The selling of the land for the northern section (phase 2) is a mistake, safeguarding should have continued so in maybe 10-15 years the gov. doesn’t have buy land again and the project can run more smoothly.
Its not a mistake its corruption and therefore I have no objection to the labour government offering no compensation or better yet raiding the bank account of Rishi Sunak for said compensation.
It's not a mistake. It's deliberate. Simple political calculus: The government needs all the money it can get right now so it can postpone tax rises, thus increasing their chance of reelection, and selling off the land also ensures that if they do lose than a future Labour government can't reverse the decision.
@@vylbird8014 one of my relative's council which is in heavy debt has taken to (between cancellation of transport options for the disabled and elderly) reimposing outdated fire legislation on council tenants including not allowing them use of their sheds or lofts, benches in communal areas, doormats or parking mobility scooters by their door at the threat of hefty fines. They will not do what is good, only what fixes the balance sheets and that is the way things are run right now.
@@nevreiha The state of local council finances is also a massive failure of the Tories. They've consistently reduced budgets over and over again yet expect them to do more with less. So the only recourse for the councils is to raise council tax or find other creative ways of generating money. They've totally destroyed this country, it'll take a good 20 years to recover from this last 13 years of epic mismanagement and callous, brazen contempt they have for the people. Unless they're rich of course, then they'll bend over backwards for your "donations".
I don't even want road construction, at this point. I just want them patched, cleaned of fallen leaves, hedges trimmed with the chunks of tree picked up, and resurfaced when they're worn out. Is it too much to ask for the roads to not destroy my vehicles? To not have to avoid certain roads because I'll get a puncture? To not go sliding around on junctions because they're coated in rotten leaves?
It's a remark I made below a video about the impact of HS2, and how some houses will be demolished. This was from a car enthusiast, who had a six lane motorway in the same shot as the HS2 construction site.
@@Skorpychan It's clearly too much to ask central government to fund highways maintenance teams properly, especially when they happen to be run by the opposition
@@GryphLanelocally to me the government is going to use some of the HS2 money spending £100 million+ to build a dual carriageway bypass around Norwich because a few hundred villagers were complaining about having a few trucks through their villages. They could probably give £100,000 to each of the complaining villagers and still have cash to spare.
Building a highway: "It's an Investment in to the Transportation Network" Building a Railway: "It's a massive waste of resources that will never be profitable or well used" It infuriates me that Rail Project are always needing to justify themselves whereas politicians, especially right leaning "conservatives", have a much more "Buils it, and they will come" approach to roads
It is a sad iexample of modern Britain that because you like something, that somebody else hates, you are then accused of being a shill, taking bribes etc
It's not just Britain, but here in the States, too. Perhaps it's a combination of psychological projection and unconscious acknowledgement of cynical marketing strategies, but it seems that anybody advocating for something that could be generally beneficial to people (especially if it's advocating the government do something) is inevitably accused of being a paid agent of some nefarious conspiracy.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the absolute hatred that Rishi and co. have for public transport in general being a factor. It's incredibly shameful knowing that they're in positions of power, especially as _we didn't bloody vote them in._ Imagine if we behaved like France. Now imagine having the TGV for 40 years instead of the Pacers.
The French used to run small, light, diesel railcars a bit like Pacers only with proper bogies. Meanwhile, the concentration on LGVs has led to the voies classiques that the French Pacers ran upon being run down or closed altogether. Meanwhile, internal airlines in France are enjoying a bit of a revival, so maybe the LGVs aren't as popular - or profitable - as was originally planned.
This goes back to Thatcher & Co., only losers used public transport winners had bought a bright, shiny new car to enjoy the freedom of the open road devoid of unions.
What's even more disgraceful is that the PM apparently has the power to overturn the decisions of Parliament. This is the most scrutinised rail project in British history, probably world history. It had many consultations and debates and Parliament still voted for it because they knew it needed to be done. Then Rishi comes along and is like nah. All because he thought it would get a few more votes. Disgusting.
Conservatives have been against public transport since Harold Macmillan decided that the best person to be Minister of Transport should be the owner of a road-building firm who later fled the country to avoid prosecution.
But the cost has to be divided over it's life span. The current rail system was started in earnest in the 1840's. Nearly 200 years ago. So divide the cost of HS rail over 200 years and it doesn't seem too bad. It will never be cheaper to build than it is today!! Crack on, build it all, right up to Scotland and into Wales too!
Also note that when looking at international comparisons, costs are often higher in the UK because they include a much wider scope ... eg, including the cost of buying the trains and expanding capacity in city centre locations, where other countries would account for the trains separately and don't need major new works in city centres because they weren't already pared down to the bare minimum.
Also if it was to cost 100billion that was to be averaged over the remaining 15yrs of contruction which equates to about 6billion per year out of an annual UK spend of 3000billion per year
I recently made a long car journey that I last made 10 years ago (all while the HS2 controversy has gone) and was astonished at the number of new roads and by-passes have sprung up in the meantime, carving ruthlessly through woods, hills and hamlets, yet I have never heard a murmur of protest about them. I'm sure some of those hamlet dwellers did say something, but nothing that got beyond a few inches in a local paper.
It was good for the hamlet dwellers as it bypasses their hamlets. Haven't you heard of the protests around both the M3 extension and the Newbury Bypass?
@@paulsengupta971 Not if it brings the main road nearer to their hamlet than it was before. Not every hamlet or lone house is on an existing main road (often why people choose to live there), but they can find itself right next to a new by-pass route (or even be demolished). That's why you see some very high fences in places along new by-passes - they are [not very effective] appeasement for the affected owners.
The big difference is that a road provides local benefit to the area it passes through. Car owners can use it at will. HS2 goes from city centre to city centre and has little connection with the places on its route.
Good to see a positive commentary on this project. Building infrastructure is expensive and few people see the value until it stops working properly. I’m unlikely to be a regular user, but what surprises me is it wasn’t started in the north to ensure that part was built first, so the whole project was built, rather than just building the London bit.
Even as a Northerner I recognise that the southern end of the WCML is the busiest, so it makes sense to start with that end. No point in freeing up capacity at the northern end if trains are still going to run into congestion further south!
@@SEAWORRIER Unfortunately HS2 hasn't had a Government supporter of the project since Boris Johnson was PM. Although to be fair, a few other Tories did object to the cancellation.
@@hairyairey One thing about Boris Johnson I actually liked was that he wasn't afraid to look at and back big ideas. It was nice having a PM that believe in big engineering projects. Unfortunately he just wasn't that great at running the country.
I'm in Spain and I really enjoy our high speed trains. I use a lot the Valencia to Madrid line and that has been a game changer to the route. Also the Valencia to Seville one, but that's quite a distance. I really hope that we can have Valencia to Barcelona connected in the same way and that other regions can enjoy these. Problem is that many areas have old and slow trains that fail often. So both things have to be attended, regular regional trains (and commuter ones) and high speed.
As a highways designer working in structural maintenance I find things like this fascinating. HS2 actually *is* a good thing but it needs to be built properly and fully for it to have the full benefits.
@@gombles Except that it was never just about saving 15 minutes to London. It was about taking high speed traffic off the existing network, which has the effect of being able to close everything else up, adding capacity and providing extra resilience - benefits that would be felt across the entire country.
@@gombles Any benefit at all is going to be a good thing. Even things like not having to wait so long at your local level crossing. It all mounts up. The only joke here is having to rely on a Tory government to get it built.
@@gombles As said above, it's a capacity argument, not a matter of speed, you can google those details in your own time. The thing that really does make the project a waste of time is that it'll only ever be half built, it should go all the way to Inverness if we want to claim we're still a serious country.
Railways in the 19th century "Look at this amazing viaduct, isnt it amazing" Railways in the 21st century, "Oh we're very sorry, if you wouldn't mind us putting in this little peice of infrastructure please, it'll make you're life easier we promise"
People objected to railway infrastructure in the 19th century too, especially in the early days. But poor people were of no consequence and could easily be ignored. Structures that we admire in wonderment now were often seen as monstrosities scarring the landscape when they were built.
Harringworth Viaduct has over 30 million bricks. They were manufacturing and laying I think around 50,000 bricks a day during it's construction. That's extraordinary.
The frustrating thing, as Jago hints, is that Whitehall gave in to Nimbys in the Chilterns and escalated the cost of the southern leg so much that they ran out of money for the northern leg. Whereas motorways and dual carriageways run through most of the Chiltern valleys and are far more noisy and intrusive than trains. Compare the impact of HS1 and the M20 in Kent. But it also highlights a problem with our systems nowadays that overpriced lawyers can delay and block all sorts of projects with public benefit - railways, roads, housing, power stations etc. While China can get a high speed railway designed and built in 4 years by limiting local objections for the national good.
It shame how badly hs2 been handled could off been game changer for railway but now looks like to be repeat off great central railway over promised under delivered which only benefit the south and leaves north high and dry
Hello Jago, thank you for this video on HS2. Back in 2011, I travelled from London to Wuppertal, in Germany, by HS1, Thalys and DB Regional Express on all electriclly powered trains. I had the pleasure of seeing the countryside all along the route except in the Channel Tunnel obviously. Travelling by train is great because it is city centre to city centre without messing about with travelling to airports and no aviation fuel pollution involved. Do you remember the London UndergrounD poster “Fly the Tube” for the Heathrow extension? Looking at the railway maps of of how connecting the cities of Great Britain (HS1, 2, 3, 4 etc) and across Europe was a positive environmental aim. The scrapping the further extensions of HS2 is a lost opportunity for improvements to the British rail infrastructure and its benefits to travellers. Best wishes from Oxfordshire.
But he omitted the big one; access to the worksite with permission to record. Worth rather more than coffee and danish pastry, but of no monetary value. A pearl of great price perhaps?
It’s crazy they didn’t keep the line to Crewe. It was the cheapest bit of the entire project. Brum to Crewe was under 10% of the cost of London to Brum.
Indeed the major problem cutting the line short at Litchfield creates is there is no bypass for the 2 track bottleneck through the tunnel at Shugborough. That's also why phase 2 was split into a and b, as the planners realised it was dead easy to build 2a on to Crewe and create a massively better line more rapidly, leaving the harder bit to Manchester for later.
@@ADAMEDWARDS17 Although a localised Stafford bypass could improve that quite cheaply. Other than Shugborough the current WCML alignment seems pretty good?
The most congested section is London-Rugby. Costs have been cut because there will be a general election some time in the next year. The plans will be re-instated at some point, but maybe not until the first part of the line is running.
When you have decisions about long term strategic transport infrastructure projects being made by governments who are preoccupied with short term vote chasing, you are bound to end up with spiralling costs and project cancellations. I am not sure what the answer is other than to look at how other countries managed their HSR projects.
Other countries have government systems based on consensus and long term planning usually because they use a form of proportional representation rather than first past the post. In Spain the aim is that high speed rail will put all regional capaitals within 3 hours of Madrid and in Madrid there is a tunnel to enable the trains to run through region to region. HS2 would have put Edinburgh and Glasgow 3.5 hours from London and freed up the exisitng lines for other regional servies and freight. Sad that the supposed party of business can't see how that's good for trade.
Fascinating. I'm also fond of rail travel. However, HS2 suffers from the most loathsome of failings - it started from London. Now, after its cut backs, its just another fast link between (almost) London to (almost) Birmingham. Given the existence of the Euston to New Street service (and beyond) it now seems like a redundant white elephant. Politically, the full project made sense to equip northern cities (the Northern Powerhouse) with faster links to the south. The very essence of "leveling-up". Indeed, one could argue that faster east-west links connecting Liverpool, Manchester, to Leeds (& Sheffield), and on to Hull and Middlesbrough would have been even more beneficial. Theres a certain irony to the fact that the political right have been bleating about not wanting it near them, forcing costs up by requiring tunnels and viaducts to be built and they have the line while the more politically left leaning northern towns which wanted better links now get nothing. HS2 has become a very symbol of what is wrong in Britain. Its starts nowhere, its going nowhere but its doing it very fast. (apologies for being cynical)
Well you haven't done much reserch then have you, HS2 will run from London Euston terminus which is not exactly Central London( OOC is just temporary as it is not desighned as a terminus station) and terminate in the heart of Birmingham City Center at Birmingham Curzon Street Station whose main entrancw will be on Moor Street Queensway in Birmingham City Centre and these services will replace London Avanti Services from Birmingham New Street Station, it s centerd on Birmingham and I am not sure why the Northern Power House has so much importance over other areas.
It's not the "high speed" of HS2 that's most important. It's relieving the congestion on the WCML that's the most important. If you watch RU-vidrs like traindriver brian, you realise just how much time freight gets held up, how much time is wasted. The freight may appear to be moving fast when it's moving, but it can average 20mph over the course of a day between all the stops and starts and red lights and delays. HS2 will mean higher average speed on all tracks, not just the fancy new one.
But it didn't need to be high speed then, did it? We could have upgraded old disused lines for a lot less cash and still got the same congestion relieving effect.
@@DavidMartin-ym2te The new alignment uses far less energy per ton per mile. That alone will probably pay for the outlay over a century, which is the kind of timescale these projects are based on.
@@DavidMartin-ym2teNo. The upgrade to the network is a new line called HS2. Most of the old alignments aren't enough and just feed directly into the existing main lines meaning it would actually make things worse in most cases. Some branch lines should be re-established, but it needs to be done in an intelligent way. There's a point where the only upgrade is to start over because you get to the point of diminishing returns. That's what HS2 was.
It seems like the north of any place is forgotten. The same occurs over here across the pond. When there are rail commuter projects, new equipment, electrification, or other extensions, we're forgotten or only get a new station or two while the south gets all the new stuff. The same with new routes as well. We're always left out and have to deal with the onslaught of traffic from outside the region and backed up roads while the South Shore recently got more improvements including on those lines that see very little traffic to start with.
An awful lot of pre-manufactured parts on civil construction projects are built in France. I guess we just don't have the necessary expertise/manufacturing capability here.
When I saw the quality of the Elizabeth Line build it gave me great hope as to what HS2 would look like and if you want the best you have to pay for it. The controversy now is the fact that it is not achieving its goal of reaching Leeds and Manchester and dealing with the capacity issues and overloading of the existing rail network north of Birmingham.
As an American I wish I could get a slice of that high speed rail. We think what few trains we have are fast if they go highway speeds. Our passenger rail must share with freight so slow as a freight train is top speed.
the only way HS2 would have got built entirely was if they had started in Leeds and Manchester first. No way they would have cancelled it if London missed out.
And it would not of got any where at that rate, it is being built from Birmingham North to Lichfield and South to London and North from London and sites in between, this way 100% of the line is being constructed.
Nope. The massive overspend was for purchasing land and construction in london and the pandering to middle England with the tunnels in the chilterns. Look at crossrail or any construction project in london for that matter
This feels like a poisoned chalice middle finger to the next gov’t from a current gov’t, that knows it’s out of office in a matter of months now. The selling of land is irresponsible, you are driving the costs further up if the next gov’t decides it is a priority. I will say that I am confused why this type of project always seems to cost far more to build in uk than other countries, the cost projections, if accurate, are unjustifiable. HS2 is obviously needed however, and not just to Manchester but up the coast to the northern cities. I would prefer them to switch the way they talk about these things - it should be a straight 5 billion (or whatever) a year, every year for building out the network protected from ongoing maintenance costs, forever. We have built almost nothing for 2 generations now, and our infrastructure, both rail and road, is in a desperate situation now and it affects our economic growth disproportionately. We have over protected our greenfield land and made it so bureaucratic, time consuming and expensive that the only things worth the effect are huge, identical looking developments of houses that are tiny and poorly designed/built. HS2 clearly needs built, I just hope we’re not waiting another few decades for it to continue on from Birmingham, because a system linking just those 2 cities changes the cost/benefit equation.
That was how they were originally talking about it. One of the reasons construction didn't really start until 2020 was that per year expenditure for crossrail was to be switch to HS2, so the same amount of money per year would be exiting the treasury.
Too many Public Enquiries and planning appeals where the only winners are lawyers with their huge fees. These result in delays and redesigns both of which push the costs up.
@@paulsengupta971 I had my mind on HS2 changed as well by Gareth Dennis from being unfavorable to being quite supportive minus quite a few issues that I have with the station designs (the reliance on terminus stations instead of through stations and the fundamental constraints on capacity and future operations that these have.)
@@paulsengupta971 I knew little about the point of the project, just the negative press about the excessive £100 billion figure and how it would destroy towns and the environment. Gareth talks about the benefits that come with HS2, why its so expensive and debunks claims about the environmental impact of its construction.
@@datguy6101 Another point that Gareth has been good at pushing - and which most of the press pay no attention to - is that the benefits of HS2 are for wider than just those cities directly served by HS2. For example, Northampton is set to have huge gains, because Hs2 will free up capacity on the WCML to run intercity trains from Northampton to points north, which the current network can't accommodate.
@@stevieinselbybut “the WCML has no capacity problem, it’s currently running just fine” 🙄 these are the same type of people who think y2k was never a problem instead of just fixed on time at immense effort and cost.
Good video but one minor addition to note is that the majority (maybe all) of the tunnels are in the non-cancelled leg of HS2 so there’s more than a little obvious pro-London bias in the decision to cut the cheaper northern leg
To be fair, the most expensive tunnel (and the longest I think) would have been under the Manchester suburbs. Not a particularly difficult tunnel to bore as it's through sandstone, just have to be careful where to site the ventilation shafts as it would have run under a floodplain, but still. The rest would have been pretty short, though I don't know what was supposed to happen in Leeds.
They built the tunnels because of NIMBY's. Those NIMBY's also happen to be living in Tory strongholds and are quite affluent parts of the country. So they pandered to them so it didn't "ruin their view". So the rich Tory voting areas get the thing put in expensive tunnels, while the poor Tory hating parts of the country don't get a railway at all.
I must say as much as i like trains and railways , i do side with nimbys more than commuters . Many tunnels on the legacy railways of England were built due to nimbys in the 1800's .
Cost estimates are just that. Estimates. If you knew how much of a complete guess those numbers were, you would be shocked. Anyway it's still economically worth it by far.
The channel practical engineering has a nice video on why those budgets tend to get bigger over time, but that basic part is that there are a lot of unknowns factors that you can’t know about until you do it, and very few of them make things cheaper.
HS2 would be great if it was for non-Anglosphere price, like French or Spanish price tags. The WCML is at capacity and HS2 was the fix, the UK just bottled it like normal.
I am surprised the 'Government' did not convert the marked-out trackbed and even what has so far been built into a three-times as wide and fully lit motorway since the Ministry of Roads has pots of money. As far as rail is concerned the so-called 'savings'. from cancelling the Northern Leg and spending that on smaller rail projects all seem still-born under the words of local MPs as 'We cannot afford it'.
It's more complicated than that. The price includes all the stations trains and track etc. French/Spanish HSR generally doesn't include this in the price as they are separate projects, whereas we have to do it in 1 go, as there isn't the capacity at existing stations to do this
@@johnjephcote7636 Living in the Southwest of the country our local news has stated that the savings are being spent on repairing potholes so the 'savings' from the rail network are being siphoned away for the road network, all hail king car.
If you break it down the prices aren't much different. The problem is they did it as one massive mega project rather than a bunch of connected smaller ones. In France they split them up more, so the actual track to the outskirts of a city or town will be one project, the station upgrades or total new builds will be another, the lines to connect from the high speed track to the station will be another etc. This makes it more efficient to manage and also makes it harder to cancel. You can't just cancel the station build if the line is already built etc. Having it as a single project like HS2 means you can just cancel the whole thing, which is pretty much what they did.
This is because a motor car in the UK is an important status symbol, as well as a usually necessary means of transport. The days when travelling first class on the Cornish Riviera Limited or the Brighton Belle (plus secretary) or the Royal Scot conferred similar status are long gone.
Sorry, this comment is in the wrong place. It should be in the thread about why people complain about the cost of railway construction but not about the costs of road construction. Senior moment.
the Tame Valley near Birmingham is also not to be confused with the Tame Valley east of Manchester, on the historic Cheshire/Lancashire border (which gives its name to the metropolitan borough of Tameside)
There is no Tame Valley Route in Birminham there is the Stour Valley route from Birmingham to Wolverhampton, but HS2 does not follow any valley called the Tame Valley as there is no such thing although there is a small river called the River Tame in the vacinity but the HS2 line tunnels under it and goes no where near it.
I truly feel like the days when steam was king you had railway networks that although was built for competition from a business standpoint but for future reference it would be helpful for commuters. HS1 and HS2 in my opinion are trying to bring back those connections that the beeching axe had done for the network even though at the time the railway was losing money, money can be regained over time especially in different areas. I surely hope that these massive construction projects to bring back lost railway connections pays out in the long run if not then let’s say people will be pissed off
What would an HS2 return London~Birmingham set you back once all is up and running ? Mind you , the last time I took a train in the UK it was BR-only country with blue loco's coupled to Mk2 and -3 rolling stock, so I have absolutely no idea if the figure you would give me is outrageous or not. For me personally, the best thing about HS2 is at the Birmingham end: the old L&B terminus still stands proud, showing London how it should have been done.
Not so good is that anyone wanting to connect anywhere else in the West Midlands will need to get a tram from Curzon Street to New Street or walk to Moor Street with luggage. When the Birmingham Bull Ring was redeveloped it wouldn't have taken much foresight to safeguard space for a couple of extra running lines from the east to let HS2 trains run into New Street.
@@iankemp1131 It won't make any difference to local services as Birmingham Curzon Street and HS2 is desighned for long distance tain services from Birmingham, people from Wolverhampton and Coventry will have Pendolino services from there by passing Birmingham and if they did want to use the HS2 route from these places they would not change at Birmingham New Street but change trains at Birmingham International/Birmingham Interchange and if any thing else a lot of places in the West Midlands you have to get off at New Street and get the Tram/ Bus or Taxi, so whats the problem
@@peterwilliamallen1063 Will be interesting to see how many Pendolino services actually remain after HS2 opens (especially the Euston leg) and whether they get extra stops (eg Milton Keynes, Watford, Rugby). Hadn't thought about it, but Coventry could lose out significantly. Cross City line passengers will need an extra change. But I guess for the Kidderminster line it's no worse than now, and you make an interesting point that for a lot of the West Midlands, bus and taxi is the way to get to New Street as there are few local train routes - quite different to London (or indeed Leeds, Manchester and Glasgow) but similar to Edinburgh, Sheffield, Bristol etc.
I have to admit also that I am out of date on how slow and infrequent the West Coast service to the West Midlands is nowadays. 40 years ago I remember it as a half hourly service, first stop Coventry. I thought it had then gone up to every 15 minutes pre-pandemic. Having just checked, it now seems to be 2 an hour, of which only one goes through to Wolverhampton and already has all the extra stops en route!
I wonder if it was short-sighted to cancel the northern leg. If the project was to cost (say) £150 Billion over thirty years, that it only £5 Billion a year. For comparison, the interest on the National Debt is around £100 Billion a year. What will future generations think, when the UK population reaches a hundred million, as it surely will? We are still benefiting from the tunnels, bridges and cuttings, carved out by our ancestors 150 years ago. Might our descendants criticize our parsimony and lack of vision?
I've heard excessive consultancy costs and revision have also driven the price up. Sometimes more money has been spent on value engineering than was saved. At some point you have to pry the design out of their fingers and just build it!
Tories are great at that, they cost Crossrail more with their “just use multiple signalling systems” ‘cost saving’ plans than just upgrading the signalling along the whole length would’ve cost.
True value engineering cost comparisons include the consultancy re-design costs. So a value engineered cost comparison is an exact like for like cost comparison against the original solution.
thanks for this great content, my issue with hs2 is ,[1] it should have started nearer to heathrow airport as ther is a rail to the city in place,[2] as for doing a tunnel under the chiltons thats where most of the money is going,as u have shown ,the line could have built on viaducts,up in the air and out of the way,everytime i watch hs2 video,nothing seems to get done[3] as for old oak common its the biggest waste of time again refer to number 1, end of rant
The idea that anybody could NOT want HS2, and not want HS3, 4, 5, 6, 7 etc etc is quite frankly infuriating. I'll take a massive noisy concrete slab going through my village if it means London, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester and eventually everywhere else are all connected via trains that take less than an hour is quite frankly shooting ourselves and our economy in the foot.
I get the idea, though I don't think you'd need more than 4-5 lines in the UK (if you count HS2 as the full "Y") to cover all major cities. After HS2, you'd want a line connecting Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle, and then on to Edinburgh and Glasgow. After that you really only need a HS line going west to Bristol and Cardiff and you've got a network to rival France or Spain.
The Tories hate the idea of decentralising power (and the money it makes) from London. The entire UK economy is basically the finance sector which is concentrated on a couple of tiny areas in London. If that sector falls, the whole UK economy goes with it. We need to diversify and decentralise it. HS2 was supposed to add around £100billion a year to the wider economy once built (in full). It would have allowed places outside of London to be more competitive, but they don't want that, which is dumb because it means the WHOLE COUNTRY gets richer.
@@TalesOfWar I lived in London and now around it and totally agree . More infrastructure needs to be upnorth .southeast England is now the most densely populated area in Europe.
@TetchyEquation Great attitude, unfortunately a lot of the people who live in those villages didn't see it the same way :( It's annoying because trains have less noise impact on the countryside and surrounding people than the existing motorways. Look at HS1 in Kent.
I have cycled through some of the Buckinghamshire villages which HS2 will pass through. They are also campaigning against a rail freight terminal. I guess they like to be held up by the many lorries on our roads? Japan had the Shinkansen nearly 60 years ago & it made a huge improvement to their country. Is there a reason why that should not also work in the UK?
In the US, something of this sort might never get done. Witness the project in CA. As long as the rant is the lingua franca surrounding public transport here, I suspect we’ll never see true HS, the Acela notwithstanding. Sigh.
Its a myth: the GC line at Rugby was at righangles to the WCML, so you'd have had a sharp curve to make this work. But also note much of it has been built on e.g at Daventry. The one section where the route is being folowed is near Aylesbury where HS2 crosses the East West line at Calvert.
The GC route was well aligned, easily graded and built to Continental loading gauge. A great pity that the route was not safeguarded after closure. An extra mile or two round Rugby to give a gentle curve would have been far cheaper than HS2. An alternative would have been to use it as the main freight route and leave passenger trains to the WCML, solving capacity problems though not giving full high-speed rail.
@@iankemp1131 Freight trains co-exist quite nicely with local passenger trains so moving them off would achieve little. It is the long distance services which are the odd ones out.
@@peterwilliamallen1063 It would put in a dogleg with a few extra miles, but the same is true of the deviation via Old Oak Common. Also it feeds directly into the West Coast Main Line at Rugby for Manchester/Liverpool, and would serve Coventry. The real snag is that the Rugby-Coventry section in particular is a long-term bottleneck because it is only 2 tracks. So you would need a new parallel line as far as Coventry anyway. Logically that would come off the GC line some way south of Rugby (round Catesby?) to reduce the extra mileage. But it's all academic anyway as that route wasn't chosen.
All these details - local politicians, residents who not directly benefit (not in my backyard!) , enviroment protection overkill and stealth design requirements are the reasons for huge costs - rendering infrastructure projects almost impossible in Europe. And the United Kingdom. Thank You for the video!
Now, I'm just a machinist, not a political scientist or economist, but I'm willing to bet that just about all the people who demanded all these changes to HS2 are now complaining about why the costs are going up.
The so-called northern leg of HS2 would have benefited Manchester and Liverpool but would it have done anything for the actual North ( North Lancashire, Cumbria, most of Yorkshire, the North East)? When politicians talk about "the North" they tend to mean nothing beyond Manc, Liverpool, Leeds.
The whole HS2 story, the manner in which it was treated by the country, the way it was managed, and the comments to this video, all strongly suggest that any railway engineer involved in the design and construction of this railway will be much better off plying their trades in any of the other countries in the world that want to build modern high-speed rail, and above all, don't _hate_ themselves like Britain does.
Looking at the original planned route for HS2 the main problem with escalating costs seems to have arisen from connecting it to London. A Y shaped line connecting Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, with a northern spur from Manchester back to the west coast main line heading towards Scotland would have been far cheaper and benefited far more people. Instead we're getting a new terminus station at old oak common (eventually also an upgrade to Euston) and what is essentially just a high speed commuter line from the Chilterns into London. And they expect us to believe that wasn't the plan all along.
It was Y shaped the way it was for a geographic reason, to connect major cities in England together. Then the cold feet came along. I am still hopeful for a high speed line from Liverpool to Hull!
I would imagine that the same controversies arose in the 1840s. When the Victorian railway builders descended on the countryside, it must have been even more unnerving and annoying to landowners and the peasants alike.
Nothing like as controversial, except with some major land owners. Communities positively clamoured for railway services for the very good reason that the transport alternatives where very slow, horse-drawn and, for people, expensive. That is no longer the situation. There is also the issue that, with HS2, there is very little obviously of benefit to the communities it's passing through and its construction has been very disruptive to local transport (certainly is where my mother lives).
Some of the books from the time mention how locals felt the railway was a scar on the landscape. Larkrise to Candleford has a whole section about the positives and negatives of the railway coming to their town. Many hated the look of riveted iron for the bridges as it looked ‘unfinished’, we hear the same thing about concrete now. Strange that we now value the look of iron bridges
@@fisk0 In the first instance, that has precisely nothing to do with current objections, and it appears that those who have researched the issue have not found any credible justification for claims that asphyxiation would occur above 20 km/h. Among other things, some human beings can run faster than that, and a rider on a horse at galloping speed can reach about 50 km/h. The Victorians would have known about that through horse racing. Dionysius Lardner, an Irish philosopher, engaged in an unwise debate with Isimbard Kingdom Brunel on the dangers of high speed travel and his claims were thoroughly debunked. Now I have no doubt the Victorians had their fair share of the type of people that claim Covid was caused by 5G mobile phone transmissions, but it seems to have played no real part in slowing the expansion of the railway system. Indeed, the Victorian era was characterised by what is known as railway mania which saw huge numbers of highly speculative projects for new railways, often with incredibly optimistic claims for traffic which were never met. The UK countryside is littered with the remnants of these failed projects.
@@TheEulerID yes, HS2 bisects communities who won't benefit from it, but that's why the current route was chosen, to minimise built-up areas as much as possible. There are still a few villages, but that's better than the larger towns and cities the ECML bisects, and the destruction adding more tracks to that line would bring.
Thanks for not shying away from politics in these videos. You don't wear your affiliations on your sleeve, but transport is inherently political, and it serves no one to pretend it doesn't exist. My own take on HS2 is that the other sections will be built in short order once the first section starts running. The mere existence of the Chanel Tunnel made HS1 politically inevitable, once the reality of Eurostars trundling through the Kent countryside on Victorian cart tracks became apparent.
@@grahamstubbs4962 It's building that bridge from Gibraltar to Morocco that's going to be tricky! On second thoughts, a tunnel would be easier, it's only about 11 miles I think.
I think the Crewe segment would be best restored to the plan if they are building HS2. It seems about the right balance to me, the plan around Manchester always seemed suboptimal. One point in favor of HS2 is construction is moving reasonably quickly, despite the price tag; California High Speed Rail has been spending money at absurd rates and hasn’t been getting much done
The original plan with Manchester was to put it in a tunnel into Piccadilly then leave a stub end at the terminus so it could be built out to continue on for when HS3 was built (which is more or less confirmed as dead at this point). They changed that to having a new viaduct and then a full on terminus, meaning any future expansion would be extremely expensive and difficult. They even screwed over any future expansion of Euston by selling off all the land around it to property developers. Euston is already a massively over burdened station. It's maddening just how shortsighted and callous they are with their "plans". It's like they've doubled down on doing the worst possible thing for the country since 2010.
I don't believe they have sold it off yet. I read no one is really prepared talk about investing until after the elections. If Labour wins I suspect they reinstate the 12 platform design with HS1 extension a possibility and tell HS2 they a few years to get shovels into the ground before the general election. @@TalesOfWar
HS2 has amazing engineering. Just a pity all of that engineering will never make it past the West Midlands. Would have been better if Crewe and East Midlands Parkway got HS2 at least, as there would be good benefits and a decent amount of freed capacity of the WCML as well as the MML. I just wish we just built the Line as normal and let NIMBYs complain as they always will to no avail
Fantastic concept, and looking so good thus far. But it must go through to Manchester and Glasgow. The cost will be greater in the future, Bite the bullet and construct right through now. Future generations will have to dig deep to help in paying it off. Future construction will be much higher and the high speed concept is a must for the long term efficiency of rail travel. The roads will be getting more choked, and rail is the answer.
HS rail should be easy in the UK, we're in a long thin island. All you need is a north-south line; London - Birmingham - Glasgow. With 2 spurs; one towards Bristol the other towards York. I recon that would be within 45 minutes by local rail of 90% of the population. Then you can ban internal flights like France (with dispensations for the Higlands and Islands).
Should be easy. But politically, not so much. A lot of it is the old NIMBY problem: A lot of communities and councils oppose the rail going through their area because of the disruption that a major construction project causes and fears that noise and loss of unspoiled natural views will lower property values. The endpoints are also ridiculously expensive because it means buying up land and demolishing buildings in major cities - thus the jokes about connecting almost-London to almost-Birmingham. Neither end actually goes up to the city center, you have to get off at the fringe of the city and change to a local train, which defeats the purpose of high speed rail.
@@Croz89 That may be true, but on the other hand is everyting centered on London a good idea? Currently yes, but that does draw people and ideas away from the regions. Could a Bristol - Birmingham link stimulate both?
@@davidbarrass Maybe in the future, but there isn't the demand at the moment. London has to be linked up to any HSR network to make any economic sense, especially as it has the HS1 link too.
@davidbarrass That's not too far off the original concept; London to Manchester with a spur to East Midlands/Sheffield/Leeds. Bristol has adequate service already, while population density drops off sharply north of Lancashire. The 1970s West Coast electrification to Glasgow was far less profitable than the original legs to Birmingham and Manchester/Liverpool. Also, it is still pretty quick with the existing trains (likewise London-York-Edinburgh).
Very interesting video from a civil/structural point of view. Politically it is also interesting in that the project costs have escalated so much in order to keep the residents between Birmingham and London happy , that the “master plan” has been castrated, leaving everything north of Birmingham-Manchester- Leeds reliant upon the canals, as an alternative to the road congestion between Birmingham Manchester and Leeds. So much for the “Northern Powerhouse “ which has as expected, turned into a meaningless PR headline, because a significant part of what is the industrial heartland of the U.K. lies between….Birmingham Manchester and Leeds.
Part of Northern Powerhouse relied on the HS2 tracks into Manchester. Which doesn't make a lot of sense if the HS2 lines terminated in Manchester. Manchester needs an underground station so that the line can be extended.
Whato Jago You, as a railway enthusiast might support a HS2 but I, also a railway enthusiast and a retired railwayman, do not. I would have preferred the money to be spent on the existing railways in the country; electrifying the railways in the forgotten East Midlands for instance. However, I did find you video interesting and informative so we will just agree to disagree.
Those viaducts really are elegant. Nowadays, no one thinks of the Victorian brick viaducts as a blot on the landscape. But a truncated HS line does seem a bit pointless: how much difference is a faster route between London and Birmingham going to make, in total travel times?
All for railways and public transport but NOT at any price. Evidence from other sources indicates complete mismanagement of finances and little attempt to keep contractors on targets. There have also been suggestions by whistle blowers of irregular practices. Why cant we do these projects without excessive cost and waste of public money?
The cancellation of the Birmingham Manchester section is utter stupidity. The problem is, as usual, politicians. From creating the extra cost of having to use tunnels, to the moving of the "saved" money to the roads. It also doesn't help that the DfT has something against that major conurbation in the middle of the route between Manchester and Birmingham, North Staffordshire! I fail to see why politicians of both sides dislike rail so much 😢
I am enthusiastic about high speed rail, but as most major cities in the UK are within 200 miles of London, or each other even, the time benefits are not very good and probably not worth the expense. Yes, there are capacity issues with the WCML, but I can't help feeling that it would have been much more sensible and cheaper, to 6 track the WCML to The North and to straighten out the line so as to accomodate (say) 186MPH HS trains. Simialrly, the Glasgow and Edinburgh line could have been easily 4 tracked through its sparsly populated route. All the electrical substations are already in place along these routes. Some extra line capacity could have been accomodated in tunnels at the London and Birmingham stations, or into any city, but in actual fact, Euston should not have been chosen, because a tunnel to St. Pancras would have been much more sensible and useful with better connectivity to Eurostar. Estimated cost including Scotland, 30% of what has been spent already.
A good site survey! Nothing new about having to appease the landlord, with the route design or the odd tunnel (such as Alderton to keep Badminton happy), on the Badminton route from Wootton Bassett to Stoke Gifford. Perhaps the odd station here and there and so on.
The constant diminution of HS2, and the political shenanigans and slights of hand around costs and redistribution of the monies saved is a scandal, and a tragedy. HS2 is needed for capacity increases, especially around the urgent need to get freight off the roads, and onto rail; also the need to allow that freight to be moved by electric traction, which is cleaner and (generally) cheaper. The full HS2 route needs to be reinstated and extended, and taken out of the hands of short term and populist political influence.
Find ding all this interesting, admit I'm not a huge railway railway buff although my father used to take me to Quainton and disliked the warship class of diesels. Admit I'm not a fan of HS2 , purely because it seemed like a lot of money and fuss for what, I'm led to believe is only half an hour faster journey time. Perhaps it's not as black and white as that?
That's the issue, it was advertised to us with all the wrong reasons. HS2 would take a lot of express traffic off the existing lines, and would allow more local or freight services on lines that are currently running to capacity. The all electric trains on HS2 and faster journey times are just the cherry on top, not the reason to build it.
because intercity trains go fast and don't stop often, they demand a vast amount of empty space in front of them where another cannot go as it would just slow down the intercity one. If you get rid of all those faster trains you have free capacity for slower (ie freight) and stopping (ie local/suburban) trains, and one intercity train removed is worth several of those. Obviously, intercity travel is incredibly valuable for the economy (and the railway companies ofc) so we can't actually do without them, but putting them on their own network has the same effect
Great video and I'm glad you got a free Danish Pastry. What a magnificent railway; I'm just sorry I'll never see it reach the far north. Spent a few happy hours in Lille recently; a beautiful, historic town which has something special i.e. a direct high speed rail connection from the cobbled town centre to everywhere in Europe that matters. I swear you can see it in the faces of the people.
Bravo very good video and true normally everything in UK and US cost more but anw Britain i think need HS2 cause it opens the way for high-speed rail in the UK. So UK gov needs to be persistent for continuing the Hs2 till the end and immediately when its finished start some HS3 and 4 cause those things make strong economy 😤 and it pays back the money believe it.
Jago, when you get round to the Old Oak Common video, I'm still in the dark on the diversion of GW main line trains - apparently over Acton East and Acton Wells Junctions (unelectrified!) - to unknown railways such as the North London, but I didn't yet understand how. On the subject of coffee and danish pastry, I know all too well from personal experience that corporatism equates these "favours" with potential fraudulence, and thus restricts them to such modest gratuities. So why not establish a charity foundation (Stiftung) amongst railway youtubers which distributes earnt (I mean really earnt, as here) journalistic income according to a transparent key which corporations can relate to. The key would reflect clicks on the respective channel and payments would be made independently by the Foundation admin. Better than a cup of coffee for heavens' sakes. The question in moral philosophy is BTW (should anyone be interested), whether the news creator (here, the railway) should pay for the propagation of the news he has himself generated, or whether the news consumer should pay to be informed (= adverts). This is also a question for all democracies (does the voter inform himself (as assumed) or allow himself to be influenced?). I offer no answers, nor even (should it have been thus misunderstood) any inkling of any. PS: Jay Foreman has gone the influencer-route (embedded adverts), which I think conflicts with this suggestion. As much as I respect Jay Foreman and adore his work, that is a form of lobby-whoreing.
Drachwhatsisface is probably also from the London area. However, they're a dying breed; rents and house prices are shooting up faster than wages, so nobody else has free time to youtube.
Forgetting the politics of it all, I pass the Curzon St site (just outside Birmingham New Street) most weekdays and it has been fascinating watching it develop.
The part from Old Oak common to Euston should have been done later, or scrapped, being the most expensive but least essential part. It's not like Euston is a destination for many so changing to the Elizabeth line or Overground at OOC is no worse than changing at Euston onto the tube. Too late now. The costs have been incurred so the Euston extension will likely be completed while the more useful purpose of linking northern cities to London, never mind to the channel tunnel and HS1 as would have been far more useful, gets dropped. At least we'll get a nice new, extremely expensive, Euston station out of it.
It's not the most expensive part (at least, not the station). The savings over the entire budget on building a smaller Euston HS2 terminus is tiny compared to the whole project.
Everybody is looking down the telescope in the wrong way. The whole problem with the UK is that there are too many people living here and too many people with too many cars that need too many roads and too many parking places. We also have the second and third largest and busiest airports in the whole world (Gatwick and Heathrow). HS3 might be the next project in about 20 years from now, when the official figure of 68 million people rises to 98 million people.
And sixteen of the UK's twenty busiest railway stations are in London. The country is in many respects London biased, but that has been written about a lot lately.
There aren't 'too many people' living in the UK. The south-east might be overcrowded (though even there density is probably lower than most urban areas elsewhere), but there are huge swathes of empty land elsewhere. If we had towns and cities that were planned for public transport and communal living, instead of American-style suburban boxes taking up precious green belt land, there wouldn't be a problem.
Cars are not people. Too many cars yes. But the solution to that is better planned cities ( one city in particular) with better public transport with dedicated right of ways, and yes local services so a pint of milk or going to school doesn’t need a car journey . And despite words I hear to the contrary, I actually grew up in a planned suburb where both primary and high schools and the local shops and the local parks were designed to be within walking distance of the residents of a quiet low density suburb. It still exists and it still works that way. It’s not a the dream some make out. I do wonder how much the large airports are a function of serving the British market and how much they are hubs of the transatlantic passenger market. With the spokes being mostly in Europe. If they are there is nothing guaranteed about their growth. Hub and spoke is a dying model and the UK is now outside the EU and there may be attempts to build a hub somewhere in the EU to serve the EU spokes.
The cost calculations, and those who say it’s too much, ignore the simple fact that most of the cost goes on wages and salaries. HS2 employs a huge number of people either directly or in their supply chain. These people pay their taxes and spend money in the wider economy. The alternative (including cancelling parts) means people lose their jobs, firms go bankrupt. The government then both loses tax income and has to pay Social Security to the unemployed (a double loss to the government). The question is simply do we invest in our future and keep the economy moving … or … do we avoid spending, have a stagnating economy and people out of work? The answer should be obvious! Projects like HS2 (in full) and the tunnel to bypass Stonehenge are must do projects.
It is simply unbelievable that Sunak could unilaterally just cancel HS2 beyond phase 1 without consulting anyone, let alone any transport experts. So now HS2 will decant its trains north of Brum onto the WCML at Handsacre, just where the WCML goes from 4 to 2 tracks and there are the flat junctions of Colwich and Stafford. Furthermore, Handsacre Junction was only designed for a couple of trains an hour to Manchester onto the WCML slow lines. Now all HS2 trains to Manchester, Liverpool, the north west, and Scotland will be dumped onto those slow lines - the ones freight currently uses. So no more freight on WCML once HS2 opens? Madness! Oh, and redesigning Handsacre to take the extra traffic will cost a lot - most of the cost of taking HS2 to Crewe as planned, which would also bypass all those WCML pinch points! We are governed by selfish idiots!
One question that never seems to get asked is why is the line using rail technology that wouldn't have looked out of place to I.K. Brunel? Or that Stevenson's rocket could run on. The Asian countreis seem to be making a good fist of using modern railway lines such as maglev, why can't we?
There aren't as many maglev trains as you think they are. Japan is taking a huge risk on building one long maglev line where no-one else has built a line of that length. Personally I think it'll go the way of Brunel's Atmospheric Railway.
