@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
A dude on Twitter reckons the planned new HS2 will shave 15 minutes off the central Birmingham-central London train journey
15 minutes. £60 BILLION. Half of the Chilterns ripped apart. Euston demolished. Huge holes across London. The north denied
This is the final electoral seppuku of the Conservative Party
82 minutes I think is the fastest current journey time from Euston to New Street.
Cutting that to about an hour would be quite beneficial for commuters to and from Birmingham to London
“Quite beneficial for commuters” is a phrase that justifies spending £30m. Not ninety BILLION
HS2 is fundamentally about capacity not speed. Also nobody should shed a tear for Euston, it's a rubbish station, looked even worse last time I was there when network rail had shoved cheap wood paneling all over the place.
Youre right about Euston. It is awful. But I spent many a happy Friday afternoon in the Doric Arch pub next to it, waiting for a train back oop North at neighbouring Kings Cross, drinking Summer Lightning and some of the other frothy, foaming, flagons of ale they have.
Euston looks shit because it is condemned. Demolitions have already begun in the area. A new station is arising. For HS2
What a slavonian clusterfuck. Does Sunak want this to be his sole notable legacy? The man who pushed the final button on the biggest infrastructure disaster in UK history
I am coming round to the prevailing view that he is weak. I don't think he is in control of things.
It is a complete and utter shambles. Nothing seems to work in this country at the moment. I don't think Labour would be any better but they deserve a chance. I just won't bother voting next time.
As for Jeremy Hunt's speech today and the content that has been trailed, why is he even bothering. He is not convincing anyone.
A “cost-cutting” rail timetable has been blamed by passengers for “dangerous” chaos at London Bridge.
Extraordinary pictures show the concourse at the central London station crammed with thousands of passengers during the evening rush hour on Wednesday.
People described being trapped in a “crush”, with a “total lack of information”. There were reports of fights breaking out and people suffering panic attacks.
There were scores of cancellations, delays and line closures, with passengers taking to social media over the “unsafe” stampede at around 5.30pm.
Rail chiefs blamed a trespassing incident but commuters lashed out at rail firm Southeastern, saying overcrowding was a daily occurrence since it scrapped three key direct services in a new timetable last month.
Direct trains on the line between Hayes and London Cannon Street, and from London Charing Cross to both Woolwich and Maidstone East, have been axed to create “more reliable” services and save £10 million, meaning people heading to these destinations must now change at London Bridge.
It’s good to see things getting back to normal, after the pandemic
Overcrowding on Southeastern services has returned to pre Covid levels, at least on Tues-Thurs, in my own experience. I normally cycle but took the train a couple of times this week and it's back to normal for the first time since early 2020. The timetable simplification I can understand, I think it's to do with the complicated junction at Lewisham that has services crossing tracks and delaying each other. But there's no redundancy in the service - as soon as something goes wrong things get very bad very quickly. Southeastern is a terrible train operator, which doesn't help. The metro services should be run by TfL.
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
The cops don't even pretend to give a fuck about stolen bikes. They author is entirely correct; it might as well be legal to steal one.
I reckon I could find 5 obviously stolen bikes near me on FB/Gumtree in half an hour. You can probably multiply that by 10 if I started looking in London.
@APStylebook We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizing “the” labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college-educated. Instead, use wording such as people with mental illnesses. And use these descriptions only when clearly relevant.
Are you suggesting being french is a mental illness?
*The* French are incurably…. French. Poor fellows.
- there are rumours that HS2 won’t be built into central London; - The Sun says it will terminate in the west London suburbs; - The Government says it remains committed to HS2 reaching Manchester
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
You are forgetting that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
You are forgetting that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
You are forgetting that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
Indeed. Even though Leon argues from ignorance, he does demonstrate how easy it will be to rubbish what the government is rumoured to be considering, and how difficult now it will be to explain.
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
You are forgetting that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
Indeed. Even though Leon argues from ignorance, he does demonstrate how easy it will be to rubbish what the government is rumoured to be considering, and how difficult now it will be to explain.
Yes. This rumoured plan really is the worst of both worlds. Enraging both sides and achieving none of the objectives. Par for the course from this lot I'm afraid.
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
It's amazing you see a DfE conspiracy in this - it makes you sound unhinged.
Incidentally, you could resignal and redesign the OOC box for HS2 termination, and you don't need a 'dead end' platform to terminate or reverse a train in any event.
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
It's cock up, not a conspiracy.
And when there's a cock-up everyone keeps their heads down, rather than volunteering to fix it, because that's very high risk, potentially impossible, and rarely rewarded.
The cops don't even pretend to give a fuck about stolen bikes. They author is entirely correct; it might as well be legal to steal one.
I reckon I could find 5 obviously stolen bikes near me on FB/Gumtree in half an hour. You can probably multiply that by 10 if I started looking in London.
I think, for many police, it's just a 9-5 job to pay the bills where they get the satisfaction of lording it over others as an occupational perk.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
It's amazing you see a DfE conspiracy in this - it makes you sound unhinged.
Incidentally, you could resignal and redesign the OOC box for HS2 termination, and you don't need a 'dead end' platform to terminate or reverse a train in any event.
I meant DfT. Autocorrect is the one seeing DfE conspiracies here!
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
You are forgetting that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
This is really not about inertia.
You are asking the civil service to relitigate old decisions. Doesn’t happen.
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
You are forgetting that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
This is really not about inertia.
You are asking the civil service to relitigate old decisions. Doesn’t happen.
You are saying this in a conversation where we are discussing reports they are going to *checks notes* change a decision.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
You are forgetting that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
Indeed. Even though Leon argues from ignorance, he does demonstrate how easy it will be to rubbish what the government is rumoured to be considering, and how difficult now it will be to explain.
I am happy to admit to ignorance in the detailed field of dedicated new railway infrastructure, It bores me. And, besides, PB has real experts in this arena and I will readily cede to them
What I do know about is politics and particularly the emotional way that politics plays out. If the government now comes out and says HS2, at a cost of £17 trillion and the destruction of the New Forest, will terminate in some fucking potting shed in eastern Slough and will ultimately shave 13 seconds off the travel time between Newent and Watford then I predict an explosion of contempt and anger
At least if the government does decide to terminate HS2 in Ealing it will have succeeded in building the perfect metaphor for the last thirteen years of Tory misrule. What a shower.
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
You are forgetting that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
This is really not about inertia.
You are asking the civil service to relitigate old decisions. Doesn’t happen.
You are saying this in a conversation where we are discussing reports they are going to *checks notes* change a decision.
Yea - but that is driven by the treasury. My counter was to your point that they should change the positioning from speed to capacity
As @Casino_Royale notes the risk/return doesn’t work on an individual basis
The cops don't even pretend to give a fuck about stolen bikes. They author is entirely correct; it might as well be legal to steal one.
I reckon I could find 5 obviously stolen bikes near me on FB/Gumtree in half an hour. You can probably multiply that by 10 if I started looking in London.
Effectively some crimes are decriminalised given the Police's approach to them. I have seen numerous posts on local facebook groups of people who have had property stolen from their home or garden, they have camera footage. The Police don't want to know. Yet Durham are a pretty good Police force, compared to the others.
Mind you our Police can take the time to visit 1,000 homes of people suspected of streaming pay TV illegally. Protecting the commercial interests of big businesses.
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
You are forgetting that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
Indeed. Even though Leon argues from ignorance, he does demonstrate how easy it will be to rubbish what the government is rumoured to be considering, and how difficult now it will be to explain.
I am happy to admit to ignorance in the detailed field of dedicated new railway infrastructure, It bores me. And, besides, PB has real experts in this arena and I will readily cede to them
What I do know about is politics and particularly the emotional way that politics plays out. If the government now comes out and says HS2, at a cost of £17 trillion and the destruction of the New Forest, will terminate in some fucking potting shed in eastern Slough and will ultimately shave 13 seconds off the travel time between Newent and Watford then I predict an explosion of contempt and anger
The New Forest? It doesn't go anywhere near the New Forest! Or Newent, for the matter of that, although it may improve services at Ledbury.
Do you mean a small spinney in Berkshire where a moderately large number of trees were felled to make room for the tunnel opening?
(I have to say though, if this goes ahead the Tories can write off Chesham, for good.)
At least if the government does decide to terminate HS2 in Ealing it will have succeeded in building the perfect metaphor for the last thirteen years of Tory misrule. What a shower.
That metaphor would only be complete if it didn't work properly when they open it....
The cops don't even pretend to give a fuck about stolen bikes. They author is entirely correct; it might as well be legal to steal one.
I reckon I could find 5 obviously stolen bikes near me on FB/Gumtree in half an hour. You can probably multiply that by 10 if I started looking in London.
Effectively some crimes are decriminalised given the Police's approach to them. I have seen numerous posts on local facebook groups of people who have had property stolen from their home or garden, they have camera footage. The Police don't want to know. Yet Durham are a pretty good Police force, compared to the others.
Mind you our Police can take the time to visit 1,000 homes of people suspected of streaming pay TV illegally. Protecting the commercial interests of big businesses.
It has long been the case. 30 years ago I was burgled, including an unusual camera. The police did nothing, but I went to the only 3 stores in the city that sold second hand cameras and found it. The store had the details of the person who tried to sell it to them. I reported this to the police, who returned the camera, but none of the other stolen goods. No one was prosecuted.
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
You are forgetting that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
This is really not about inertia.
You are asking the civil service to relitigate old decisions. Doesn’t happen.
You are saying this in a conversation where we are discussing reports they are going to *checks notes* change a decision.
Inertia only applies to stationary objects now, does it? Call yourself a teacher!
The one piece of consolation about this HS2 shambles, as we scan the world around us and watch countries both rich and poor sticking down high speed rail in their sleep while we commission more reports, is that the Americans are even worse at this stuff. The stories of their aborted attempts to build even small stretches of moderately rapid railway in California are hilarious.
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
You are forgetting that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
Indeed. Even though Leon argues from ignorance, he does demonstrate how easy it will be to rubbish what the government is rumoured to be considering, and how difficult now it will be to explain.
I am happy to admit to ignorance in the detailed field of dedicated new railway infrastructure, It bores me. And, besides, PB has real experts in this arena and I will readily cede to them
What I do know about is politics and particularly the emotional way that politics plays out. If the government now comes out and says HS2, at a cost of £17 trillion and the destruction of the New Forest, will terminate in some fucking potting shed in eastern Slough and will ultimately shave 13 seconds off the travel time between Newent and Watford then I predict an explosion of contempt and anger
The New Forest? It doesn't go anywhere near the New Forest! Or Newent, for the matter of that, although it may improve services at Ledbury.
Do you mean a small spinney in Berkshire where a moderately large number of trees were felled to make room for the tunnel opening?
(I have to say though, if this goes ahead the Tories can write off Chesham, for good.)
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Thanks. It’s a very alien approach. In the digital sphere the whole philosophy is to avoid monolithic systems and complex dependencies. Take steps toward the end goal, delivering incremental value, learning and adapting as you go.
I respect your experience, but can’t help wondering if there aren’t things to be learnt from the digital world. For example you could finish Euston even if the whole route is not connected. Or you could take out one of the main bottlenecks.
I am sure I’m wrong due to ignorance, but it feels like there must be a way to make this less binary or come up with stupid ideas like having trains terminate mikes outside the capital. I recall the original Eurostar in Waterloo for example. The trains got third rail capability and trundled through Brixton. In France they went fast, HS2 could do the same.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
You are forgetting that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
This is really not about inertia.
You are asking the civil service to relitigate old decisions. Doesn’t happen.
You are saying this in a conversation where we are discussing reports they are going to *checks notes* change a decision.
Inertia only applies to stationary objects now, does it? Call yourself a teacher!
In this case it doesn't seem to apply to stations...
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
The government says it is "committed to delivering HS2 to Manchester". Fab. I can see very high speed shuttles to the Airport from the city centre, with the line south of there mothballed.
It's like when they started to wire the WCML. The first sections to open were Crewe - Liverpool and Crewe - Manchester. What today's "committed" announcement is the equivalent of is confirming wires to Manchester. Having cancelled wiring up anywhere to the south.
The cops don't even pretend to give a fuck about stolen bikes. They author is entirely correct; it might as well be legal to steal one.
I reckon I could find 5 obviously stolen bikes near me on FB/Gumtree in half an hour. You can probably multiply that by 10 if I started looking in London.
When I grew up in Denmark, where every station had forests of bikes, mostly unlocked, there was a kid in my class (American) who would routinely steal a bike to get where he wanted to go. He argued that there were so many that one would hardly be missed, and claimed that when convenient he'd return it to the original place when he came back.
The point of the story: we were all reasonably responsible middle-class kids - mostly children of diplomats etc. - and we could all see he was wrong and slightly bonkers. But it literally never occurred to any of us to do anything about it - tell a teacher, call the police, even have a serious talk with him to persuade him to stop. The instinct to report a crime to the authorities was completely missing. And in retrospect I wonder how serious a crime would have had to be to stir us into action.
When we hear of cases of really serious crimes (domestic abuse, for example) being ignored by neighbours, it makes me remember that. The instinct not to get involved, not to be a snitch, and avoid "trouble" is hugely strong.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Thanks. It’s a very alien approach. In the digital sphere the whole philosophy is to avoid monolithic systems and complex dependencies. Take steps toward the end goal, delivering incremental value, learning and adapting as you go.
I respect your experience, but can’t help wondering if there aren’t things to be learnt from the digital world. For example you could finish Euston even if the whole route is not connected. Or you could take out one of the main bottlenecks.
I am sure I’m wrong due to ignorance, but it feels like there must be a way to make this less binary or come up with stupid ideas like having trains terminate mikes outside the capital. I recall the original Eurostar in Waterloo for example. The trains got third rail capability and trundled through Brixton. In France they went fast, HS2 could do the same.
That was so embarassing for the country! I remember my first trip back from Paris by train, whizzing through the French countryside at however hundreds of miles an hour it was, so fast you couldn't even see the bridges as we flew under them; then back in the UK we were overtaken by a train full of commuters at Bickley...
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
You are forgetting that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
Indeed. Even though Leon argues from ignorance, he does demonstrate how easy it will be to rubbish what the government is rumoured to be considering, and how difficult now it will be to explain.
I am happy to admit to ignorance in the detailed field of dedicated new railway infrastructure, It bores me. And, besides, PB has real experts in this arena and I will readily cede to them
What I do know about is politics and particularly the emotional way that politics plays out. If the government now comes out and says HS2, at a cost of £17 trillion and the destruction of the New Forest, will terminate in some fucking potting shed in eastern Slough and will ultimately shave 13 seconds off the travel time between Newent and Watford then I predict an explosion of contempt and anger
The journey time wasn't the point, it was capacity. The problem being of course that a walk to Birmingham Curzon Street then HS to Old Oak then crushing onto the Elizabeth line will be slower than train from New Street to Euston. Which means no real capacity gain.
Bra. Vo. And HY, Moonrabbit and a few others will STILL insist not only that we vote Conservative, but how it is the moral choice. Is it fuck.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Thanks. It’s a very alien approach. In the digital sphere the whole philosophy is to avoid monolithic systems and complex dependencies. Take steps toward the end goal, delivering incremental value, learning and adapting as you go.
I respect your experience, but can’t help wondering if there aren’t things to be learnt from the digital world. For example you could finish Euston even if the whole route is not connected. Or you could take out one of the main bottlenecks.
I am sure I’m wrong due to ignorance, but it feels like there must be a way to make this less binary or come up with stupid ideas like having trains terminate mikes outside the capital. I recall the original Eurostar in Waterloo for example. The trains got third rail capability and trundled through Brixton. In France they went fast, HS2 could do the same.
That was so embarassing for the country! I remember my first trip back from Paris by train, whizzing through the French countryside at however hundreds of miles an hour it was, so fast you couldn't even see the bridges as we flew under them; then back in the UK we were overtaken by a train full of commuters at Bickley...
I remember that too. It created incentives to get on with HS1, but in the meantime value had been delivered. We were both paying customers on actual trains, getting to where we needed to go quicker than before, rather than reading endless debates in the press,
It looks like HS2 is going to make the Berlin airport look like a triumph of project management.
There will be many thousands of grifters on well paid contracts who will have made a good living out of it though.
There are over 18,000 civil servants at the DfT. That's more than twice as many as at the DfE, which is grossly overstaffed.
Of course, I assume quite a lot of these are things like safety inspectors, employees of the Highways Agency, the people who (mis)manage the smart motorway network and so on.
But it's quite extraordinary that out of nearly twenty thousand people not one of them seems to be possessed of an atom of common sense.
Unless, of course, there is another explanation...
All politics is relative of course; and in voting (or not) you have to put the options alongside and compare the meerkat. In 1997 putting major's Tories against Blair's Labour I had no real hesitation in voting Tory. Today, putting the Tories against SKS's Labour (and SKS is no Blair) the Tories are simply nowhere. I could not vote for them under any circumstances at the moment.
It seems to me that, oddly, all the other parties are acting as if they have nothing really to win. Tories and SNP are both acting as if there is no real hope for their near future. If there were NZ would have been out ages ago; and Nicola would not be making egregious and unforced errors. The LDs may as well not exist they are so invisible.
One of their big mistakes in 2019 was pouring a lot of money into futile national (or nationwide) campaigning, including tons of direct mail from someone who pops in here now and again. I’m sure that won’t be happening again, and would expect all their effort and resources to be ruthlessly targeted and local. If you live in one of their chosen spots, I’d hope you’d already be seeing it, but for the rest of us, yes, they’re pretty invisible.
I live in one of their targets. They've put out one leaflet in the last year. That said, they remain ace at winning by-elections.
But if the Lib Dems are targeting things effectively, you would not be getting anything at all, Mr Palmer. After all you are an ex Labour MP and a Labour loyalist.
When I first won my ward in the early 90s, for some time I’d kept a record of local Tory members, annotating the delivery routes so that those houses got missed, and as I found new ones - from canvassing, letters to the paper, or the grapevine - I went and knocked another house off the route by hand. So by the time the election came we were skipping anyone we knew to be a diehard Tory (to coin a phrase).
One of my special moments was at the count, after we’d won by over a thousand (having lost by the same four years earlier!) when one of the leading Tories came up to me and said “I don’t understand how you’ve done it?; we never saw anything from you”!
Back then it was rare to go to so much trouble, and credit to our delivers for following the instructions. Nowadays if a party isn’t doing targeted campaigning and messaging, it’s way behind the times.
Yes, maybe? But my neighbour voted LibDem last time, and also says she's just had the one leaflet. It may be more because we're up a fairly obscure blind alley and the deliverers don't bother.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Thanks. It’s a very alien approach. In the digital sphere the whole philosophy is to avoid monolithic systems and complex dependencies. Take steps toward the end goal, delivering incremental value, learning and adapting as you go.
I respect your experience, but can’t help wondering if there aren’t things to be learnt from the digital world. For example you could finish Euston even if the whole route is not connected. Or you could take out one of the main bottlenecks.
I am sure I’m wrong due to ignorance, but it feels like there must be a way to make this less binary or come up with stupid ideas like having trains terminate mikes outside the capital. I recall the original Eurostar in Waterloo for example. The trains got third rail capability and trundled through Brixton. In France they went fast, HS2 could do the same.
That was so embarassing for the country! I remember my first trip back from Paris by train, whizzing through the French countryside at however hundreds of miles an hour it was, so fast you couldn't even see the bridges as we flew under them; then back in the UK we were overtaken by a train full of commuters at Bickley...
I’m always amused by the story of the Great Fire. They had all sort of ideas on how to make London a modern city with wide, well planned streets.
The government took so long agreeing the optimal plan that when they went to start building they discovered that the existing owners had already rebuilt their houses (and streets) where they had been before
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
And so we talk about competitiveness. Britain falling behind the French and he Germans must be the fault of the EU. Perhaps. Or, just maybe, they invest and we don't. They have new motorways and high speed rail and we don't. They don't treat their workforce like exploitable cattle as we do. They invest in education so the next generation aren't ignorant and stupid as too many f ours are.
Again, this goes back to the 70s. Terrible management and communist unions broke industry. Then Thatcherism removed what was left and committed us on the path to banking and shopping. New Labour fixed the rotting schools and hospitals but didn't change the direction of travel. And now the open corruption of a party awarding 9-figure uncontested contracts to its friends with no concern about delivery of the contract or trying to get the money back.
So no, it isn't party political. The Tories are far worse than Labour but its not as if Blairism changed anything substantial. Starmer needs to look past the Tony towards Harold Wilson and the white heat of the optimism of the 1960s...
MPs have been saying privately that they think Zahawi is doomed and they don’t want to be seen to be backing a ‘dead man walking’. They’ve grown bored over the past year of defending dud policies and people in their party, only for a screeching handbrake turn a day or so later. One MP defending a particularly egregious policy on the radio discovered the inevitable U-turn had taken place while he was in the studio, and vowed never to bother being loyal again.
The problem...though, is that voter boredom might not be because people don’t want politics in their lives to the extent it has been forced on them recently. It may instead be because they don’t want the Conservatives in their lives any more.
The psychodrama of the previous year made boring necessary. But Sunak needs to give his MPs a sense that they’re fighting for the right cause and that he’s got fire in his belly too. Bored voters are one thing, but a party that’s bored of governing is quite another.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
And so we talk about competitiveness. Britain falling behind the French and he Germans must be the fault of the EU. Perhaps. Or, just maybe, they invest and we don't. They have new motorways and high speed rail and we don't. They don't treat their workforce like exploitable cattle as we do. They invest in education so the next generation aren't ignorant and stupid as too many f ours are.
Again, this goes back to the 70s. Terrible management and communist unions broke industry. Then Thatcherism removed what was left and committed us on the path to banking and shopping. New Labour fixed the rotting schools and hospitals but didn't change the direction of travel. And now the open corruption of a party awarding 9-figure uncontested contracts to its friends with no concern about delivery of the contract or trying to get the money back.
So no, it isn't party political. The Tories are far worse than Labour but its not as if Blairism changed anything substantial. Starmer needs to look past the Tony towards Harold Wilson and the white heat of the optimism of the 1960s...
If only there were some sort of association or partnership with them that we could join...
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
And so we talk about competitiveness. Britain falling behind the French and he Germans must be the fault of the EU. Perhaps. Or, just maybe, they invest and we don't. They have new motorways and high speed rail and we don't. They don't treat their workforce like exploitable cattle as we do. They invest in education so the next generation aren't ignorant and stupid as too many f ours are.
Again, this goes back to the 70s. Terrible management and communist unions broke industry. Then Thatcherism removed what was left and committed us on the path to banking and shopping. New Labour fixed the rotting schools and hospitals but didn't change the direction of travel. And now the open corruption of a party awarding 9-figure uncontested contracts to its friends with no concern about delivery of the contract or trying to get the money back.
So no, it isn't party political. The Tories are far worse than Labour but its not as if Blairism changed anything substantial. Starmer needs to look past the Tony towards Harold Wilson and the white heat of the optimism of the 1960s...
If only there were some sort of association or partnership with them that we could join...
If that were the only problem we'd have had 15 high speed lines 20 years ago.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
And so we talk about competitiveness. Britain falling behind the French and he Germans must be the fault of the EU. Perhaps. Or, just maybe, they invest and we don't. They have new motorways and high speed rail and we don't. They don't treat their workforce like exploitable cattle as we do. They invest in education so the next generation aren't ignorant and stupid as too many f ours are.
Again, this goes back to the 70s. Terrible management and communist unions broke industry. Then Thatcherism removed what was left and committed us on the path to banking and shopping. New Labour fixed the rotting schools and hospitals but didn't change the direction of travel. And now the open corruption of a party awarding 9-figure uncontested contracts to its friends with no concern about delivery of the contract or trying to get the money back.
So no, it isn't party political. The Tories are far worse than Labour but its not as if Blairism changed anything substantial. Starmer needs to look past the Tony towards Harold Wilson and the white heat of the optimism of the 1960s...
Have to disagree about education, at least as far as France goes. Their education system is a joke and has been for decades. Bored graduates teaching restless classes by rote.
Germany, I think the difference is that they take non-academic education very seriously, while we don't. It's less a policy than a mindset.
I wonder if there is political chicanery at work here
1. Jeremy Hunt is about to give his “positive speech” on Britain today, praising the economy and refuting declinism. This will be somewhat undermined as it is revealed we are in such abject decline we have spent £100 zillion on a railway that goes from nowhere to nowhere. And won’t have any toilets. Or seats. Or wheels. Or purpose
2. All this impacts Keir Starmer personally and heavily. He’s not just the Labour leader he is the MP for Euston and Camden - and all the places in that bit of London that have been controversially demolished to make way for a railway that now won’t happen (allegedly). Starmer will be PM in 18 months. This will then be his call. What will he say?
Lions led by donkeys. Whether that’s the NHS, Education, immigration or Transport. That’s the British problem. Heroic efforts to make broken systems work.
Then the politicians come in driven by short term Daily Mail headlines and somehow contrive reform and change that makes ths situation worse.
I wonder if there is political chicanery at work here
1. Jeremy Hunt is about to give his “positive speech” on Britain today, praising the economy and refuting declinism. This will be somewhat undermined as it is revealed we are in such abject decline we have spent £100 zillion on a railway that goes from nowhere to nowhere. And won’t have any toilets. Or seats. Or wheels. Or purpose
2. All this impacts Keir Starmer personally and heavily. He’s not just the Labour leader he is the MP for Euston and Camden - and all the places in that bit of London that have been controversially demolished to make way for a railway that now won’t happen (allegedly). Starmer will be PM in 18 months. This will then be his call. What will he say?
That’s the sort of short term clever clever hyper political nonsense that has led this government to the abyss. Truss tried to outbid Starmer for example. So it’s entirely possible that they are playing silly buggers and will shoot themselves in the foot again.
I wonder if there is political chicanery at work here
1. Jeremy Hunt is about to give his “positive speech” on Britain today, praising the economy and refuting declinism. This will be somewhat undermined as it is revealed we are in such abject decline we have spent £100 zillion on a railway that goes from nowhere to nowhere. And won’t have any toilets. Or seats. Or wheels. Or purpose
2. All this impacts Keir Starmer personally and heavily. He’s not just the Labour leader he is the MP for Euston and Camden - and all the places in that bit of London that have been controversially demolished to make way for a railway that now won’t happen (allegedly). Starmer will be PM in 18 months. This will then be his call. What will he say?
He[ll set up an independent enquiry stuffed full of lawyers and worthies and nothing will happen,
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are hit and miss, aren’t we? Liz Line was late, but it’s great. Heathrow was a shambles now it is quite shiny and lovely in places
Yet where is the new Heathrow runway? And what about railways and airports outside London? They are often a mess
You know more about this HS2 stuff than most on here. What do you think is going on? Kite flying? Genuine chaos in HMG, and panic about cost? Political backstabbing?
- there are rumours that HS2 won’t be built into central London; - The Sun says it will terminate in the west London suburbs; - The Government says it remains committed to HS2 reaching Manchester
!
That's a bit of a non-denial denial, isn't it?
This could be a waving of bleeding stumps tactic by the Department for Transport. We know that Sunak and Hunt are desperate for spending cuts- gotta fund the tax bribe cut somehow- so departments suggest the most obviously harmful savings they can think of.
The risk is that, right now, the Cabinet want the stumps to bleed.
The government says it is "committed to delivering HS2 to Manchester".
For now. The timing is difficult politically, with 2024 looming. I note though that they haven't discounted the idea of putting the project on ice for 5 years, which would contain the amount to be written off when a government does eventually pull the plug on the northern link.
I wonder if there is political chicanery at work here
1. Jeremy Hunt is about to give his “positive speech” on Britain today, praising the economy and refuting declinism. This will be somewhat undermined as it is revealed we are in such abject decline we have spent £100 zillion on a railway that goes from nowhere to nowhere. And won’t have any toilets. Or seats. Or wheels. Or purpose
2. All this impacts Keir Starmer personally and heavily. He’s not just the Labour leader he is the MP for Euston and Camden - and all the places in that bit of London that have been controversially demolished to make way for a railway that now won’t happen (allegedly). Starmer will be PM in 18 months. This will then be his call. What will he say?
Build HS2
Because as of 8am this morning it's a symbol of our decline as a Country and our Grade A incompetency.
You'd think the binary search part, the whizzing backwards and forwards, would be easy to automate. You might also think the actual looking for the appearance or disappearance of objects would be easy-ish to automate.
I wonder if there is political chicanery at work here
1. Jeremy Hunt is about to give his “positive speech” on Britain today, praising the economy and refuting declinism. This will be somewhat undermined as it is revealed we are in such abject decline we have spent £100 zillion on a railway that goes from nowhere to nowhere. And won’t have any toilets. Or seats. Or wheels. Or purpose
2. All this impacts Keir Starmer personally and heavily. He’s not just the Labour leader he is the MP for Euston and Camden - and all the places in that bit of London that have been controversially demolished to make way for a railway that now won’t happen (allegedly). Starmer will be PM in 18 months. This will then be his call. What will he say?
I reckon this, largely incomprehensible, HS2 malarkey is to distract us all from the tax travails of "The King of Anal". It seems to be working.
I wonder if there is political chicanery at work here
1. Jeremy Hunt is about to give his “positive speech” on Britain today, praising the economy and refuting declinism. This will be somewhat undermined as it is revealed we are in such abject decline we have spent £100 zillion on a railway that goes from nowhere to nowhere. And won’t have any toilets. Or seats. Or wheels. Or purpose
2. All this impacts Keir Starmer personally and heavily. He’s not just the Labour leader he is the MP for Euston and Camden - and all the places in that bit of London that have been controversially demolished to make way for a railway that now won’t happen (allegedly). Starmer will be PM in 18 months. This will then be his call. What will he say?
Build HS2
Because as of 8am this morning it's a symbol of our decline as a Country and our Grade A incompetency.
It's also tied to a rebuild of Euston that he will surely want to go ahead.
I wonder if there is political chicanery at work here
1. Jeremy Hunt is about to give his “positive speech” on Britain today, praising the economy and refuting declinism. This will be somewhat undermined as it is revealed we are in such abject decline we have spent £100 zillion on a railway that goes from nowhere to nowhere. And won’t have any toilets. Or seats. Or wheels. Or purpose
2. All this impacts Keir Starmer personally and heavily. He’s not just the Labour leader he is the MP for Euston and Camden - and all the places in that bit of London that have been controversially demolished to make way for a railway that now won’t happen (allegedly). Starmer will be PM in 18 months. This will then be his call. What will he say?
I reckon this, largely incomprehensible, HS2 malarkey is to distract us all from the tax travails of "The King of Anal". It seems to be working.
Now there is a mental image I could well have done without.
I wonder if there is political chicanery at work here
1. Jeremy Hunt is about to give his “positive speech” on Britain today, praising the economy and refuting declinism. This will be somewhat undermined as it is revealed we are in such abject decline we have spent £100 zillion on a railway that goes from nowhere to nowhere. And won’t have any toilets. Or seats. Or wheels. Or purpose
2. All this impacts Keir Starmer personally and heavily. He’s not just the Labour leader he is the MP for Euston and Camden - and all the places in that bit of London that have been controversially demolished to make way for a railway that now won’t happen (allegedly). Starmer will be PM in 18 months. This will then be his call. What will he say?
That’s the sort of short term clever clever hyper political nonsense that has led this government to the abyss. Truss tried to outbid Starmer for example. So it’s entirely possible that they are playing silly buggers and will shoot themselves in the foot again.
I think they have been hobbling about on stumps for some time.
Put money down on Hunts speech reannouncing things already known, a bunch of guff, and something clever sounding to cover cuts. Then the think tanks will release their boilerplate press releases.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are at cross-purposes. I am talking about the project from concept to planning through construction then delivery. I assume you are talking about the construction bit. Yes, we can build things very well - not disputing that. But we're shit at realising we need things building, then agreeing where to build them, then continuing with the plan to build them after a change of party in power.
Nowhere else suffers from this stupidity on this scale. Just us.
I wonder if there is political chicanery at work here
1. Jeremy Hunt is about to give his “positive speech” on Britain today, praising the economy and refuting declinism. This will be somewhat undermined as it is revealed we are in such abject decline we have spent £100 zillion on a railway that goes from nowhere to nowhere. And won’t have any toilets. Or seats. Or wheels. Or purpose
2. All this impacts Keir Starmer personally and heavily. He’s not just the Labour leader he is the MP for Euston and Camden - and all the places in that bit of London that have been controversially demolished to make way for a railway that now won’t happen (allegedly). Starmer will be PM in 18 months. This will then be his call. What will he say?
That’s the sort of short term clever clever hyper political nonsense that has led this government to the abyss. Truss tried to outbid Starmer for example. So it’s entirely possible that they are playing silly buggers and will shoot themselves in the foot again.
I think they have been hobbling about on stumps for some time.
Put money down on Hunts speech reannouncing things already known, a bunch of guff, and something clever sounding to cover cuts. Then the think tanks will release their boilerplate press releases.
If he accepts questions he will get ceaseless questions about HS2. He cannot duck them all
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are at cross-purposes. I am talking about the project from concept to planning through construction then delivery. I assume you are talking about the construction bit. Yes, we can build things very well - not disputing that. But we're shit at realising we need things building, then agreeing where to build them, then continuing with the plan to build them after a change of party in power.
Nowhere else suffers from this stupidity on this scale. Just us.
America is often pretty bad. For different reasons
I wonder if there is political chicanery at work here
1. Jeremy Hunt is about to give his “positive speech” on Britain today, praising the economy and refuting declinism. This will be somewhat undermined as it is revealed we are in such abject decline we have spent £100 zillion on a railway that goes from nowhere to nowhere. And won’t have any toilets. Or seats. Or wheels. Or purpose
2. All this impacts Keir Starmer personally and heavily. He’s not just the Labour leader he is the MP for Euston and Camden - and all the places in that bit of London that have been controversially demolished to make way for a railway that now won’t happen (allegedly). Starmer will be PM in 18 months. This will then be his call. What will he say?
No toilets or seats, you say?
Half the Lizzie Line currently runs Shenfield to Paddington only. 12 trains an hour, nice and long. Mostly standing at peak time, but you can't have everything.
How pissed would you have to be that extending those to Birmingham via the HS2 line would be a neat idea?
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are hit and miss, aren’t we? Liz Line was late, but it’s great. Heathrow was a shambles now it is quite shiny and lovely in places
Yet where is the new Heathrow runway? And what about railways and airports outside London? They are often a mess
You know more about this HS2 stuff than most on here. What do you think is going on? Kite flying? Genuine chaos in HMG, and panic about cost? Political backstabbing?
The new Heathrow runway doesn't exist, not because Britain's engineers aren't capable of building it, but because the politicians aren't capable of agreeing to build it.
HS2 as a project had an exceptionally long gestation period. Years and years before a shovel was even put in the ground, and then after the shovels were put into the ground the political support wasn't sufficient to see it through, but instead we saw the eastern leg curtailed.
Politicians only see the votes lost from NIMBYs and the money spent from these sorts of projects, not the economic growth that follows from improving infrastructure (which they reason a different politician will claim the credit for anyway).
Suppose that New Labour hadn't delayed on giving the go-ahead for HS2, and it had started and been completed much earlier. We might now be seeing the beneficial consequences in increased economic growth as a result - under a Conservative government. It is these sorts of delays that are one reason why Britain's trend rate of growth is so poor.
My opinion on what is going on is that there really is no money left. The likelihood is that cancelling another part of HS2 is being raised as a necessary cost-cutting measure if HMG don't agree to save/raise some money elsewhere. Perhaps Jeremy Hunt wants to find £xbn to fund nurses pay rises, and this is one of the unpalatable options presented to find that money.
The cops don't even pretend to give a fuck about stolen bikes. They author is entirely correct; it might as well be legal to steal one.
I reckon I could find 5 obviously stolen bikes near me on FB/Gumtree in half an hour. You can probably multiply that by 10 if I started looking in London.
When I grew up in Denmark, where every station had forests of bikes, mostly unlocked, there was a kid in my class (American) who would routinely steal a bike to get where he wanted to go. He argued that there were so many that one would hardly be missed, and claimed that when convenient he'd return it to the original place when he came back.
I grew up in Belgium where people did (and still do, though not in Bruxelles) just prop their bikes against the outside of their houses next to the front door. The solution is to somehow not have bike theft as a central thwart of the national identity.
I wonder if there is political chicanery at work here
1. Jeremy Hunt is about to give his “positive speech” on Britain today, praising the economy and refuting declinism. This will be somewhat undermined as it is revealed we are in such abject decline we have spent £100 zillion on a railway that goes from nowhere to nowhere. And won’t have any toilets. Or seats. Or wheels. Or purpose
2. All this impacts Keir Starmer personally and heavily. He’s not just the Labour leader he is the MP for Euston and Camden - and all the places in that bit of London that have been controversially demolished to make way for a railway that now won’t happen (allegedly). Starmer will be PM in 18 months. This will then be his call. What will he say?
That’s the sort of short term clever clever hyper political nonsense that has led this government to the abyss. Truss tried to outbid Starmer for example. So it’s entirely possible that they are playing silly buggers and will shoot themselves in the foot again.
I think they have been hobbling about on stumps for some time.
Put money down on Hunts speech reannouncing things already known, a bunch of guff, and something clever sounding to cover cuts. Then the think tanks will release their boilerplate press releases.
If he accepts questions he will get ceaseless questions about HS2. He cannot duck them all
He probably can, I suspect. After all, the motto of this iteration of the Conservative Party is something like "go on then, try to make us". Only classier, probably by being in Latin.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are at cross-purposes. I am talking about the project from concept to planning through construction then delivery. I assume you are talking about the construction bit. Yes, we can build things very well - not disputing that. But we're shit at realising we need things building, then agreeing where to build them, then continuing with the plan to build them after a change of party in power.
Nowhere else suffers from this stupidity on this scale. Just us.
We do seem slow to get things built these days. I was staying in a fancy Victorian hotel. I delved into its history and discovered that the whole edifice was thrown up in a year. I appreciate that modern standards of worker safety mean that things take longer and that is a good thing, but at least in terms of the building quality this thing has stood the test of time, so somewhere along the line we have lost something. Lots of bureaucracy and professional services all taking their cut is my guess.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are hit and miss, aren’t we? Liz Line was late, but it’s great. Heathrow was a shambles now it is quite shiny and lovely in places
Yet where is the new Heathrow runway? And what about railways and airports outside London? They are often a mess
You know more about this HS2 stuff than most on here. What do you think is going on? Kite flying? Genuine chaos in HMG, and panic about cost? Political backstabbing?
The new Heathrow runway doesn't exist, not because Britain's engineers aren't capable of building it, but because the politicians aren't capable of agreeing to build it.
HS2 as a project had an exceptionally long gestation period. Years and years before a shovel was even put in the ground, and then after the shovels were put into the ground the political support wasn't sufficient to see it through, but instead we saw the eastern leg curtailed.
Politicians only see the votes lost from NIMBYs and the money spent from these sorts of projects, not the economic growth that follows from improving infrastructure (which they reason a different politician will claim the credit for anyway).
Suppose that New Labour hadn't delayed on giving the go-ahead for HS2, and it had started and been completed much earlier. We might now be seeing the beneficial consequences in increased economic growth as a result - under a Conservative government. It is these sorts of delays that are one reason why Britain's trend rate of growth is so poor.
My opinion on what is going on is that there really is no money left. The likelihood is that cancelling another part of HS2 is being raised as a necessary cost-cutting measure if HMG don't agree to save/raise some money elsewhere. Perhaps Jeremy Hunt wants to find £xbn to fund nurses pay rises, and this is one of the unpalatable options presented to find that money.
We hit a new borrowing record last week, so you might be right. We're broke.
The cops don't even pretend to give a fuck about stolen bikes. They author is entirely correct; it might as well be legal to steal one.
I reckon I could find 5 obviously stolen bikes near me on FB/Gumtree in half an hour. You can probably multiply that by 10 if I started looking in London.
When I grew up in Denmark, where every station had forests of bikes, mostly unlocked, there was a kid in my class (American) who would routinely steal a bike to get where he wanted to go. He argued that there were so many that one would hardly be missed, and claimed that when convenient he'd return it to the original place when he came back.
I grew up in Belgium where people did (and still do, though not in Bruxelles) just prop their bikes against the outside of their houses next to the front door. The solution is to somehow not have bike theft as a central thwart of the national identity.
I was in Cambridge in the early 90's when the council tried a primitive free bike scheme. It lasted about three days.
As a council spokesman said "not all the bikes have been stolen - half of them are in our workshop because they've been vandalised".
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
And so we talk about competitiveness. Britain falling behind the French and he Germans must be the fault of the EU. Perhaps. Or, just maybe, they invest and we don't. They have new motorways and high speed rail and we don't. They don't treat their workforce like exploitable cattle as we do. They invest in education so the next generation aren't ignorant and stupid as too many f ours are.
Again, this goes back to the 70s. Terrible management and communist unions broke industry. Then Thatcherism removed what was left and committed us on the path to banking and shopping. New Labour fixed the rotting schools and hospitals but didn't change the direction of travel. And now the open corruption of a party awarding 9-figure uncontested contracts to its friends with no concern about delivery of the contract or trying to get the money back.
So no, it isn't party political. The Tories are far worse than Labour but its not as if Blairism changed anything substantial. Starmer needs to look past the Tony towards Harold Wilson and the white heat of the optimism of the 1960s...
If only there were some sort of association or partnership with them that we could join...
We tried that - for 45 years. And things still got worse.
We don't need to join clubs. We just need to look at how others do things and work out how to do that in our country. Many of us on here keep banging on about this but we still get the idiotic distraction that things would all be so much better if we rejoined the same club rather than actually just trying to learn from some of the individual members.
I wonder if there is political chicanery at work here
1. Jeremy Hunt is about to give his “positive speech” on Britain today, praising the economy and refuting declinism. This will be somewhat undermined as it is revealed we are in such abject decline we have spent £100 zillion on a railway that goes from nowhere to nowhere. And won’t have any toilets. Or seats. Or wheels. Or purpose
2. All this impacts Keir Starmer personally and heavily. He’s not just the Labour leader he is the MP for Euston and Camden - and all the places in that bit of London that have been controversially demolished to make way for a railway that now won’t happen (allegedly). Starmer will be PM in 18 months. This will then be his call. What will he say?
There are few certainties in politics, but one of them is that if Labour form the next government (here's hoping) they will spend at least 5 years pointing out that absolutely everything is the fault of governments from 2010-onwards.
The noise of this will drown out most other things; the reality is that the sheer intractability of problems in the UK and the western world (see last week's Economist on health care beyond the UK for an example) is going to continue for the foreseeable future.
One other Labour certainty: the failings of the NHS will be blamed on something called Tory governments, not on something called the NHS.
@MrHarryCole · 34s EXC: Inflation blighted HS2 in chaos with delay or scrap of it arriving at Euston.
Construction costs pain means scaling back of the project under live discussion in Whitehall.
Spent last few weeks under bonnet and it's not looking good
— The reality is that Old Oak Common station is probably a better option for most people rather than Euston
The rest of the planet is going to be throwing out its maglevs and hyperloops for those new fangled teleporters before some half-finished HS2 limps into operation linking one random part of the country to another, neither of which were intended as the start and terminus and in-between requires a replacement horse and cart.
Even Thailand is building high speed trains faster than us. Part of a Chinese-funded Beijing to Singapore adventure
It beggars belief they might scrap the Euston link. They’ve spent 3 years literally building it right outside my house. And now all that is for nothing??!
Even leaving that aside, this would be a literally insane proposal. You can’t scrap the Euston link without scrapping the lot. There are no terminus platforms at Old Oak Common - only through platforms - so train’s couldn’t stop and start there.
Which is what the DfE, their clients and their client’s patsies in the media want. Scrap HS2 and in the small minds of two of them, more money is spent on transport where it’s needed, I.e. London. For the clients, the air and road haulage industries will be safe from highly unwelcome competition.
I agree entirely with your first para. Not so sure about the second
The proposal is like building Eurostar but having it finish in Morden or Tooting, not Waterloo/St Pancras
Also, how much would they even save by scrapping Euston? I’ve been watching them build it for years. Many years. Much of it around Euston Camden is completed (the new station apart). They’re about to move beyond central london to the outer london stuff
Nothing. In fact, it would be more expensive. You would have to radically redesign Old Oak Common and that would be very costly. Meanwhile much of the leg to Euston has already been built, and would still have to be built for extra trains to carry the HS2 passengers to London!
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
Maybe it’s a cunning plan to get the internal obsessives within Tory ranks to shut up about it? Demonstrate the public furore there would be at stopping, now that we’re past the point of no return, and make them shut up?
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
The other flaw is, I don’t think there would be, and again we come back to how badly HS2 has been sold, possibly deliberately. Even on this board there are still people who believe it’s about speed and agitate for ‘more and faster trains’ on the traditional network, unaware that that’s literally impossible in the HS2 corridor without new tracks (this includes the dishonest IRP, incidentally, which cannot possibly deliver what it says it will without building new lines).
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
You are forgetting that inertia is the most powerful force in the universe
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
The biggest mistake was the name. If they’d called it “Capacity 2030”, instead of “High Speed 2”, people would understand the project a lot easier.
The biggest single benefit of HS2 has nothing to do with rail at all - it’s getting hundreds of long-distance lorries a day off the roads, and moving containers onto trains for the majority of their journey.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are at cross-purposes. I am talking about the project from concept to planning through construction then delivery. I assume you are talking about the construction bit. Yes, we can build things very well - not disputing that. But we're shit at realising we need things building, then agreeing where to build them, then continuing with the plan to build them after a change of party in power.
Nowhere else suffers from this stupidity on this scale. Just us.
We do seem slow to get things built these days. I was staying in a fancy Victorian hotel. I delved into its history and discovered that the whole edifice was thrown up in a year. I appreciate that modern standards of worker safety mean that things take longer and that is a good thing, but at least in terms of the building quality this thing has stood the test of time, so somewhere along the line we have lost something. Lots of bureaucracy and professional services all taking their cut is my guess.
The Grade 1 listed Brunswick Town in Hove was flung up from start to finish in 6 years on out of town farmland as a speculative development - built with cheap painted stucco to keep costs down. Nearly 200 years later, still going strong and arguably the finest Regency architecture in the country.
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Have you not been headhunted by the Saudis yet?
They’re building some insane amount of infrastructure at the moment - but the vast majority of it is on virgin desert. No planning problems, few natural features or existing infrastructure to work around, one man who’s clearly in charge of the project, who wants it built yesterday and clears all the problems out of the way…
@Casino_Royale as the resident train infrastructure expert, I have a question. Why aren’t these rail infrastructure projects delivered incrementally in an Agile fashion? Why couldn’t we have already commissioned parts of HS2? Slowly building up to the whole project? From a digital product point of view, the way this works is really odd.
Thanks. I'm not a train infrastructure expert, just experienced in big project delivery, but essentially a railway is a totally integrated system top-to-toe - line speed, track, signalling, rolling stock, timetabling, operations and maintenance regime etc..everything - and you need to fulfil a very robust and difficult safety case every time you open or change anything.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
Plus, the HS2 plan IS to commission it in parts. London - Heartlands Junction - Birmingham being the first phase. There was then to be a connection to the Trent Valley section of the WCML so that trains towards Manchester could rejoin the classic route whilst they build the next phase.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Honestly, if there was an emoticon for a round of applause this post would get it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
No it doesn't- we are actually very *good* at delivering infrastructure projects in this country; it's the clarity and consistency of government sponsorship that's the issue.
Posts like this boil my piss.
We are at cross-purposes. I am talking about the project from concept to planning through construction then delivery. I assume you are talking about the construction bit. Yes, we can build things very well - not disputing that. But we're shit at realising we need things building, then agreeing where to build them, then continuing with the plan to build them after a change of party in power.
Nowhere else suffers from this stupidity on this scale. Just us.
We do seem slow to get things built these days. I was staying in a fancy Victorian hotel. I delved into its history and discovered that the whole edifice was thrown up in a year. I appreciate that modern standards of worker safety mean that things take longer and that is a good thing, but at least in terms of the building quality this thing has stood the test of time, so somewhere along the line we have lost something. Lots of bureaucracy and professional services all taking their cut is my guess.
The Grade 1 listed Brunswick Town in Hove was flung up from start to finish in 6 years on out of town farmland as a speculative development - built with cheap painted stucco to keep costs down. Nearly 200 years later, still going strong and arguably the finest Regency architecture in the country.
This is reminiscent of China in the 00s, they got stuff done eye wateringly quickly. It is really best understood as the product of a lack of regulation and a vast amount of cheap labour, and just a general drive to get things done.
Comments
Even shaving one platform off the Euston end was pointed out at the time to be a false economy. Getting rid of it all would be worse.
But that is what the DfT appear to have wanted all along. At least, I can’t explain their actions in hugely inflating cost, delaying matters unnecessarily, cancelling the eastern leg and putting forward wilful lies to parliament on the subject otherwise.
And since it cannot be because they believe HS2 to be a bad thing for transport - as no report, even those written by Rukin, has ever managed to argue that successfully - it must be because they are working for other interests.
The only flaw is that it would imply the Tories have some cunning and foresight.
I could not feel more warmly towards the computer scientist in @whippletom's sorry of stolen bicycles.
https://twitter.com/RobDotHutton/status/1618191368094126082/photo/1
It is a complete and utter shambles. Nothing seems to work in this country at the moment. I don't think Labour would be any better but they deserve a chance. I just won't bother voting next time.
As for Jeremy Hunt's speech today and the content that has been trailed, why is he even bothering. He is not convincing anyone.
The timetable simplification I can understand, I think it's to do with the complicated junction at Lewisham that has services crossing tracks and delaying each other. But there's no redundancy in the service - as soon as something goes wrong things get very bad very quickly. Southeastern is a terrible train operator, which doesn't help. The metro services should be run by TfL.
Most people therefore if it’s cancelled think, ‘oh well, never mind’ and carry on with their lives.
They don’t realise that improved services or even reopened railways for their local area rely heavily on HS2 being completed to provide the extra capacity. No through London services from Cannock without it. Trains from Aberystwyth still terminating in random locations due to congestion at New Street. No reopened lines in Leicestershire.
I’ve come to the conclusion this must be deliberate. Nobody, not even a civil servant, could be this stupid for this long (and in any case it’s been going on too long for one person to be responsible). And since it cannot be in a belief that HS2 is the wrong option since every other option is demonstrably more expensive and slower to complete, that leaves corruption as the most plausible explanation.
I reckon I could find 5 obviously stolen bikes near me on FB/Gumtree in half an hour. You can probably multiply that by 10 if I started looking in London.
- there are rumours that HS2 won’t be built into central London;
- The Sun says it will terminate in the west London suburbs;
- The Government says it remains committed to HS2 reaching Manchester
!
If a mistake was made earlier on (I can see a politician deciding that “speed” is easier to sell to the public than “more capacity”) then it becomes work and effort to change that
This rumoured plan really is the worst of both worlds. Enraging both sides and achieving none of the objectives.
Par for the course from this lot I'm afraid.
Incidentally, you could resignal and redesign the OOC box for HS2 termination, and you don't need a 'dead end' platform to terminate or reverse a train in any event.
And when there's a cock-up everyone keeps their heads down, rather than volunteering to fix it, because that's very high risk, potentially impossible, and rarely rewarded.
Not that they seem any better.
It's like a house of cards: you can't open it until everything is ready - if one thing isn't ready then the house of cards collapses and nothing is ready.
It's about 10 times harder to incrementally improve or upgrade a live operational railway that's already in service rather than greenfield (due to all of the above needing to change as well as the safety case) so it doesn't really make sense to do except in the phases that have already been laid out.
What I do know about is politics and particularly the emotional way that politics plays out. If the government now comes out and says HS2, at a cost of £17 trillion and the destruction of the New Forest, will terminate in some fucking potting shed in eastern Slough and will ultimately shave 13 seconds off the travel time between Newent and Watford then I predict an explosion of contempt and anger
As @Casino_Royale notes the risk/return doesn’t work on an individual basis
Mind you our Police can take the time to visit 1,000 homes of people suspected of streaming pay TV illegally. Protecting the commercial interests of big businesses.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/police-premier-league-illegal-streaming-28911133
Do you mean a small spinney in Berkshire where a moderately large number of trees were felled to make room for the tunnel opening?
(I have to say though, if this goes ahead the Tories can write off Chesham, for good.)
Twitter is on fire with derision and outrage
I respect your experience, but can’t help wondering if there aren’t things to be learnt from the digital world. For example you could finish Euston even if the whole route is not connected. Or you could take out one of the main bottlenecks.
I am sure I’m wrong due to ignorance, but it feels like there must be a way to make this less binary or come up with stupid ideas like having trains terminate mikes outside the capital. I recall the original Eurostar in Waterloo for example. The trains got third rail capability and trundled through Brixton. In France they went fast, HS2 could do the same.
I have to applaud the Tories if this story is true. The latest in a proud 60 year tradition of shitbox part-cancelled infrastructure projects. London(ish) already has stub ends of the M1 and M23 and M11 where the completion was cancelled. We talked about the M67 recently across Woodhead where other than a Hyde bypass section the rest was cancelled.
Same with the M62 into Liverpool, the rest of the Newcastle and Glasgow motorway networks etc etc. We had the Cumberland gap in the M6 for years. Hell, even look at the insane lane drop northbound at A1(M) Leeming Bar - the contract for the part-built bit south of the junction being too expensive to alter to paint the missing lane in through the junction.
This is Britain. We have been Fucking Useless at infrastructure since the 70s. Everyone else would have built high speed rail decades earlier. We're going to build an absurdly over-engineered and overly paranoid core that doesn't actually go anywhere and that's it.
Absolutely on the nail and no govt gets it at all.
It's like when they started to wire the WCML. The first sections to open were Crewe - Liverpool and Crewe - Manchester. What today's "committed" announcement is the equivalent of is confirming wires to Manchester. Having cancelled wiring up anywhere to the south.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/hunt-set-to-declare-that-dire-predictions-about-uk-s-future-are-wrong/ar-AA16MOLw?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=fc8391280a694fac9fc9743bc52feeb0
The point of the story: we were all reasonably responsible middle-class kids - mostly children of diplomats etc. - and we could all see he was wrong and slightly bonkers. But it literally never occurred to any of us to do anything about it - tell a teacher, call the police, even have a serious talk with him to persuade him to stop. The instinct to report a crime to the authorities was completely missing. And in retrospect I wonder how serious a crime would have had to be to stir us into action.
When we hear of cases of really serious crimes (domestic abuse, for example) being ignored by neighbours, it makes me remember that. The instinct not to get involved, not to be a snitch, and avoid "trouble" is hugely strong.
👏
Bra. Vo. And HY, Moonrabbit and a few others will STILL insist not only that we vote Conservative, but how it is the moral choice. Is it fuck.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/newslondon/boris-johnson-gets-£510000-advance-as-taxpayers-face-rising-legal-bill-for-ex-pm/ar-AA16Mob4
The ex leader of Camden Council
Of course, I assume quite a lot of these are things like safety inspectors, employees of the Highways Agency, the people who (mis)manage the smart motorway network and so on.
But it's quite extraordinary that out of nearly twenty thousand people not one of them seems to be possessed of an atom of common sense.
Unless, of course, there is another explanation...
Time for him to move on.
Posts like this boil my piss.
The government took so long agreeing the optimal plan that when they went to start building they discovered that the existing owners had already rebuilt their houses (and streets) where they had been before
Again, this goes back to the 70s. Terrible management and communist unions broke industry. Then Thatcherism removed what was left and committed us on the path to banking and shopping. New Labour fixed the rotting schools and hospitals but didn't change the direction of travel. And now the open corruption of a party awarding 9-figure uncontested contracts to its friends with no concern about delivery of the contract or trying to get the money back.
So no, it isn't party political. The Tories are far worse than Labour but its not as if Blairism changed anything substantial. Starmer needs to look past the Tony towards Harold Wilson and the white heat of the optimism of the 1960s...
MPs have been saying privately that they think Zahawi is doomed and they don’t want to be seen to be backing a ‘dead man walking’. They’ve grown bored over the past year of defending dud policies and people in their party, only for a screeching handbrake turn a day or so later. One MP defending a particularly egregious policy on the radio discovered the inevitable U-turn had taken place while he was in the studio, and vowed never to bother being loyal again.
The problem...though, is that voter boredom might not be because people don’t want politics in their lives to the extent it has been forced on them recently. It may instead be because they don’t want the Conservatives in their lives any more.
The psychodrama of the previous year made boring necessary. But Sunak needs to give his MPs a sense that they’re fighting for the right cause and that he’s got fire in his belly too. Bored voters are one thing, but a party that’s bored of governing is quite another.
Germany, I think the difference is that they take non-academic education very seriously, while we don't. It's less a policy than a mindset.
1. Jeremy Hunt is about to give his “positive speech” on Britain today, praising the economy and refuting declinism. This will be somewhat undermined as it is revealed we are in such abject decline we have spent £100 zillion on a railway that goes from nowhere to nowhere. And won’t have any toilets. Or seats. Or wheels. Or purpose
2. All this impacts Keir Starmer personally and heavily. He’s not just the Labour leader he is the MP for Euston and Camden - and all the places in that bit of London that have been controversially demolished to make way for a railway that now won’t happen (allegedly). Starmer will be PM in 18 months. This will then be his call. What will he say?
Then the politicians come in driven by short term Daily Mail headlines and somehow contrive reform and change that makes ths situation worse.
Yet where is the new Heathrow runway? And what about railways and airports outside London? They are often a mess
You know more about this HS2 stuff than most on here. What do you think is going on? Kite flying? Genuine chaos in HMG, and panic about cost? Political backstabbing?
This could be a waving of bleeding stumps tactic by the Department for Transport. We know that Sunak and Hunt are desperate for spending cuts- gotta fund the tax bribe cut somehow- so departments suggest the most obviously harmful savings they can think of.
The risk is that, right now, the Cabinet want the stumps to bleed.
Because as of 8am this morning it's a symbol of our decline as a Country and our Grade A incompetency.
Put money down on Hunts speech reannouncing things already known, a bunch of guff, and something clever sounding to cover cuts. Then the think tanks will release their boilerplate press releases.
Nowhere else suffers from this stupidity on this scale. Just us.
Half the Lizzie Line currently runs Shenfield to Paddington only. 12 trains an hour, nice and long. Mostly standing at peak time, but you can't have everything.
How pissed would you have to be that extending those to Birmingham via the HS2 line would be a neat idea?
Just put the whole thing out of its misery .
HS2 as a project had an exceptionally long gestation period. Years and years before a shovel was even put in the ground, and then after the shovels were put into the ground the political support wasn't sufficient to see it through, but instead we saw the eastern leg curtailed.
Politicians only see the votes lost from NIMBYs and the money spent from these sorts of projects, not the economic growth that follows from improving infrastructure (which they reason a different politician will claim the credit for anyway).
Suppose that New Labour hadn't delayed on giving the go-ahead for HS2, and it had started and been completed much earlier. We might now be seeing the beneficial consequences in increased economic growth as a result - under a Conservative government. It is these sorts of delays that are one reason why Britain's trend rate of growth is so poor.
My opinion on what is going on is that there really is no money left. The likelihood is that cancelling another part of HS2 is being raised as a necessary cost-cutting measure if HMG don't agree to save/raise some money elsewhere. Perhaps Jeremy Hunt wants to find £xbn to fund nurses pay rises, and this is one of the unpalatable options presented to find that money.
As a council spokesman said "not all the bikes have been stolen - half of them are in our workshop because they've been vandalised".
Maybe we really don't deserve nice things.
We don't need to join clubs. We just need to look at how others do things and work out how to do that in our country. Many of us on here keep banging on about this but we still get the idiotic distraction that things would all be so much better if we rejoined the same club rather than actually just trying to learn from some of the individual members.
Part of our challenge is geographic - we are a small, crowded island with a rocky central spine that makes engineering challenging
Please make it stop ! Enough already no ones interested in this delusional clap trap !
The noise of this will drown out most other things; the reality is that the sheer intractability of problems in the UK and the western world (see last week's Economist on health care beyond the UK for an example) is going to continue for the foreseeable future.
One other Labour certainty: the failings of the NHS will be blamed on something called Tory governments, not on something called the NHS.
The biggest single benefit of HS2 has nothing to do with rail at all - it’s getting hundreds of long-distance lorries a day off the roads, and moving containers onto trains for the majority of their journey.
They’re building some insane amount of infrastructure at the moment - but the vast majority of it is on virgin desert. No planning problems, few natural features or existing infrastructure to work around, one man who’s clearly in charge of the project, who wants it built yesterday and clears all the problems out of the way…