UK Green Lights HS2 High Speed Rail Line

An anonymous reader writes "The United Kingdom has given the green light to the first phase of its proposed High Speed Two train line. In response to environmental concerns, the route for HS2 will now include extra tunneling in the first 90 miles, so not to disrupt the natural beauty of the English countryside. The first phase will connect London to Birmingham and could be functional by 2026."

Comments

A good start, but...

[anyanka]

...any chance they'll ever fix the horrible mess they've made of the non-high speed lucky-if-you-get-there-alive train service in the UK?

Re:A good start, but...

[jo_ham]

Blame that on John Major, breaking up the rail system and selling all the money-making parts off for pennies on the pound to private industry, then rolling up all the complex and expensive stuff into Railtrack.

An ideal way to privatise profit and nationalise risk.

BR needed modernisation badly, but privatisation was not it the answer there - at least not the way it was done.

Re:A good start, but...

[jo_ham]

Actually, Beeching's Axe (while brutal) probably saved the rail system. It was certainly *too* aggressive in its cuts, but the railways were in serious trouble at that point.

Re:A good start, but...

[BasilBrush]

I don't think so. It was rather like trying to save a troubled supermarket by cutting the loss leaders. Do that, and there will be less customers in the store to buy the profitable products. A profitable supermarket, like Tesco or Asda has lots of loss-leaders.

Branch lines were loss-leaders for the main lines. Close a branch line that runs near to where someone lives, and that person is no longer a customer for the main line.

Beeching was supposed to make the Railways profitable again. It didn't. And that's the reason why.

Now with so much congestion on the roads, we could really do with those branch lines again. Such a shame they were lost.

14 years??

[fnj]

14 years to complete just part of it?? It took only six years for the greatest mobilization in world history to defeat the Axis.

Re:14 years??

[Totenglocke]

You can thank the exponential growth of bureaucracy over the last 70 years for that. It's the same reason why it took 7 years to build the original World Trade Center and now more than a decade after 9/11, they're "hoping" that it will be almost done by 2020 (19 years after).

Yes lots, also lots of rich city types

[fantomas]

Lots of beautiful English countryside south of Manchester. Also lots of stockbrokers / rich city types who don't want their countryside fantasy shattered by noisy development work. A bit like the rich lords and ladies 150 years ago who complained about their views being ruined the first time they put railway lines across the land.

Though to be fair there are ecological concerns to be taken into account this time round seeing as we've got less countryside left.

Re:Yes lots, also lots of rich city types

[dkf]

Though to be fair there are ecological concerns to be taken into account this time round seeing as we've got less countryside left.

The easiest way to fix that is to get some farmers in the area to take some land out of production and just leave it alone. Within a few decades, you'll have woodland there as that's the natural state for most of the UK anyway (that which isn't bare rock or open water). Sure it won't be undisturbed natural woodland but there's almost none of that anyway; too many hundreds of years of human interference have already been and gone.

Re:Yes lots, also lots of rich city types

[delinear]

Generous? Homes will be affected along the entire length, but it's not the Birmingham end of the line that's getting concessions with underground tunnels etc. Imagine you've put everything you have into an even more modest home that backs onto some farmland, and take great pleasure in having your breakfast looking out over the grazing sheep and the thicket of trees on the horizon. Then one day you're told that your view is going to be of a grey concrete wall, behind which there will be a train line. Then you find out that the people with comparatively far less modest homes in a comparatively far richer part of the country had their piece of line buried to preserve their views (partially at your expense as a tax payer). And do you think they'll do this in Manchester or Leeds? You'll be lucky to have even the concrete wall to look at, probably a rusty chainlink fence. This is nothing to do with general pleasantness, it's to do with the Conservatives looking after their own as usual. According to them the public sector is a horrible drain on society, but they have no qualms about raiding it to make their own lives easier at the expense of the rest of the country. They should be leading by example and refusing to let the public pay extra for something that benefits so few.

Re:The problem with our railways is not speed

[Captain Hook]

Thing is, rail capacity has been a problem for decades, double decker trains are an obvious solution, but when they build a new bridge over a rail line, they still build it to fit a single decker train under it.

They should have simply mandated 20 years ago, all future infrastructure should be capable of taking a reasonable height double decker train and at least some of that infrastructure would by now be already in place.

Re:Pffft, natural beauty.

[Anonymous Coward]

The chilterns are moderately pretty, but not in the same class as the others you mention. Most of it was ruined decades ago by people building large country houses. What remains is spoilt by far too many houses, major roads and expensive cars. There are much worse places to put a train line.

The actual concern is not environmental in a scientific sense, but property prices.

This has nothing to do with rail

[Colin Smith]

This is what is called a "Keynesian stimulus program"[2]. It's purpose is to spend 300 billion[1] into the economy in order to inflate the national debt away, save the banks and the contractors. At the taxpayers and citizens expense, the currency will be devalued causing inflation and taxpayers will have to service increased interest payments. The people who will be hit hardest by the additional inflation and taxation are the old, and the poor.

If they had spent the money on something useful, it would have crowded out the private sector, so they have to spend it on something which has no particular relevance; saving 20 mins between Birmingham and London is totally irrelevant.

[1] Yes, it says 32 billion now...
[2] Google Keynes, bottles and coal mines.

Re:This has nothing to do with rail

[serviscope_minor]

No, really, it's purpose is to spend 32 billion+.

The stretch to bitmingham will cost 15bn and save 40 (not 20) minutes, not to mention increasing capacity. The Full cost is for the full plan is for the extension to Manchester and Leeds which will cost 32bn and save considerably more time and also add capacity.

The mainline is running close to capacity, and only the government has the foresight and funds to spend money on large infrastructure projects.

Since you're likely to troll me with the same assertion as before, what do you propose should be done to increase capacity?

Re:Not just railway lines

[shilly]

As someone else has said, it's 40 minutes, not 20. And obviously, that's far from the only benefit of HS2 -- self-evidently, it's a huge increase in capacity. Capacity is much more important than speed.

Re:The problem with our railways is not speed

[Richard_at_work]

The requirement for "data" doesn't apply if the outcome is a person modifying their behaviour based on their own experiences.

If I have several bad experiences, it doesn't matter to me one bit that other people are having good experiences - it doesn't change my experience at all. Statistically my experience might not rise above being an outlier, but it's still my experience and that is what I base further behaviours on.

I'm glad you enjoy good experiences on the railways. It doesn't affect myself at all.