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Post by Deleted on Oct 6, 2022 16:42:37 GMT
So they are talking about canceling again.
What next I wonder.
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Post by Alex on Oct 6, 2022 22:11:43 GMT
Can't read it but if they cancel it they really are absolutely reneging on their levelling up pledge. Its bad enough that they've cancelled the eastern leg and scrapped the new trans-penine route along with the deletion of the link to the Scottish mainline at Warrington which has made the project next to useless anyway but to kill it completely when they've already built several tunnels, half built a new station in Birmingham and levelled large swathes of forest in the Cotswolds will set the UK railway back decades.
The way this current government have messed up all the major rail projects they've entered into is getting beyond farcical.
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Post by Big Blue on Oct 7, 2022 8:31:49 GMT
The most telling comment:
This is what happens when there is an agenda for “clean” infrastructure that only considers journeys made by the people making the decisions or those most likely to vote for them. Right the way through West Coast Route Modernisation this route has been the king. It is an important route but only where London refuses to let go of its position of utter dominance (I know, ironic coming from me….) and the whole concept of “levelling-up” seems to be based on “how many more northern serfs can we get into London”. The concept of fast rail has also been dealt a considerable blow by the actual use of modern comms to conduct business. My current client is based in West Cumbria. I meet them in Warrington once a quarter. All other correspondence and meetings are done on Teams. A couple of years ago they’d have asked me to be in their offices a few days a week.
I’ve never been a fan of HS2, even though I love railways. It was a good idea when the French did it but their planning was 8 years in the late 60s and it started operating in the early 80s, some 20 years before our own HS1 opened. HS1 only exists because SNCF tech was used otherwise we’d never have had a high speed railway: the UK has always tried to use existing, 150 year old p-way infrastructure to run faster trains through vehicle improvements as opposed to new p-way. Remember the APT?
There’s several more routes that needed the HS2 investment and altering routes with computer controlled signals and shorter, more frequent trains that can stack at terminuses would be a better passenger benefit than the Thameslink Project solution of same train-times, longer trains. There’s also the possibility of the HS2 money building an entirely new conurbation based on an industry grouping, so the workers, service staff, schools and hospital are all in one defined area with a short, cycling or EV commute to those places. The UK has always been pretty shit at town planning though, due to land owners powers and an insistence on asking the people here in the short term (living, settled adults) what’s good for those that come in the year 2100 (which also adds to cost - HS1 was not meant to be a hugely expensive tunnel into StPancras from Stratford).
Bit of a rant, but that’s what Lord Wolfson was getting at: not many people want their tax spent on HS2 and if I explained the contracting model to you (I am very aware of it due to my industry sector) you wouldn’t either. “Free money” is how one close colleague described it.
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