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HS2 under review


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5 hours ago, Terra-Nova2 said:

 

The original concept also envisaged a link, presumably going in the other direction to allow trains to continue to Bristol, but this didn't seem to make it to the consultation. 

Coming back to this.

I have just looked at my copy of the plans drawn up in 2010* and nothing is shown on that.

In fact only the connection onward to the WCML is shown, no Derby line link at all (unless I have missed it!)

 

*Construction was expect to start withing a couple of years.

Here we are 10 years on and still prevaricating.

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Phil you'd do yourself a favour if you didn't call people who don't happen to agree with you names.

 

Quite honestly I find posts like your last one both childish and insulting.

 

As that seems to be the lie of the land for anyone who disagrees with hs2 in its current overblown and over expensive state I will back out. I find slanging matches both pathetic and pointless.

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2 minutes ago, Hobby said:

Phil you'd do yourself a favour if you didn't call people who don't happen to agree with you names.

 

Quite honestly I find posts like your last one both childish and insulting.

 

As that seems to be the lie of the land for anyone who disagrees with hs2 in its current overblown and over expensive state I will back out. I find slanging matches both pathetic and pointless.

Hobby, my comment was nothing to do with HS2, it was to do with Chartered Engineer status, and no I'm not one but I do have an application in progress.

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42 minutes ago, Hobby said:

Phil you'd do yourself a favour if you didn't call people who don't happen to agree with you names.

 

Quite honestly I find posts like your last one both childish and insulting.

 

As that seems to be the lie of the land for anyone who disagrees with hs2 in its current overblown and over expensive state I will back out. I find slanging matches both pathetic and pointless.

 

The point is if you go back through this thread - or indeed read the large amount of official documentation you will find that 99% of the stuff the anti - HS2 camp are coming out with (and which you have continued to push in various ways) is nonsense.

 

HS2 is a mature project with around a decades worth of detailed study behind it - not some sort of election promise that pooped into existence last December

 

The fixation with Birmingham simply proves you haven't bothered to read up properly on the project before commenting  - because if you had then you wouldn't be fixated on Birmingham!

 

If you actually do your research then you will find there are plenty of things which an informed person can use against Hs2 - including the excessively high energy consumption for going for a 250mph railway (rather than a 186 / 200mph one as is the established norm in the rest of Europe) to the behaviour of some of their contractors or even the lack of a physical connection between the classic network and HS2 near Birmingham Curzon Street. I'm sure there is more -  BUT that is the sort of thing that requires a popper understanding of the project to identify, unlike regurgitating press falsehoods.

 

HS2 is a massively complex project with many threads that deserves proper study to appreciate with any degree of accuracy and I am more than a little fed up of people wading into what should be a very interesting thread with cheap one liners that don't stand up to scrutiny. Hence the use of capitals , bold and large text as obviously the nice polite approach doesn't work.

 

Sadly, inaccurate / populist comments being mistaken for informed debate is one of the reasons why the world is in such a mess these days. This tendency to put forward poorly researched opinions as fact is dangerous, lazy and wrong regardless of whether you are the POTUS or an RMweb member and applies to everything from HS2 through middle east politics to the science of climate change.

 

 

 

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6 hours ago, woodenhead said:

And that's fine, I am in general agreement, 140 might be nice but we probably don't need ultra high speed.

 

But we are where we are - how much would it cost to start again from scratch on HS2 and re-do all the planning, design, costing, compulsory purchasing

I have learned more about HS2 from this thread than from all the national media combined.

 

One of the important points is that the cost of actual construction (i.e. earth-moving) isn't greatly dependent on designed-in train speed.  It does greatly increase the cost of the trains, but if you run faster, you can turn them round faster, so can get away with a smaller fleet.  At an arbitrary £1m/carriage, you could easily save £20k/week over the life of the programme by having one fewer train set (so about the cost of a Championship level centre-back). 

 

The cost of land and property acquisition has had a huge impact on HS2 and as property in the UK has doubled in value approximately every decade since the programme started, this has led to a hug e increase in costs.

 

But we shouldn't mind because seemingly everyone now believes that rising house prices are a good thing.

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With all this banter about how few people live in Central Birmingham let's not forget that Curzon Street is not the only destination in Phase 1. There is also Birmingham Interchange by the NEC. The local councils and commercial stakeholders envisage 40% of journeys in Phase 1 will be made using the station. Birmingham Interchange is being built not only to connect with the NEC but with transport links to Birmingham International and Birmingham Airport. There are also plans to extend the Midland Metro (which will also pass Curzon Street) out to the station.

It will also be a Parkway station with some 7500 parking spaces.  This will obviously benefit people living in the surrounding area including Coventry, Warwick etc. The parking was to all be at ground level, but the plans have recently changed and will now be multi-storey freeing up land for up to 4000 homes in the immediate vicinity of the station. There is also expected to be pressure from developers to open up more land for housing in the surrounding area. Roll on London Zone 10

 

Brian

Edited by brigo
London Zone
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2 minutes ago, Northmoor said:

The cost of land and property acquisition has had a huge impact on HS2 and as property in the UK has doubled in value approximately every decade since the programme started, this has led to a hug e increase in costs.

 

But we shouldn't mind because seemingly everyone now believes that rising house prices are a good thing.

 

Which is perhaps the real point here. Its an extremely unhealthy British obsession - and in my experience the more you care about such things the more selfish and self centred person you are!

 

People love to brag about how much their house is worth - yet that in turn pushes up everything else, in the area too!

 

Builders in London can charge a premium because it costs them more to pay their own mortgages - go to Liverpool and the same job will cost significantly less because the builder has lower outgoings and can turn a profit even charging lower prices.

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6 hours ago, melmerby said:

Well as I found out, it is very much who you know, rather than what you know, that was the route to progressing to be chartered.

I was informed by someone fairly well up the tree, who was involved with the organisation whose exams I took, that Tech Eng was on offer as it was and I would have duly progressed to Chartered after a few years of keeping my nose clean.

I have no reason to believe it was b*llshit.

As a CEng who worked <ahem> hard for over a decade after completing my degree (and academic study doesn't come easily to me) before being able to apply for Chartered status, I rather take offence at that remark.

I have never met a Chartered Engineer who knew his assessor(s) socially.  I have met a few engineers - not many, but a few - who took a similarly cynical view of CEng status.  They all found it easier to blame nepotism or "other people" than admit they might not be good enough.

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1 hour ago, Northmoor said:

As a CEng who worked <ahem> hard for over a decade after completing my degree (and academic study doesn't come easily to me) before being able to apply for Chartered status, I rather take offence at that remark.

I have never met a Chartered Engineer who knew his assessor(s) socially.  I have met a few engineers - not many, but a few - who took a similarly cynical view of CEng status.  They all found it easier to blame nepotism or "other people" than admit they might not be good enough.

I never even tried (I didn't even join the institute the exams were set by) as my workplace duties took a turn in an entirely different direction, where the qualifications I had recently obtained were not needed.

But I stand by what I said, It was dangled in front of me as a routine advancement, as long as you did the job properly.

I am only telling what I found.

Maybe what I was told was utter b*llshit but I had no reason to doubt it at the time and see no reason why the said person would have told me such a thing.

As far as I know there was nothing it for him as they had nothing to do with the organisation where I worked.

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6 hours ago, woodenhead said:

My late father thought they had, he was convinced they were already tunnelling under his home in Manchester. 

 

I assured him, had they begun it would have been all over the news, perhaps it was the Chinese, who remembers this https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061387/

I remember seeing that many years ago. Even as a kid I seem to remember thinking it was a little bit paranoid, even for an American sci-fi film.  I'd also not realised that Ed Bishop out of Gerry Anderson's UFO was in it. 

 

On the subject of Gerry Anderson, I'm disappointed that nobody has suggested a nuclear powered monorail as an alternative to HS2. 

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, Northmoor said:

I have learned more about HS2 from this thread than from all the national media combined.

 

One of the important points is that the cost of actual construction (i.e. earth-moving) isn't greatly dependent on designed-in train speed.  It does greatly increase the cost of the trains, but if you run faster, you can turn them round faster, so can get away with a smaller fleet.  At an arbitrary £1m/carriage, you could easily save £20k/week over the life of the programme by having one fewer train set (so about the cost of a Championship level centre-back). 

Surely if the trains go faster, whilst you can have a smaller and therefore cheaper fleet, they accumulate mileage faster and therefore wear out quicker, so you have to spend money replacing the fleet sooner.

 

As my old physics teacher said, "You don't get summat for nowt".

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5 hours ago, Mike Storey said:

 

So, 1.1 million people live with Birmingham City limits, but around another 2.5 million within the Metropolitan area.

 

But, some 48 million journeys originated or ended at Birmingham New Street (data as of 2018/19), whereas only 5.3 million the same for Wolverhampton, for example.

 

So, O Ye Expert on Demographic Transport Demand Forecasting, where would you put your money????

I deliberately said CENTRAL Birmingham. The city limits extend out to Frankley, Kingstanding, Walmley and other places that are a very long and tedious bus ride from Curzon Street station, O Ye non-Expert on the English language and Geography. 

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13 hours ago, Pandora said:

Lord Berkeley, his  evidence being  the proven expertise  of Japanese railways of  high-speed  operation of dedicated lines for passenger trains for a capacity  figure of  12 trains per hour.

What is the evidence  for a capacity of 18tph on HS2?

Surely the evidence from Japan and SNCF must be heeded in the HS2 case.

 

Some information on japanese High Speed services

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen

 

Be very careful when using Shinkanshen as a yardstick for anything. It is an excellent system but the Japanese have a way of presenting statistics that is quite different to  western methods.

 

For example the wiki reference you give refers to the much admired punctuality statistics with average delay 24 seconds including 'natural disasters'. But what it doesn't mention is that JR changes the timetable en-route when 'natural disasters happen. When I was working on the Taiwan High Speed Rail project (essentially Japanese E&M systems) we went on a tour of Shinkansen systems hosted by JR and the suppliers. On one journey from the north to Tokyo it started snowing: speed was reduced because of snow build up around the suspension. Arrival in Tokyo was 40 minutes after the advertised arrival journey time when we boarded. However, officially we were on time: the snow time-table had been invoked en-route. Can you imagine the furore here if we tried that? Sorry no delay payment due: we invoked the 'NR incompetence (insert other cause as you wish) timetable and were actually on time.

 

It applies to other statistics too: you will read that no passenger has ever been killed on the Shinkanshen. True by JR definition where a passenger is descried as somebody who has successfully boarded or alighted from a train at a station. So the student who was trapped in a door and dragged to his death doesn't count (hadn't boarded successfully) and the few people who fell from open doors between stations are in the trespass statistics as they left the train not at a station.

 

The JR signalling system is more than capable of supporting more than 12 trains per hour but they choose to limit the number to ensure system resilience. 

 

The Japanese don't use high speed turnouts: one reason is that the overhead line design is limited to 80km/h at turnouts. This adversely affects capacity in a way that would not be an issue with HS2 (assuming a non-Japanese overhead line design). In Taiwan 200km/h turnouts were installed as the original alignment was based on European practice, but these have an 80km/h limit.

 

I have no doubt that 18tph is achievable with ETCS. I make that statement as a chartered engineer (though not an IRSE member) with more than 40 years' experience including high speed.

 

 

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This morning on BBC Breakfast they were at the site of Curzon St Station, where they were currently excavating the 1838 platforms.

Maybe there's a way of saving money? Refurbish the old Grand Junction station:jester:

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Yet another HS2 PR car crash on the Today Programme on Radio 4 this morning. HS2 advocate, Professor Steve Brittan (professor of International Business Development, and authentic Brummie) was asked the simple question, "How much would be too much?" [money to build HS2]. He seemed totally flummoxed by this; the best he could come up with was the usual, "We can't afford not to". I know that seems like a perfectly acceptable answer to all the HS2 faithful on here, but to ordinary people, and especially politicians, that lame response opens up the nightmare scenario of giving a blank cheque to a load of rail engineers who have over the last decade demonstrated an almost unfailing ability to spend huge sums of money delivering less than was asked for years late. Not at all what would make any politician connected with the project look good, which, thanks to our system of democracy, is what they really care about.

 

HS2 deserves to be cancelled, if the way it conducts its business and PR is anything to go by.

 

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2 hours ago, ruggedpeak said:

From today's Telegraph

 

2401-MATT-GALLERY-WEB-P1_trans_NvBQzQNjv

Unfortunately those two friends are now going to spend the next 9 years in the loft arguing about whether it’s better to carry on with the HS2 project or build a branch line layout :mad_mini:

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24 minutes ago, boxbrownie said:

Unfortunately those two friends are now going to spend the next 9 years in the loft arguing about whether it’s better to carry on with the HS2 project or build a branch line layout :mad_mini:

That's before the OO/EM/P4 debate.........

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The whole HS2 debate has gone too far as neither side is prepared to back down!

 

The same arguments will be applied to its replacement or whatever the monies are spent on.

 

In the same way would many people buy a house with a mortgage if they realised how much they would have paid when the house finally becomes theirs, rather than just looking at monthly payments! 

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10 minutes ago, Flittersnoop said:

Yet another HS2 PR car crash on the Today Programme on Radio 4 this morning. HS2 advocate, Professor Steve Brittan (professor of International Business Development, and authentic Brummie) was asked the simple question, "How much would be too much?" [money to build HS2]. He seemed totally flummoxed by this; the best he could come up with was the usual, "We can't afford not to". I know that seems like a perfectly acceptable answer to all the HS2 faithful on here, but to ordinary people, and especially politicians, that lame response opens up the nightmare scenario of giving a blank cheque to a load of rail engineers who have over the last decade demonstrated an almost unfailing ability to spend huge sums of money delivering less than was asked for years late. Not at all what would make any politician connected with the project look good, which, thanks to our system of democracy, is what they really care about.

 

HS2 deserves to be cancelled, if the way it conducts its business and PR is anything to go by.

 

Mis-quoted & distorted budgets are commonplace within politics & business. Who knows what it will cost?

Many projects completed "on time & within budget" are done so at the cost of quality. The ECML electrification was an example. Trains were supposed to run at 140mph but this never happened so compromises were made & the OLE there has a reputation of being more fragile than the WCML or GW.

 

I have heard that the latest figure for HS2 is £106 billion. Is this reasonable? & if so, for what? Would this be a reasonable estimate or a maximum possible figure so the project can be completed 'within budget'. It could even be a cost-cut figure to complete the line with issues, then it costs twice that to put it right.

 

Costings for a public project are more complex too. If a project puts 10,000 people in work for 10 years with a salary of £35k, that would cost £3.5billion. But just under 1/3 of that would be put back into the ecomony in income tax, so it is only really £2.5billion. If those people would otherwise be unemployed, this would also save £10billion in benefits, so from the initial figure of £3.5billion, the difference to the economy is only £1.4billion.

All money ends up as wages somewhere along the line. Much of this goes directly for raw materials but someone has to extract/produce these, then someone else has made their machinery. It goes on, but all ends up somewhere in somebody's pocket.

Real economies are much more complex than that.

 

I am not claiming these figures are anywhere near correct, but neither are what we see in the media. They illustrate how figures can be so badly distorted by media, politicians & management wanting to inflict their own bias on things.

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1 hour ago, Flittersnoop said:

Yet another HS2 PR car crash on the Today Programme on Radio 4 this morning. HS2 advocate, Professor Steve Brittan (professor of International Business Development, and authentic Brummie) was asked the simple question, "How much would be too much?" [money to build HS2]. He seemed totally flummoxed by this; the best he could come up with was the usual, "We can't afford not to". I know that seems like a perfectly acceptable answer to all the HS2 faithful on here, but to ordinary people, and especially politicians, that lame response opens up the nightmare scenario of giving a blank cheque to a load of rail engineers who have over the last decade demonstrated an almost unfailing ability to spend huge sums of money delivering less than was asked for years late. Not at all what would make any politician connected with the project look good, which, thanks to our system of democracy, is what they really care about.

 

HS2 deserves to be cancelled, if the way it conducts its business and PR is anything to go by.

 

One would think, looking at this post, and several others, that the cost of this project is all up front, as it were. It isn't of course; engineering projects don't work like that, do they? The £106billion is going to be spent over the life of the project, and possibly beyond, if there's some sort of guarantee payment held back. No, it's £106 billion over at least 20 years, so about £5.5 billion a year on average, which in today's spending terms, is chicken feed. That's less than the projected £35 billion increase in the NHS budget quoted in the Conservative Party election manifesto last December. It's way less than the annual defence budget; the existing annual NHS budget, and the annual Social Security budget, all of which are seen as vital spending

 

Your post is a typical example of that famous problem of certain sections of the UK population who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

 

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8 minutes ago, 62613 said:

One would think, looking at this post, and several others, that the cost of this project is all up front, as it were. It isn't of course; engineering projects don't work like that, do they? The £106billion is going to be spent over the life of the project, and possibly beyond, if there's some sort of guarantee payment held back. No, it's £106 billion over at least 20 years, so about £5.5 billion a year on average, which in today's spending terms, is chicken feed. That's less than the projected £35 billion increase in the NHS budget quoted in the Conservative Party election manifesto last December. It's way less than the annual defence budget; the existing annual NHS budget, and the annual Social Security budget, all of which are seen as vital spending

 

Your post is a typical example of that famous problem of certain sections of the UK population who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

 

And your post is typical of the example of the famous problem of people who dismiss large chunks of the UK population for not being as clever as them (or as clever as they think they are).

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10 hours ago, Flittersnoop said:

I deliberately said CENTRAL Birmingham. The city limits extend out to Frankley, Kingstanding, Walmley and other places that are a very long and tedious bus ride from Curzon Street station, O Ye non-Expert on the English language and Geography. 

 

People from anywhere outside central Birmingham, if they want to catch a fast train to London, have to make their way to New St, whether that be by taxi, tram, local train, or bus (and I doubt whether a bus ride to New St now is anything less than long and tedious). And if changing between local train and express at New St the interchange time will not be a great deal less (assuming a proper link is built) than getting from New St to Curzon St, especially if they arrive at the Midland side of New St and as well as negotiating narrow platforms, congested stairways and unreliable escalators, have to pass through two ticket barriers.

 

Looking at Avanti West Coast's current timetable, there are five trains per off-peak hour (one Liverpool, one Glasgow and three Manchester) which will (eventually) use HS2, so that immediately provides capacity for other trains. Wolverhampton currently has only one Euston express per hour, I would expect in the new era a minimum half-hourly service. And Avanati hardly stop at all at the main Trent Valley stations (Lichfield, Tamworth and Nuneaton), so that is another greatly-improved service which HS2 can facilitate.

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