I saw a Renault 4 today, in near pristine condition.
It brought back many memories. I had one on the 80s. It had an enormous virtue. It was easy and cheap to repair. Whilst owning it I got as close to understanding what happened under the bonnet as I ever have.
I do, of course, know it did not meet modern safety standards. I also know it accelerated like there was something sticking the proverbial to the shovel. But oddly, you got where you were going, nonetheless. And it was the only car I ever had that got a name. It was so much fun to drive (once you got used to the gear lever on the dashboard) that it became Henrietta, based on the letters in its registration number.
Why mention this? Because it strikes me we could learn a lot from the Renault 4 and other cars like it.
Why has HS2 failed? Not because we cannot build rail lines: we clearly can. What we cannot do is build ones that run at more than 200mph. But then, we really do not need them. If we needed more capacity than an uninterrupted 150mph would have been more than enough, and vastly easier and cheaper.
It was the same for the Elizabeth line. It was so over-engineered it took forever to open it once the infrastructure was ready.
And then there are modern cars. Massive lumps of metal capable of being moved at high speed on enormous tyres by vast quantities of lithium in batteries for which there is insufficient charging infrastructure.
Why is this? It is all because we are perpetually told bigger, faster, and more complicated is better and so we must have it.
Look at your phone for evidence. What proportion of even its most basic facilities do you use? I am a geek and do not use a large part of what it can do.
I am not, of course, saying we should cease to innovate. That is not my point, at all. We need to innovate to save this planet. But the object of that innovation should not be to go faster. Or to consume more. Or to out-compete other countries. It should, instead, be about making life better and more sustainable.
So we do need innovation in public transport. We need to make smaller, safer cars, and to create a tax system that makes them much more attractive than alternatives. Progressive consumption, which favours sustainability, can be part of a progressive tax system.
And we need to innovate so that work suits more people, is more fulfilling and flexible when so much is at the moment an exercise in alienating people from their meaning.
We also, of course, need innovation in tax and the way we organise society.
But what we do not need is tech for the sake of it, because that makes no sense at all now. More than that, it is very obviously failing us.
If we learned that from HS2 we would have got somewhere.
We should have already known it, of course: Concord had already taught us that. It seems though that politicians are slow in this regard.
We'd get even further if we valued what we have and improved it, including rail lines in northern England and Scotland that need electrification, whilst addressing the deficit in the maintenance in public infrastructure.
If we made what we have work we could go a long way. In itself that would require massive innovation. I suspect that Renault 4 chucks out vast quantities of pollutants. But the idea remains sound. It was a simple car suited to the task demanded of it. We need to design that way, once more. That way we might get the chance to succeed.
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We shopgirl? Me no shopgirl! I no this already! Thank you for make me laugh already today – of all days…
Corrected now.
Third paragraph from end… “We shopgirl”? I can’t guess at that one!
Sorry – I did not re-read my edits. Corrected now.
The first European TGV l;ine was Paris – Lyon – 400kms. Before it was built – 70% flew by air, 10% by rail and the rest drove (the French civil servants were very unsure about the business case). On completion 70% took the train etc. Spain – Barcelona – Madrid – 500kms – similar logic. London – B’ham 160kms. High speed trains take some time to get up to speed (15 – 20 mins). The problem in the Uk is: failure to get ERTMS (Euro signalling standard) implemented aspa, failure to electrify (lower maintenance on trains/more reliable) etc etc. Failure. But the insultants did well out of HS2. So that’s alright then.
However, all is not peachy in mainland Europe. German and french regional rail is creaking (sound familiar?) & there has been a big lack of investment (sound familiar) – because let’s face it the current neolibtard approach to infra’ is to focus on …. road transport – ref what Wedgie Sunak was saying recently.
All my German friends are now moaning about their trains…
Would totally agree about electrification, in cab signalling, etc. and no need for ultra high speed.
High Speed UK http://highspeeduk.co.uk/ had a much better integrated scheme which even limited to 250 km/h (155 mph) would have had broad benefits.
But a considerable problem is a legacy of not doing integrated land use transport planning which have led to car accessible but not easily public transport serviced developments.
Surface running trams should be considered as the backbone of a public transport system in towns. Electric buses but not BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) can service this backbone and lesser used routes along with bicycles, scooters, walking and even bike and car / van hire for the occasional need.
Trams can successfully run in mixed traffic on streets with traffic light /greenwave priority. Trams are proven to shift drivers from cars to public transport, freeing up road space for more critical uses.
Prefabricated rail track systems offer lower cost and quick installation compared with current methods eg TIG-m, Trampower LR55, Coventry VLR trackform
But an integrated transport plan is needed that deals with car parking, traffic management, neighbourhood zones, etc. see TfGB https://tfgb.org/campaigns/bristol-transport-plan
Thanks
The sort of plan that Jamie Driscoll was planning for the north east? He was an engineer before he became a politician.
One of the good things to come from Sunk’s plans is to reopen the Leamside Line in the north east to take some heavy traffic off the main line. However, as it has been in the pipeline for a number of years now, people are still not confident. It would link Washington to the Metro, with lots of financial and environmental advantages. That probably means that it won’t get off the ground.
That old Renault was built to do a job.
Much of what is built today is there to extract wealth – cars based on lifestyle choices and market segmentation that needs to go back to the place they were bought to replace headlight light bulbs – (I ask you) or to be serviced, extracting more wealth in after sales care. Tinker at your peril now!
Cars sell dreams now – just look at the adverts. And what doesn’t ?
One off projects are treated the same an opportunity to exploit – and when you consider the all the fuss the Advanced Passenger Train (APT) got when it was built to travel fast on a Victorian (and older in places) railway?
The mismanagement of railways though is what sticks out for me. They’ve closed down so many routes in the name of saving money and reduced capacity on existing networks when Railtrack was bust delivering ‘shareholder value’ and essentially overcrowded what is left!! So then they need even more complicated signalling to deal with this and now they decided to build a new line.
With HS2, they should either scrap it or build it? So what about the cost? A project costs what it costs. You can spend only so much time gazing into the future anticipating what the inflation rate will be etc.
Grow some and do it and do it well I say. Instead, what we get is half hearted compromises and something sub-par.
This is because we get so heated up about the budget only and are so poor at recognising and therefore not looking at the externalities because people refuse to do the work and acknowledge these. So changes are made that only consider the budget. Beeching also worked like this.
Prima facie all of this looks like good old British stupidity. But it’s not. It’s all about creating opportunities for others to create markets – markets that at the end of the day kill us like the ‘great car economy’ is doing.
You are right
Cars are for status now
The more absurd they are the higher the status the driver thinks they have
Henry Morrison, who I think is MD of the Northern Powerhouse consortium was just speaking (approx 13.06 after Sunaks monologue) on LBC about the cancellation of HS2. He said it would COST the Northern Powerhouse area £100 bn PER ANNUM in lost opportunity as a number if interconnections were co dependent. Investment has been put on hold and ongoing low productivity will be just some of the effects.
£100 bn every year. These know nothing Tories should be trued for misconduct in public office, and those guilty can be incarcerated on the Bibby Stockholm under the same conditions they wished to inflict on refugees and asylum seekers.
A courageous state would need some restraining. HS2 and Concord are good examples. But how would you stop them? You could ask them to do a cost benefit analysis but they would just make the numbers up.
Teresa May was doing this week too – just making numbers up to say how much better off we’ll be from her big proclamation.
Thought you might like a few pieces of rail information that I picked up on twitter this morning Richard…
France, Germany, Spain, China, India, the UAE, the US, Portugal, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland … are all building new high speed lines between cities smaller than Birmingham and Manchester maybe it’s not too late to learn from Spain Avg build cost is €15m per km. So the 600 km leg from Barca to Madrid would have cost about €9 billion. It’s reduced the journey time to about 2.5 hours (6 hrs by car) last time cost me €36 return
Spain has 16 high speed rail lines in operation, totalling 2,500 miles and linking most of its major cities
Japan has 8 high speed rail lines totalling 1,760 miles. A further 3 under construction, all between cities with populations smaller than Birmingham & Manchester
Italy has 2 high-speed lines totalling 840 miles with a 3rd under construction between Milan & Genoa, a distance far less than Manchester to London
France has 12 high speed rail lines totally 1,740 miles, and is planning & building more – all between cities smaller than Birmingham and Manchester
The British govt is about to cancel half of a 210 mile line linking its 1st, 2nd & 3rd largest cities
15 years of infrastructure planning to transform connectivity between Britain’s 3 largest cities & regions, with cross-party agreement spanning 6 governments, is to be ripped up tomorrow after spending £45bn, in a short-term Sunak dash for election tax cuts
Hard to exaggerate the political mismanagement of HS2, Britain’s largest infra project, since 2010. Most of 5 PMs, 7 Chancellors, 7 Transport Secs & 11 Treasury Chief Secs barely interacted with the state company HS2 Ltd, intervening only to impose more costs, delay & uncertainty.
What a disgrace
Spain & France are relatively sparsely populated countries compared to the UK which makes construction easier & cheaper.
The argument for high speed in Italy is weak. Japan does what Japan does. Many of the others are me-toos regarding high-speed rail.
Money on HS2 could have been/should have been spent on better signalling, track improvements (more or less the totality of the Uk network was built between 1830 – 1855) and rolling stock. Instead, money is hosed at a politicial vanity project.
The UK invented railways – now there are exactly ZERO British companies building trains. Pathetic is not the half of it. A complete and total political failure amongstall parties.
The problem is that Thatcherite neoliberalism is a deeply ignorant creed that doesn’t understand the importance of infrastructure and believes that construction and engineering expertise and the culture/environment that supports it can be turned on and off like a tap.
Even worse any honest consideration of the subject would need them to admit the necessity of admitting that it needs National planning, commitment and intelligent management which they can never do because it reveals neo-liberalism as the greed driven lie that it really is.
We don’t get what we need; instead we get what marketing and R&D departments need us to buy in order to justify their salaries.
Great piece! One comment – I wonder whether electrification of rail lines is getting close to entering the “old hat” category? Should investment not be directed to hydrogen fuel cell rolling stock. It would remove the need for electric cables and all the alteration of bridges/tunnels etc. Such fuel cell trains are running in some countries now, including Scotland, albeit only at trial stage. To me (and I’m not an engineer I admit) that seems to be where the future lies.
I suspect electrification is much greener overall
Germany has recently cancelled adoption of hydrogen fuel-cell trains, after concluding last year that hybrid electric-battery trains are much cheaper to run:
https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/will-no-longer-be-considered-hydrogen-trains-up-to-80-more-expensive-than-electric-options-german-state-finds/2-1-1338438
Hydrogen’s utility for transport is dependent on copious over-supply of CO2-free electricity (wind, solar, nuclear), in order to split water, and significant investment in infrastructure for distribution —both practically non-existent now and for the foreseeable future, so far as the UK is concerned. I think it may have a future, but probably not in many of our lifetimes —although I’d love to hear otherwise.
If we are able to produce substantial amounts of hydrogen, my first priority would be to use it for industrial manufacturing applications (e.g., steel and cement) where fossil fuels are difficult to replace, and then air transport. At present, we can feed electricity directly to trains, and batteries can help with the gaps in electrification infrastructure.
H2 – all depends.
There is a chuffa (diesel) that goes up to Wick & Thurso. In theory one could electrify – but I’m not sure I would be happy having to maintain the catenaries in winter. Thus in that case H2/fuel cells might fit the bill (or just convert the diesels to H2 – Ulemco in Liverpool can do that) – & make the H2 locally (no shortage of wind). I’d hazard a guess – mostly electrification & in the remoter spots (e.g. the mid-Wales line) go the H2 route & perhaps do a quick and dirty with a diesel conversion – go fuel cell when budget permits/there is more epxperience.
I agree
I was talking more intensive routes
The last time I looked (a few years ago) the efficiency of producing hydrogen by electrolysis and then compressing it was about 60% (ie for every kWh of electricity used, you got 0.6 kWh of compressed hydrogen). Hydrogen fuel cells were about 60% efficient so for every kWh of electricity used you will get about 0.36 kWh of traction electricity to drive the train.
The efficiencies may have improved a bit and, assuming they’re at both 70%, for every kWh of electricity used you will get about 0.5 kWh of traction electricity.
For conventional trains the efficiency is probably 90%.
On this basis hydrogen fuel cell trains will only be viable in extreme conditions where overhead lines are not practical and battery charging is difficult to achieve.
Using hydrogen to power a conventional engine would be even less efficient, probably nearer 25% overall (70% for hydrogen production and 36% for the engine). But it might be suitable as a stop gap until fuel cells prove their reliability.
Hydrogen might be better used for industrial heating, aviation, heavy road transport and, possibly, home heating. Using hydrogen for home heating might reduce the need to upgrade the feeder cables to residential areas to cope with the increased demand imposed by charging battery cars and heat pumps – although the piping to residential areas might need upgrading to handle hydrogen.
Both Hitachi and Alstom have developed commuter battery + Over Head Line OHL trains (160km/h / 100mph) with on the move charging. At present they have trigeneration trains – battery + OHL + diesel that can save 50% CO2 emissions but the trains are limited to around 15km on batteries. only. Hitachi are confident as the technology improves for batteries and super capacitors then 100km battery range will probably be the tipping point to favour battery+OHL vrs hydrogen trains. So for example near stopping towns and the HV grid a section of track with OHL every 100km will be used for on the move and at the station charging. Problems with low bridges and installing OHL are bypassed.
Hitachi intercity train 140mph diesel with 70km battery range saves 20% CO2
https://www.hitachirail.com/products-and-solutions/battery-powered-trains/intercity-battery-trains/
Any of this Hitachi equipment made in Newton Aycliffe in County Durham? Or do they just make the rolling stock there that can’t be used on the lines up here?
I fondly remember my Citroen Dyane I owned back in the 80s. The antethisis of ‘modern’ cars in that it was smaller, slower, and simpler. I now drive a Fiat Panda which, like your Renault 4 dis, gets me from A to B perfectly satisfactorily. Much ‘safer’ of course than the Dyane, but with limited ‘status’, I’m pleased to say.
We need, I think, more simplicity in life – let’s start with the tax regime!
From a Railway Professional on National PreservationWhen we all look back on HS2 in the decades to come, we will need to remind ourselves of the following points:
The total cost of HS2 was always a projection of its full lifetime costs and wasn’t available and ringfenced as actual cash that, if the project was scrapped, could then be immediately put to other projects (which is still being stated by Tory politicians this week, despite it being completely untrue)
The scope of the project from the outset was large and ambitious, but the total scope was made to include rolling stock and other equipment that other countries don’t normally include in their total spend for high speed railways (see: Chinese/Italian/French high speed rail projects)
The media across the board simply didn’t understand that “High Speed 2” was never about the speed, but was materially about capacity to run trains and provide Network Rail with an alternate route to the WCML (thus allowing NR to work on planning for WCML upgrades in decades to come)
The claims that we need to learn from other countries this week is infuriating: for the last decade Chinese delegates amongst other countries have been coming here to see HS2 as, in design and in the building of the line, Britain is (was?) leading the development of new high speed railways and particularly in its green credentials
The line’s costs have been increased substantially by forcing tunnelling in several areas instead of cuttings, for the benefit of the environmental case (which I personally think on balance has been handled well by HS2 limited, but these scope changes are not at their insistence)
Repeated cuts to HS2’s scope has increased the total lifetime costs by way of contract penalties in the way of cancellation costs
We’re also seeing the ridiculous cutting of parts of the line for which substantial earthworks have already been undertaken to enable the building (see: Euston) – which has likely not saved any money but actually cost more in demolition and now security issues on the building sites in question
We are also in the process of seeing some highly expensive equipment buried and not used (see: drills)
We should also remember of this government:
We currently have the biggest tax intake in Britain’s history and the last three years have, despite spending, increased year on year the overall tax take
We are still somehow also requiring massive cuts to public spending (which includes NR’s budgets, and has done for some time – HS2 being built had no effect on our CP7 funding but govt cuts have. In addition, please note, as predicted, HS2 “cash” is unlikely to come back to the railway industry in a meaningful way)
The tone deafness of announcing the cutting of the railway to Manchester…whilst having the Tory conference in Manchester will not be easily forgiven, if ever, I suspect
TL;DR:
HS2 was a complicated project actually being carried out in to a very high engineering standard, beset with political interference and forced to cut elements of the overall scope that would never have saved any money through the pruning.
The current crop of “conservatives” appear to be incapable of long term planning for the future of the country and HS2’s fate is a nice example to remind us in future of the obscene lengths the tories have gone to, to neuter any chance of “levelling up” of the North of England, and Scotland, yet again.
It’s a mystery as to why an electric high speed railway would get descoped massively but new oil fields would get funding and support from a multi billionaire prime minister. A total mystery.
Total. Mystery.
Has absolutely nothing to do with his family’s firm Infosys signing a £1.5 billion deal with BP only a few months before. Nope, nothing to see here.
At least my conscience is clear.
If we needed capacity, and we did, that’s fine
But as I said, 150mph capacity would have been amply good enough
Richard: I respect your writing on a lot of topics, especially economic theory, but in this case I think your knowledge is lacking and you should talk to some rail professionals. I would suggest reading Gareth Dennis’ Twitter feed for starters.
The headline speed is the design speed of the railway. Actual service speeds would be lower but with “headroom” for the future. Building it to high speed specification actually isn’t that much more expensive (maybe 10% more) – you still have to build bridges and tunnels to roughly the same standard and the overall land take is pretty much the same once you start building to a decent main line spec – be that 125mph or 250mph.
But the beauty of the high speed specification is that it allows HS2 (in full including the Leeds leg) to relieve the southern halves of the West Coast, East Coast AND Midland main lines. Rebuilding old Victorian lines, even if it were economically viable, such as the Great Central or the Midland Peak District route, wouldn’t achieve this. It’s three railways for the price of one. Nor would 150mph design speed and it wouldn’t be much cheaper despite what you might think. 10% extra costs for massively more benefits.
I wrote about HS2 quite extensively here:
https://northwestbylines.co.uk/business/transport/the-case-for-hs2-improving-our-transport-links-and-network-capacity/
The worst congestion right now is the West Coast Main Line around Milton Keynes-Euston. But just as how the M6 started life as the Preston bypass and the M4 the Maidenhead bypass, if you just bypass one congested area you move the bottlenecks elsewhere. Birmingham New Street, Wolverhampton-Birmingham, Crewe, Manchester Piccadilly, Doncaster, Leeds… They all have capacity issues and they all have the common problem that on their existing sites there’s no easy way to fix those issues.
Here in Manchester the north side of the city enjoys a 12 or even 6 minute interval tram service. Why? Because all the trams have the same stopping pattern and the same acceleration and braking performance. South of the city, places like Poynton and Bramhall have an hourly service in each direction. Two Manchester-Euston express trains per direction per hour and one southbound Cross Country all eat line capacity so these stations can’t have a better service frequency. A third Manchester-Euston goes “the long way round” via Crewe because the direct Stoke route is at capacity. HS2 would have solved this.
The real reason for the failure of HS2 is government prevarication, being unable to decide what it wants and, as you explain so well in other posts, the irrational fear of government debt. If they’d just got on and built what Parliament authorised (and which Sunak had no right to scrap without consulting Parliament) we would have had the network substantially complete and be enjoying the benefits by now.
I’m sorry, but to claim a 150mph line costs the same as a 215mph line is just wrong
I know more than enough about railways (50 years of study) to know you are wrong
Capacity, not speed, is what is needed. You have misunderstood that. Frankly an 80mph line would have solved many of the problems. That’s why railways always had slow lines. They created capacity. Fast lines did not.
We will have to disagree
The whole business case for HS2 was predicated on almost total bullsh*t.
Lord Berkeley was deputy chair of a review of the project commissioned by the government (who has since demanded that his name be removed from the final report). He has published his own report (Jan 2020) and concluded “Parliament has been seriously misled by “fiddled” figures about the true cost of HS2….the cost of the line is completely out of control….HS2 Ltd has designed the scheme for 360-400km/h (223-248mph), higher than any other high-speed line in Europe or Japan, and for 18 trains an hour in each direction, when the company itself admits that no other such high-speed line is able to run more than 12 to 14….The revenue [assumption] is all shot to pieces….”
Berkeley, a former Labour transport spokesman who was named as deputy chair of the Oakervee review by ministers as proof it would be balanced, said the government knew about the ballooning costs up to four years ago(2016).
Also it is assumed that business’ productivity increases are going to come from travelling time saved by business people will be spent in the office and completely disregards the fact that people have laptops/tablets and work on trains, increasingly so with 5G,6G,7G roll-out.
If one accepts the entirely unrealistic 18 trains an hour in each direction then some fag-packet calculations reveal that HS2 Ltd would seem to be proposing that 108,000 business people need to travel each and every working day!
(Assumptions – trains run 7am to 7pm, each 500 capacity train is half filled with business people.)
This is all without any examination of why it is costing up to ten times more per mile to construct in the UK as it does in Europe and HS2 Ltd and the Treasury have been monitoring these costs from the outset.
Sunak cancels the “rest of HS2”.
Every penny saved, he says, will be reinvested in transport – meaning £36bn for the North, Midlands, and “across the country”.
Of course, the second part is a lie and about as reliable as a Tory promise on a bus. It’s an election ploy. The “across the country” bit probably means that what is spent will mostly be in Tory held areas. The man has form.
Across the country means Surrey
Across the country is the £8 billion being diverted to fill in potholes!! That would be the potholes that Tory cuts to LA budges have created – and we are supposed to think this is a wonderful long term plan from Sunak. He was boasting in his interview on the Today programme how good he is at long term decisions such as cutting net zero and cutting HS2.
Is the man a complete deluded idiot?
Please God can the population understand that cancelling plans is NOT long term planning.
I too was a Renault 4 fan. I had two, followed by a 6 which was the same thing with more modern styling. Easy to maintain, yes, but I bet you never had to change one of the suspension torsion bars. I once went to the very north of Scotland in one (Cape Wrath).
Slightly off subject, I watched a very interesting programme last night (recorded earlier in the week) by the historian David Olusoga which included the period of the creation of the Bank of England. He didn’t seem to understand that the BoE funded the government by creating paper money that was given value by being redeemable in payment of taxes. But he then went on to say that one of the founding directors of the Bank, William Paterson, resigned after a year and started up a company in Scotland to create a new Scottish colony in Panama, New Caledonia. That was funded by public subscription because, even though Scotland was still self governing (10 years before the Act of Union) he didn’t set up a Scottish Central Bank as he had done on England. The New Caledonia project was a disaster,
His programme got good reviews
Oh dear…….
Thanks so much for pointing out that most of the cars now being manufactured and driven are three times the size they need to be and designed to travel three times the speed that is even legal (and “e” or not, produce massive amounts of pollution). All while the threat of climate change becomes ever clearer to see. Just down sizing our over-inflated appetites for flaunted status and speed would be “greener” than a completed HS2.
We used to build railways by hand using shovels and wheel barrows. The London and Birmingham railway took 5 years to build and opened in 1833. At the same time the Grand Junction Railway was built from the Liverpool and Manchester railway to Birmingham. Both went way over budget.
Almost every railway went over budget
I have read an immense amount of railway history
But most got finished once they had started construction
Not all, but most
Having worked in housing development since 2011, no project I’ve been involved in has finished on budget ever because time passes and costs change and stuff happens.
My own personal success criteria for projects now is ‘Did it get finished?’ and then ‘What is wrong with it?’ (quality in modern British construction is questionable).
As I said above, too much emphasis is put on cost management and budget ‘guessing’ and not enough on ‘Well, now its finished so what’s the best use we can make of it?’.
So, as a result of HS2, there may well be less investment everywhere and that is just what we don’t want.
Tim Watkins has just written well about this problem.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/10/04/hs2-an-artifact-of-a-bygone-age/
Not far from my home in Frome are some of the part built remains of the Dorset and Somerset Canal – it would have run across the bottom of the garden in a previous house of mine. Never carried a boat although some bits had water in them.
The Potteries, Shrewsbury and North Wales Railway was part built then collapsed before being resurrected 30 years later into the Shropshire and Montgomeryshire which was many things apart from profitable.
There were a few projects started then abandoned.
Interestingly The Midland Railway bought a lot of land and property for its West Riding Lines which it ended up selling after WW1s
Two examples in obscure locations proves little
And that MR example was all about territory wars
If the main argument for HS2 was increased capacity, rather than increased speed, it’s a shame the old Midland Railway route from St Pancras to Manchester Central via Derby was axed in the 1960s. Obviously they weren’t bothered then, either, about a better long term decision for a brighter future.
It’s Ironic, too, that HS2’s cancellation was announced in the conference centre where Manchester Central used to stand.
Agreed, on all fronts
Mr Neale,
Michael Byng insists that on top of a badly scoped and costed plan, HS2 chose the wrong route (for clearly articulated reasons of cost/complexity).
On your reference to St.Pancras -Manchester; one of the absurdities of HS2 is that everybody arrives at Euston; but if your final destination is not London but Paris or Brussels for example (i.e., Europe) you require to change not just trains, but stations. It is a short distance, but requires a transfer by tube, bus: or you have to walk. £54m for HS2 Birmingham to Euston and they just forgot about integrating it with Europe, or wish to reduce air traffic to Europe by the best means. They really seem to think nobody in Britain could possibly ever choose to go anywhere but London; but in reality they just don’t think. Period.
Interesting then that HS1 no longer stops at Ashford or Ebbsfleet. It seems that the railway companies assume people only want to travel between London and the continent. Or maybe that’s just the most profitable service for them.
Here in Darlington millions are being spent to upgrade our mainline station – to cope with High Speed trains that won’t be arriving now. A few more millions are already spent to prepare for the 2025 Celebration of the first public railway. A modern shed for the production of new retro steam locomotives to follow Tornado. Renovation of the earliest ‘Heritage’ buildings on the track of the S&DR. But key parts of that old track are now a road. Or a leisure path. The coal and steel economy which needed trains is gone. Fixed links between a limited number of established towns and huge industrial sites, for a relatively limited number of people, have been replaced in this area by millions of random movements, regularly changing with each new requirement for labour or service delivery, leisure or other individual need or desire to move beyond the walkable local. The Darlington Quakers, the Peases and others, who hired George Stevenson to transport their coal economically from the dales to the sea, had a clear and simple vision. Today, providing all kinds of work for everyone, and the services, food, homecare, a plumber or a doctor and a thousand other things they require within a 15 minute walk will surely require the creation of a very different and much more complex economy. I doubt that a single engineer working for a couple of bankers could do that. Where do we find the social engineers to create a new vision of society – and persuade people to try it?
Excellent question
Were high speed trains ever expected to arrive in Darlington?
I understood that the improvements for the station were because parts of the treasury Were being moved to Darlington.
In Darlington two lines cross at grade and so it was decided years ago to provide extra platforms and make the passengers walk between the Teesside and Bishop Auckland directions. The mainline London to Edinburgh service gets more capacity – and safety – as a result, and can go faster. Of course, a certain Conservative sub-regional Mayor trumpets success in bringing Whitehall to Darlo through a ‘new’ station. Visiting Treasury staff will indeed have brand new escalators to help them up and over, come and go, in and out.
Modern consumerism doesn’t promote less for less. Sales growth is driven by promising more and more regardless of customer needs. Software is the perfect example of this arms race.
‘This underwhelming product is perfectly adequate for the average Joe’s needs’ are words seldom seen in an advert.
🙂
Since you won’t let me reply to the original comment thread…
Here you go. This is the link I was looking for earlier in which HS2 CEO Simon Kirkby addresses your point of why not just build to 140-150mph spec head on:
https://www.railengineer.co.uk/taking-hs2-to-completion/
“Why high?
Some people have questioned whether a high-speed railway is strictly necessary. If a conventional railway, with a speed of, say, 140mph, were to be built instead. Wouldn’t that do just as well?
“Most of the characteristics are the same for any type of new railway, the aesthetics of bridges and the substructure are the same,” Simon replied. “One of the challenges we all have as an industry is taking people into the world of three or four per cent passenger growth and imagining what the industry looks like in 10 or 20 years’ time. Half of the trains out of Euston by the end of this decade will be full, and that’s with standing provisions as well. So we’d need a four track railway from Euston to Birmingham, not a two track one, because the speeds are slower and the capacity is less.”
But then why not build a four-track conventional railway instead of the twin-track HS2?
“Then the envelope would be much bigger and the cost would be greater. The land take would be greater and the viaducts would be twice the width. A lot of what we’re doing doesn’t matter if it’s high speed or not, a viaduct is a viaduct, a tunnel is a tunnel, two tunnels cost twice as much as one tunnel, so I’m not being smart but it would be a lot more, and the benefit probably would be marginal.
“In addition, to get the connectivity, you do need to get to the north of England more quickly or there would be no point. So when you look at the cost and the massive strategic investment of HS2, why shouldn’t it be a world-class system, a world-class railway? And world-class long- distance railways are high speed now.””
So yes, capacity is important. But capacity comes from speed. And I’ll bet you much of if not most of the cost of a railway is in non-construction issues such as doing the legal legwork to get Parliamentary authority to build it and surveying a route. These costs are going to be roughly the same for a mainline railway regardless of what spec you build it to. So I didn’t say it was the same cost to build to high speed – I said it wasn’t that much more expensive.
Respectfully, I disagree, and have always disagreed
Capacity comes from duplication (most of which was shut or removed by BR) and connections, which HS2 has never had and looks like it never will have.
This is what people have never seemed to understand about railways in the modern era.
You are wasting your time arguing with me on the issue.
I am with the man in Wolverhampton on Question Time last night who mocked speed and said people weren’t stupid. They did not need speed. If they wanted to get somewhere early they knew they needed to get an earlier train. What they want to know is they will get there. HS2, without duplicate capacity, was always a snarl up waiting to happen.
@Nigel Hargreaves – sorry, very late:
You say:
“one of the founding directors of the Bank, William Paterson, resigned after a year and started up a company in Scotland to create a new Scottish colony in Panama, New Caledonia. That was funded by public subscription because, even though Scotland was still self governing (10 years before the Act of Union) he didn’t set up a Scottish Central Bank as he had done on England. The New Caledonia project was a disaster.”
but that is transferring our current understanding onto what happened then.
Paterson was in the discovery stage…
As, I think, to some extent at least, are many, if not most of us.
We really have got to be aware, I suggest, that money wasn’t an idea that sprang forth perfectly formed – it was an emerging concept as this excellent paper shows (I think first pointed out by @Schofield of this parish) and is well worth a read: http://financeandsociety.ed.ac.uk/article/view/3017
So the fact that Olusoga doesn’t give us the whole (modern) picture is really him doing history….