflexible and unintegrated. 

 

if we reduced tickets to a reasonable price lots of people would use their cars less and we would have full or overcrowded trains

- it isn't as simple as this. The Brum to Euston (let's assume it makes it there) won't primarily abstract from car for obvious reasons

 

reasonable people could disagree about whether HS2 was the best use of money before it started

- no, reasonable people looked at low 30s billions cost in 2009 money and fainted because a) that's a stupefying amount of money for something we don't really need, b) the UK is fiscally and financially parlous and c) no one for a moment believed that would bear any relationship to the outturn cost. And lo here we are 14 years later with not a train in sight and a total bill of circa £90bn for a far, far smaller railway that won't at present time even get to what you might call London

 

but now it has started it must be built, and built properly, to get the undoubted benefits it will bring

and the longer it is delayed the more it will cost

- on this argument any bad idea ever launched must be seen through to its conclusion no matter what. The London Motorway Box immediately springs to mind. Some ideas are bad no matter how much you finesse them and deserve to die. 

 

eg the current mothballing of the Euston upgrade is expensive in itself and will add billions to the overall cost 

- it'll add to the cost but by nothing like the amount of doing the current planned works at Euston (which have magically doubled overnight)

 

ps all current HS2 prices in 2019 money. of course inflation, especially in construction and specialist construction areas, has been really low since th....wait a second

Medley pretty  much has this.   HS2 was never the most efficient way of delivering more capacity to the lines -it was a vanity project - and one the country can ill afford given the economic position and the sums needed to get regional and local transport across the country up to SE standards, which is far far more important in terms of levelling up.   Getting people to London fast has rather the opposite effect.

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