HS2 Project Update, May 2024 

Connectivity and capacity are the keywords. Don't moan about being stuck on an overcrowded, late running train if you are against HS2. Yes, delivery could/should have been better. But this needs to go to Manchester, Leeds, and the Golborne Link is a must.

Crossrail was a phenomenal achievement proud to say i was 1 of 15k plus who worked on it. And the press did nothing but be negative. At HS2 Denham we built the segment and viaduct factories and worked them. The press had nothing but negativity to offer. In 2 weeks i begin at HS2 Birmingham...cant wait. Makes me proud to say I'm British working on a phenomenal British Engineering Project as part of a multicultural multi national project. Its about time the Press got positive. This ongoing project with all it sets out to achieve is a statement. We should be proud and loud.

It'll be fantastic to see the line and stations when complete, hoping it reaches Manchester and Leeds in my lifetime.

I wish that they had kept going onto Manchester and Leeds , they keep going on about costs , they said this about the cost when they built the channel tunnel and look at what that has done and the money has been paid back , SO GET ON AND BUILD IT AND F--K the sceptics.

Manchester and the North must be connected. Its the spine transport system that will open up the country for future growth.

Bring back Manchester and Leeds with NPR.

Excellent video Hew, pls produce more updates. We’re not all naysayers! Fantastic project, long overdue and pity the govt keeps meddling and asking for costly redesigns which have had a massive impact on cost and timings.

It's great to see the progress being made. As someone who used to travel from Manchester to London quite often, I am pleased with this new development. While some people may complain about the cost, it will pay off in the long run and benefit our country.

It would be fantastic if they decided to build a link from this new HS2 line to HS1 just north of London. It would allow for direct high speed trains not only from Birmingham to London, but also from Birmingham to Paris and other European cities. An integrated network of high speed lines would make much more sense than having two seperate lines that serve two different London termini. If the railways really want to compete with airlines, surely this would be a great investment for those living in the Midlands. Not everybody needs to travel to London!

Can't wait to see one of these whizz past for the first time, gonna be so cool! Amazing to see how much can be done underneath a working city as well, crazy to think how much work is going on beneath our feet.

Hope that no time will be wasted in building the London Overground stations at Old Oak Common. They will be so useful as interchanges for those of us living in West London. It would be nice too if the Acton-Northolt line were reinstated to bring Chiltern services into Old Oak Common. Here's hoping!!

A very concise and informative update... Keep up the good work!

keep up the good work, thanks for upgrading our ageing infrastructure despite so many people against it.

This is fantastic! What a great summary! I'm really impressed! Not that I need to be, as Ive been videoing the Colne Valley viaduct progress for about a year now, posting 86 HS2 videos on RU-vid out of my total of 444!! Interest is national and international, especially from the States and Germany! Well done to all working on the project, and I hope to continue my little whimsical and hopefully entertaining videos south of Harefield!

People keep going on about the cost…what they’re really unhappy is the price. This is INVESTMENT. There is a cost if we don’t build it. We should build high speed rail to connect the entire country.

Great update! Here's hoping that the next government give the go-ahead for future phases to get us up to Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds...

Lovely to see the work is still go on wonderful to see keep the project going ❤

Great project. Shame it’s not coming to Leeds.

I love watching the progress of HS2. Can't wait to travel on it. 👍😊💙🇮🇪🇬🇧

looks so modernistic and what a feat of engineering

Such an incredible project, congratulations 👍

The HS2 was meant to even out the North and South divine but with the cancellations of the Northern parts it is Increasing it..

Just love-it when a plan is coming together. This sure is a Lifetime opportunity. Can't wait to see it in motion. "Action. ".

this is great! I really hope that someone continues the investment in infrastructure that we need so these techniques and skilled people's work can continue to benefit public services.

Brilliant stuff. Get it built to the north & onto Scotland.

Wow I love the architecture and design of the new stations hoping the real ones will look the same

Thank you for another informative progress update. This first half will hopefully prove the naysayers wrong when it delivers the capacity needed, along with freeing up the classic lines. Don't lose the plans for the route beyond Handsacre, otherwise Stafford-Crewe will just become the next bottleneck. Don't scrap the TBMs. either - more work awaits, once common sense prevails north of Brum. A great report.

That Old Oak Common Station is epic.

Phantastic und its so good to See That in GB modern Infastrastruction is buildt

Good to hear the progress being made on this engineering marvel. Too many short sighted views have been expressed over time regarding this project and a succession of dithering political decisions have not helped progress. Like others have commented there is a clear need to push north of Birmingham to Manchester and beyond and complete the link to Central London.

He looks thrilled

I totally agree with the comments by supporters to build out the HS2 system. I am in awe of how well your system was planned and thought out and enjoy the updates. Looking on as a native Californian living in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1962, the naysayers and short-sighted citizens here have been arguing about mass transit since the 1950s. The original BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) system funding was barely passed by the voters way back in the 1960s and 2 South Bay Counties opted out of the system. This resulted in the big mistake not bringing BART (the 1950s/60s designed rapid transit) around the Bay at the onset (sound familiar?). People at that time were complaining about the cost and what would happen to the suburbs. As I'm writing this, the approximate 6 mile connection to San Jose is estimated to cost almost $13 BILLION dollars! The entire BART system in 1976 was approximately $1.6 Billion Dollars (about $12 Billion in 2023 dollars). My point is this - don't be as stupid and short-sighted as some of your American descendants (lol) - unless the population in the UK and around the world starts declining, all parts of your system will need to get built out as originally planned. It will just cost more and more as time goes on. I am sick and tired of the conservatives here complaining about how high their taxes are when they fight to get their $50 Million dollar mansions highlighted in the Wall Street Journal and regular people have to live with substandard public transportation. It sounds like you have something similar going on. Oh, yes - for those of you who keep track of transportation around the world, here in California (with about 10% of the U.S. population) we are arguing about CA High Speed Rail. UGH! It seems that human being never change! BTW - my wife and I absolutely loved our 2019 visit to London and to Warner Brothers Studio/Harry Potter. Loved the food, people and history. 2019 is when I first heard about and saw HS2 at the Euston Station. We also enjoyed being able to take public transport everywhere - even when it involved a lot of walking between stations. 🙂

Good onya all ! Keept it up ! IG ore those that run interference along the the way,they know not what they say !

Please connect the project to Leeds and other nothern cities. The key benefit of this project in the first place was to help the economy of those cities. Cutting them off like that was a great loss of opportunity for the prosperity of the UK. Even though if the cost would be higher, for the long-term benefit, it is completely understandable and worthy of investing to it's full potential.

Old Oak Common is my favourite one as that is the closest station to my house!

❤

Phase 1 is at or near the peak of construction. In a year or so, most activity, such as track laying and overhead electrification will be confined to within the lineside fences. Site compounds and temporary haul roads will be being removed, landscaping will be ongoing and mitigation planting will be getting established. Then, with the prospect of a 360kph railway linking London and Birmingham opening by the end of the decade, it will be difficult to argue against Phase 2 (Eastern and Western Arms).

Very impressive project. With the loss of Phase 2 the project does not now provide true value to the taxpayer. We need a better government for the uk who make the best long term decisions and not one's to win votes.

Manchester needs to develop strong horizontal ties with Liverpool, Sheffield and Leeds. It will be more beneficial to the North to be connected than to become sleeper towns for London. BUT, once that has been achieved, then it's essential faster connections are achieved as originally envisioned by HS2 for max gains. Coud we do both at once? It'd be a dream! We're gonna need a lot of private investment to pull it off; hopefully Burnham and Andy Street successor will manage to do it.

I needed to know why they don’t dig a tunnel and do an extension for the main line Train so that they can extend the unused abandoned underground train stations. Why couldn’t they use the part D78 Stock train doors on the sides and also restructure the front face of the A60 and A62 stock that includes the class 313, class 314 and class 315 remix and make them all together and also redesign them an overhead line and also make them into Five cars per units and also having three Disabled Toilets on those Five cars per units A60 and A62 stock trains and also convert the A60 and A62 stock trains into a Scania N112, Volvo B10M, Gardner 6LXB, Gardner 6LXC and Gardner 8LXB Diesel Engines and also put the Loud 7-Speed Voith Gearboxes even Loud 8-Speed Leyland Hydra cyclic Gearboxes in the A60 and A62 stock, class 313, class 314, and class 315 and also modernise the A60 and A62 stock and make it into an 11 car per unit so it could have fewer doors, more tables, computers and mobile phone chargers. A Stock Train and 8 Disabled Toilets on those A stock trains. why couldn’t we refurbish and modernise the Waterloo and city line Triple-Track train tunnel and make it more Larger and extend it to the bank station, making it into a Triple-Track Railway Line so those Five countries such as Australia, Germany, Italy, Poland And Sweden to convert the waterloo and city line Triple-Track Railway tunnel into a High-Speed Railway lines? The Third Euro tunnel Triple-Track Railway line to make it 11 times better for passengers so they could go from A to B. Then put the modernised 11 car per unit A Stock and put them on a bigger modernised Waterloo and city line Triple-Track train tunnel so it could go to bank station to those Five countries such as Australia, Germany, Italy, Poland And Sweden. The modernised refurbished 11 cars per unit A stock could be a High Speed The Third Triple-Track Euro Tunnel Train So it is promising and 47 times a lot more possible to do this kind of project if that will be OK for London Australia, Germany, Italy, Poland And Sweden. oh by the way, could they also tunnel the Triple-Track Railway Line so it will stop from Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Essex so that the Passengers will go to Australia, Germany, Italy, Poland and Sweden and also extend the Triple-Track Railway Line from the Bank to Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Essex Stations so that more people from there could go to Australia, Germany, Italy, Poland And Sweden more Easily. Why couldn't they extend the Piccadilly Line and also build brand-new underground train stations so it could go even further right up to Clapton, Wood Street can they also make another brand new underground train station in Chingford and could they extend the Piccadilly Line and the DLR right up to Chingford? All of the classes 150, 155, 154, 117, 114, 105, and 106, will be replaced by all of the Scania N112, Volvo B10M, Gardner 6LXB, Gardner 6LXC and Gardner 8LXB Diesel Five carriages three disabled toilets are air conditioning trains including Highams Park for extended roots which is the Piccadilly line and the DLR trains. Could you also convert all of the 1973 stock trains into an air-conditioned maximum speed 78 km/hours (48 MPH) re-refurbished and make it into a 8 cars per unit if that will be alright, and also extend all of the Piccadilly train stations to make more space for all of the extended 8 car per unit 1973 stock air condition trains and can you also build another Mayflower and Tornado Steam Locomotive Companies and can they order Every 77 Octagon and Every 47 Hexagon shape LNER diagram unique small no.13 and unique small no.11 Boilers from those Countries such as Greece, Italy, Poland, and Sweden, can they make Mayflower and Tornado Steam Locomotive speeds by up to 147MPH so you can try and test it on the Original Mainline so it will be much more safer for the Passengers to enjoy the 147MPH speed Limit only for HS2 and Channel Tunnel mainline services, if they needed 16 Carriages Per units, can they use those class 55’s, class 44’s, class 40’s and class 43HST Diesel Locomotive’s right at the Back of those 18 Carriages Per Units so they can take over at the Back to let those Mayflower and Tornado Steam Locomotive’s have a rest for those interesting Journeys Please!!!!!!, oh can you make all of those Coal Boxes’s 18 Tonnes for all of those 147MPH Mayflower and Tornado Steam Locomotive’s so the Companies will Understand us PASSENGER’S!!!! so please make sure that the Builders can do as they are told!!!!! And Please do something about these very very important Professional ideas Please? Prime Minister of England, Prime Minister of Australia, Prime Minister of Sweden, Prime Minister of Germany, Prime Minister of Italy, Prime Minister of Poland and that Includes the Mayor of London.

Bit late, but build Euston as a smaller through station to Stratford and beyond. Giving people the choice of OOC EUS SFA

Whilst I love the engineering aspect, I struggle to see how this works economically. I live in Solihull, and they always make the play that Interchange station is in Solihull, it technically is, but it in really not near the centre of Solihull. To get to interchange station will be similar to getting to Birmingham International station, a £25, 30 min taxi ride. I can get a Chiltern train from Solihull to London usually for the same cost of the taxi to Interchange/Internation stations. So how are the tickets for HS2 going to be priced, they basically have to give them away and include the trip on Elizabeth line to get you somewhere that you actually want to be. With the taxi ride and the Elizabeth line I struggle to see how this will even be quicker than the direct Chiltern to Marylebone (admittedly not the best located London station but at least it’s on the tube).

Going to save a few minutes of a journey between Birmingham and somewhere outside London……..feckin genius! I imagine Sunak and co have some mates making an utter mint out of our tax money on this shambles of a project.

Spain, Italy and France have built thousands of miles of high speed lines since the 1980s. They've allowed for free competition which has reduced prices considerably. A train from Madrid to Barcelona takes 2h30min (the distance is even larger than London-Edinburgh) and you can buy it for as low as 10€. What has the UK done in the meantime?

0:53 and best british time and costs planning

You can't claim it to be for the 21st and 22nd century when you have things like the Shanghai Maglev at 460kph. Why isn't HS2 a maglev system for the price we are paying?

The Northern expansion needs to be revived! Everyone in the UK deserves access to affordable, clean and safe HSR!

Great to see such work being done in the UK to add more travel capacity options to the British Transportation system. This is greatly missed here in the USA, we are stuck with congested roads/highways and airport tarmacs. We need High Speed Rail like yesterday, unfortunately we lack the leadership and financial fortitude from Governments, federal, state, and the private sector. The inconvenience, expense/investment you are going through now in the UK will bear fruit ten fold in the future years.

manchester and leeds branches plz

Run this by me again please. Why is it not connecting to HS1 and why is over £100 BILLION being wasted to save 20 MINUTES to only get to Birmingham????

Excellent update. Thank you. However, not continuing the project up country as originally planned is a gross dereliction of economic common sense.

The discontinued CRH380D could be inherited from HS2 rolling stock.

is it still going through crewe?

it needs to go further than Birmingham it should go to Glasgow and Edinburgh at least to relive congestion on the WCML

Bit too much of a PR 'advert' and not enough about the engineering.

I wonder why they arnt planning a line around the top of London and taking it down to Ashford to link with Eurostar .

oh, not THAT Huw Edwards lol

🚄🇬🇧👍👍

Where will the trains be built and by whom?

HS2 still wont connect to HS1, so to get from Birmingham to Paris will still be easier to fly. Incredible that after spending over £50bn they could not get it to connect to HS1 and the European network. Almost nothing gets mentioned about this abject failure in design and planning, why?

The germans have made an absolute fortune selling TBMs to us in the last 20 years or so.Just how did we become so useless that we have to import all of our Tunnel Boring Maçhines,to say nothing of the trains that will also be imported but assembled here.What a disgrace.

I thought this had been cancelled

No mention of Euston. Has that been officially scrapped?

Needs a direct link to the south-east, Kent, either via Stratford International or a new line via Gatwick. Send trains to Dover Priory, with a stop a Ashford International.

Incredible progress 👍Proud to be English 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

The continuing bilge on zero carbon rail for HS2 never stops, Using their own DfT data, HS2 would not be carbon neutral for 125 years.

Has anyone told the narrow minded government that more railway lines are needed?

Cant wait for the Elizabeth Line to get crush loaded thanks to Rishi being a idiot and not letting you push on to Euston.

A great deal of the tunnelling is only being undertaken to satisfy unrealistic NIMBY objections by MPs in comfortable Conservative constituencies adding needless and eyewatering billions to the total cost yet these are precisely the people who then sought to condemn the total outlay. But for these errant objectors, this project could have been undertaken such that the money saved could have provided electrification all over the north of England - the so-called 'levelling-up', perhaps. Utterly unnecessary cosmetic expenditure (such as the miles of ingenious M-shaped cut-and-cover green tunnels) is starving the rest of the rail network of vital investment and we have not tens, not hundreds, but thousands of miles of former railway to reinstate if we are ever to manage a substantial change from road to rail, which the climate crisis is telling us we must. Green tunnels - why not put the M25 and the M40 underground because they are far more intrusive in the landscape than HS2 ever would be ! I completely admire the 31,000 working on this project for their resilience, morale, and determination in the face of what has been disgracefully misdirected government hostility to rail and that hostility simply must stop, and stop soon. The proper target for anyone's anger concerning HS2 should be those who have deliberately made the project far harder and heavier in engineering terms and thus far more time-consuming and immensely more costly than it need have been and for that you must look in on the House of Commons itself, and the resentful mandarins in the Treasury who have hated rail for most of the past century - we cannot afford that behaviour anymore. Failure to build the continuation to Manchester will actually lessen capacity overall because the HS2 trains cannot use the classic network as it currently stands to their proper capacity. Don't try to dress this project up as a complete success at this stage because the missing elements of it it will need to be revived and expanded in great haste by the next government. This very day (9th May) the press is carrying a story about a disastrous underestimate of global warming by the end of the century, leaving scientists 'in despair'. Not only does the high speed network need to reach Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds and Bradford but it must also reach Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh. The French managed theirs decades ago. Politicians here seem not even to have understood the basic physics of high speed - the further you go, the more worthwhile it is to go very quickly. Adding capacity to the network would actually have been better accomplished with a raft or rail reopenings, although anything HS2 will provide is valuable, of course. As for Old Oak Common, it will be a reasonably well-connected interchange with the Elizabeth line and the GWML but they are no substitute for the line's completion to Euston. People want to get from one city centre to the other if they are taking a high speed service, not to be washed up/marooned in Acton with a colossal walk with heavy luggage only to leave them waiting for the Elizabeth line. The pausing of the Euston stretch is is yet another interference by an uncomprehending, amateurish government - they must quite basically not be understanding anything about a civil engineering project like this. Let's hope there are indeed better times round the corner because we shall be in a dreadful state if not because the car and the white van are not going to last for ever.

Yes but not for another ten years, before a HS2 train run

That is allot of cement .

I cant believe that this project hasn't been cancelled yet, another white elephant that never should have been started.

Huw Edwards has had a career change

Nothing on Euston…

is that Baldrick?

I thought the UK switched to metric

Very pleased to see Huw doing well after he left the BBC.

As an investment in the future of the country, HS2 was an amazing solution to some serious structural problems in the UKs economy. Glad you're now selling the benefits of HS2 as it should have been sold from the start. Alas, unpopular Rishi thought it'd add inches to his 'little rishi' if he cancelled it. Show he was a 'big strong man' and all that. I often wonder why we follow the idiots in charge when they decide to commit obvious partisan and short sighted acts such as a fire sale of the land acquired for phase 2b and 3. "Cant prove me wrong now tee hee!" It's so childish. Just say "No. Sod off!

Any update on how the resale of compulsory purchased property on the northern leg is going?

The HS2 scheme will transform the way we move between our major cities, with "zero carbon" journeys between Birmingham and London. Natural gas is 38.5% of the UK's energy mix in February 2023 and the main source of electricity entering the national grid. Wow, carbon-free natural gas!

Is it true the government have given one billion pounds for the final leg into Euston ?

Thought it was cancelled to manchester so it's just a quick way to get to Birmingham where no one wants to go

Number of jobs generated is not proportional to the investment. Will London be invesiting in Birmingham as it will in effect be a new Zone for travel? Shame Brexit has scewed up uk investment and growth. Great to see the continued regeneration of Birmingham.

Wouldn't it have been better to see if the Euston extension is going to go ahead before spending all that money on the Atlas Road logistic tunnel?

AITCH!!!

Where’s our money in Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

I keep thinking about the 100 Billion and over runs of 40 Billion So far London to Birmingham are you kidding What a joke we are 👎🇬🇧

Well I read that as 31,000 new taxpayers and tens of £billions being spent on economic stimulation, both on transportation and new housing. Emphasis on cost is misleading, as if the entire build is a sunk expense.

this shit makes me ROCK HARD

The 1st railway in the world was between Manchester and Liverpool. HS2 is only half a job. Levelling up in England is a joke. The North has been ignored again.

Or you could just Zoom

HS2 must be fully built Both Eastern and Western Legs HS2 must go to Euston

Early 2030s… Jesus…

The lowest speed building project wherever. HS2

I predict these trains should they ever actually run will be empty because no one will be able to afford the £50000 season ticket or the £2500 one way fare..

The UK should consider developing the first Mass Drone Transport system. A fleet of drone buses that can carry 40 people, that would mostly follow the existing intercity rail tracks. The drones could build on the new generation of airships to increase their efficiency and use AI scheduling, building on the advances that have been made in tall building's smart lifts technology. Although trains can be impressive mass transport systems once built, they represent large investments and require tunnels, bridges and the acquiring of green belt land. Scaled up Drone technology would eliminated the whole of the city interconnecting infrastructure and its continual maintenance, instead it could operate more as a coach service with frequent flights. There will be a country somewhere that will be the last to invest in traditional mass transport systems, before everyone has moved on, let it not be the UK.

A friend of mine told me about the new craze for playing chess with bales of hay. Watch this video and you can find out about Hay Chess too. Sorry!

Does it not go to Liverpool?

1:56 WTF! Wouldn't it have been quicker and cheaper to stop tunnelling a few hundred metres back and excavate a cutting? It's literally only 4m/5m under the surface grade!!! No wonder this project is so far over budget.

Wo