Aston to Acton, the emasculation of HS 2

[JohnB]

So not only might HS not actually get to Euston, it won't get to Manchester either. What a colossal political blunder to spend so much to achieve so little. The small time reductions to Birmingham will be swallowed by changing trains at Old Oak Common, and they've pared away all the longer routes where the gains were greater. While we needed a new NS railway spine, building it to a high speed standard was daft, so much better to spend the money building a slower line or connecting Northern cities. Why blight the Euston area for 20 years for nothing.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... conference

No idea why Sunak thinks its a good idea to announce this ahead of a Tory conference in Manchester.

[Lootman]

I seem to recall that Japan started its bullet trains by also linking just its two biggest cities: Tokyo and Osaka. The rest came later. Of course that route also covered the important cities of Yokohama, Nagoya and Kyoto.

Didn't the French do only Paris to Lyon to start?

California is building a high speed train but, for now, they are only building the easy bit - along the central valley where it is flat and unpopulated. The tricky expensive bits, getting into LA and San Francisco, are slated for later. Or never. And SF already has a railway station built for it, which currently is just a vast Euston-sized hole in the ground.

So all nations seem to do this kind of thing one bite at a time. Except maybe China where they don't have to worry about NIMBYs.

[BullDog]

Somewhat astonishingly, there's a graph in the Telegraph today that shows how much per mile HS2 is costing so far. It appears to be an absolutely gob smacking £270 million per mile. I struggle to understand how thus can be true, but it seems it is.

The second most expensive high speed railway in Europe it says is Stutgart to Munich which comes in around £70 million per mile.

Incredible numbers?

As an aside, up here in the frozen North, I haven't met anyone who thinks HS2 is a good idea. Crewe to Euston is just 1hr 40mins. Not too bad, on Victorian built infrastructure?

[bungeejumper]

I seem to recall that Japan started its bullet trains by also linking just its two biggest cities: Tokyo and Osaka. The rest came later. Of course that route also covered the important cities of Yokohama, Nagoya and Kyoto.

Didn't the French do only Paris to Lyon to start?

Indeed, but Sunak is doing it the other way round. The incredible shrinking railway! It's a bit different when you start out with a schedule linking London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds (with all the heady George Osborne guff about the Northern Powerhouse), and then find your costs have accidentally doubled, so you scale it back to only the southern part of England. The half that's already getting all the other new rail projects.

Sunak might think he's doing the only possible thing. What he's actually doing is abandoning all hope for the red wall seats, and all the levelling-up that underlay the Northern Powerhouse. Signing his own electoral death warrant.

O/T I suppose, but wouldn't it have been nice if Johnson's crew hadn't blown £35 billion on awarding that test and trace project money to Dido Harding's special pals who never delivered anything useable with it? Would have covered the HS2 shortfall quite nicely.

An irrelevant association of issues, you might say? Let's see how long the north's memory turns out to be.

BJ

[airbus330]

Building a railway through some of the most expensive and crowded real estate in Europe, in a country that is basically skint, in the face of resistance from a thousand interest groups and residents, actioned by the most inept governments for generations, overseen by a non functioning civil service, in the face of little public appetite and managed by some pretty average businessmen. What could possibly go wrong? Only the engineers have come out well, as far as I can see, with some epic structures already built.
Not to connect HS2 into Euston is lunacy, no matter what the cost will be. Add Manchester etc. in the future seems fairly logical.

[BullDog]

Building a railway through some of the most expensive and crowded real estate in Europe, in a country that is basically skint, in the face of resistance from a thousand interest groups and residents, actioned by the most inept governments for generations, overseen by a non functioning civil service, in the face of little public appetite and managed by some pretty average businessmen. What could possibly go wrong? Only the engineers have come out well, as far as I can see, with some epic structures already built.
Not to connect HS2 into Euston is lunacy, no matter what the cost will be. Add Manchester etc. in the future seems fairly logical.

Quite correct. The UK is a laughing stock in the eyes of the international community, I'm sure.

[Lootman]

Crewe to Euston is just 1hr 40mins. Not too bad, on Victorian built infrastructure?

The fastest train takes just 1 hour and 33 minutes. It is 158 miles, so that implies an average speed of a shade over 100 mph.

That said the average journey time is 2 hours and 25 minutes, according to Trainline:

"Travelling from London Euston to Crewe by train. There are around 172 trains running between London Euston and Crewe daily, which usually take 2h 25m to complete the journey".

https://www.thetrainline.com/train-time ... estination.

So presumably some take 3 hours or more?

[BullDog]

Crewe to Euston is just 1hr 40mins. Not too bad, on Victorian built infrastructure?

The fastest train takes just 1 hour and 33 minutes. It is 158 miles, so that implies an average speed of a shade over 100 mph.

That said the average journey time is 2 hours and 25 minutes, according to Trainline:

"Travelling from London Euston to Crewe by train. There are around 172 trains running between London Euston and Crewe daily, which usually take 2h 25m to complete the journey".

https://www.thetrainline.com/train-time ... estination.

So presumably some take 3 hours or more?

Correct. There's some trains that take more than 3 hours. They must stop at every station on the way.

It's simple to book a ~1hr 40min train though. And provided you book off peak and well in advance, the cost is almost reasonable.

[doolally]

Crewe to Euston is just 1hr 40mins. Not too bad, on Victorian built infrastructure?

The fastest train takes just 1 hour and 33 minutes. It is 158 miles, so that implies an average speed of a shade over 100 mph.

That said the average journey time is 2 hours and 25 minutes, according to Trainline:

"Travelling from London Euston to Crewe by train. There are around 172 trains running between London Euston and Crewe daily, which usually take 2h 25m to complete the journey".

https://www.thetrainline.com/train-time ... estination.

So presumably some take 3 hours or more?

It has been highlighted many times, but the prime driver for HS2 is not speed. It's capacity. The existing lines just cannot handle any more traffic, so extra lines have to be added. The extra cost in making those new lines high speed is relatively small.
doolally

[88V8]

The fastest train takes just 1 hour and 33 minutes. It is 158 miles, so that implies an average speed of a shade over 100 mph.

It has been highlighted many times, but the prime driver for HS2 is not speed. It's capacity.

Errrm...But it says here HS2 is essentially an attempt to boost the UK economy and at the same time redress the balance between the North and the South. A high-speed link between northern cities and London will make commuting much quicker and provide more opportunities to work in London without having to necessarily live there or within the traditional commuter belt for the capital.
Shorter journey times are at the heart of the project. The Department for Transport says HS2 will reduce Birmingham to London journey times from 1hr 21min to 49min.

So, a London-centric vanity project devised by people unaware that one can work on the train....

Given the level of environmental damage driving this nonsense through our overpopulated isle, I would be delighted if the whole thing is put in the bin where it belongs.

V8

[doolally]

It has been highlighted many times, but the prime driver for HS2 is not speed. It's capacity.

Errrm...But it says here HS2 is essentially an attempt to boost the UK economy and at the same time redress the balance between the North and the South. A high-speed link between northern cities and London will make commuting much quicker and provide more opportunities to work in London without having to necessarily live there or within the traditional commuter belt for the capital.
Shorter journey times are at the heart of the project. The Department for Transport says HS2 will reduce Birmingham to London journey times from 1hr 21min to 49min.

So, a London-centric vanity project devised by people unaware that one can work on the train....

Given the level of environmental damage driving this nonsense through our overpopulated isle, I would be delighted if the whole thing is put in the bin where it belongs.

V8

Alternatively. see https://www.hs2.org.uk/why/#:~:text=HS2 ... 0by%202050.

HS2 is designed to address three key problems facing the nation. HS2 will provide more capacity, cut carbon and deliver better connectivity.

HS2 will add vital capacity to the existing rail network by taking long-distance trains off it, creating thousands of extra seats and space for more local, commuter and freight services.

No signs of vanity in that
doolally

[Lootman]

Somewhat astonishingly, there's a graph in the Telegraph today that shows how much per mile HS2 is costing so far. It appears to be an absolutely gob smacking £270 million per mile. I struggle to understand how thus can be true, but it seems it is.

Crossrail ran out at about £20 billion. Given that it uses pre-existing rights of way west of Paddington and east of Stratford, then it is probably comparable to HS2 on a per-mile basis. The new underground Crossrail tunnels come to a total of about 26 miles, so I leave others to work out the cost of that per mile. Top speed is 60 to 90 mph, depending on where.

I would imagine at this point the sunk cost and already committed funding of phase 1 of HS2 is far too high to quit. There are vast building sites west of Euston, at Old Oak Common and north-east of New Street station in Birmingham. Plus presumably any number of new tunnels and bridges. So it may be that ending it at Brum is the only way to stop the bleeding.

World's shortest high speed rail route?

[Mike4]

Only the engineers have come out well, as far as I can see, with some epic structures already built.

Have there? I haven't noticed any when out and about myself. I've seen several truly epic piles of earth but no actual structures.

Where should I be looking? I like epic structures. Thanks!

[BullDog]

It has been highlighted many times, but the prime driver for HS2 is not speed. It's capacity.

Errrm...But it says here HS2 is essentially an attempt to boost the UK economy and at the same time redress the balance between the North and the South. A high-speed link between northern cities and London will make commuting much quicker and provide more opportunities to work in London without having to necessarily live there or within the traditional commuter belt for the capital.
Shorter journey times are at the heart of the project. The Department for Transport says HS2 will reduce Birmingham to London journey times from 1hr 21min to 49min.

So, a London-centric vanity project devised by people unaware that one can work on the train....

Given the level of environmental damage driving this nonsense through our overpopulated isle, I would be delighted if the whole thing is put in the bin where it belongs.

V8

Exactly. No matter how you try to spin it, there's absolutely no justifiable reason for HS2 to be built. Nobody I know wants it built. There's literally thousands of infrastructure projects across Northern England crying out for investment and not being done.

[Dod101]

It has been highlighted many times, but the prime driver for HS2 is not speed. It's capacity.

Errrm...But it says here HS2 is essentially an attempt to boost the UK economy and at the same time redress the balance between the North and the South. A high-speed link between northern cities and London will make commuting much quicker and provide more opportunities to work in London without having to necessarily live there or within the traditional commuter belt for the capital.
Shorter journey times are at the heart of the project. The Department for Transport says HS2 will reduce Birmingham to London journey times from 1hr 21min to 49min.

So, a London-centric vanity project devised by people unaware that one can work on the train....

Given the level of environmental damage driving this nonsense through our overpopulated isle, I would be delighted if the whole thing is put in the bin where it belongs.

V8

There are no end of reasons why this project should not be built or completed but I do not think that the environment is one of them. Judging by the huge amount of work underway at the moment, the environmental damage has been largely done as far as I can see. This country needs some imagination and new infrastructure. Let’s just get on with it. On completion, we will have a new railway and the countryside will recover remarkably quickly. A railway takes up less room I would say than the average six lane Motorway and I imagine is a lot less polluting.

Dod

[GrahamPlatt]

Spilt milk now, but they should have built the Manchester-Birmingham link first.
For all sorts of reasons, not least of which being to show they were committed to the North.
As BJ says, this will not be forgotten, nor forgiven.

[Lanark]

Another way to look at this is the UK has 990 million train journeys per year at an average cost of £29

71 Billion cost of HS2 / 990 million = £71.7

So the cost of this one line is equal to all the income of the entire network for 2 ½ years.

If Hs2 has 4 trains per hour 365 days/year that is 35,000 trains per year with a capacity of 550 that = 19 million extra passenger journeys.
If sold at full capacity that will be 1.8% of all UK train journeys.

71 Billion / 19 million = £3700

So back of an envelope, ignoring interest and all the other operating costs, HS2 would pay for itself in 1 year if every ticket was £3700, in 10 years if the tickets are £370 or 100 years if the tickets are £37

The Hs2 rolling stock has an estimated 35-year life-span.

[Redmires]

Only the engineers have come out well, as far as I can see, with some epic structures already built.

Have there? I haven't noticed any when out and about myself. I've seen several truly epic piles of earth but no actual structures.

Where should I be looking? I like epic structures. Thanks!

A few times recently on weekend trips to the North the M42 has been closed due to epic HS2 works. And this looks pretty epic

https://mediacentre.hs2.org.uk/news/hs2 ... rwickshire

As it is for the HS2 to link to Crewe, unfortunately it's an epic bridge to nowhere.

[airbus330]

Only the engineers have come out well, as far as I can see, with some epic structures already built.

Have there? I haven't noticed any when out and about myself. I've seen several truly epic piles of earth but no actual structures.

Where should I be looking? I like epic structures. Thanks!

You could look at the bridge work crossing marshland and the A412 near Denham as an example. Plenty more interesting solutions here https://learninglegacy.hs2.org.uk/docum ... hitecture/

[Leothebear]

I may be over suspicious, but could it be that too many extremely juicey contracts have been promised for this, the most enormous white elephant ever, to be ditched?

Leo