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On 12/06/2021 at 12:33, caradoc said:

 

That is exactly what they do expect ! As quoted in this month's (June 2021) Railway Magazine, anti-HS2 protester 'Goldi' says 'why do people need to travel so much ?.... People should embrace slower lifestyles..... and should become more local.....'. Good luck to him on convincing everyone to return to a medieval lifestyle with most people rarely, if ever, travelling far from home, and even more luck to any Government that attempts to enforce that. 

 

We should aim to travel less, commuting is a wasteful exercise, I'm surprised how few can see through the mist,  the idea that you can travel 150 miles in a hour only works if the fare is zero,  simply sit down and calculate the time at work to pay for the ticket, if the fare ticket is £100 and it takes you 4 hours of work to pay for the ticket, that high-speed  150 miles in 1 hour average  is in reality 150 miles in (4+1) hours, .... a mere 30 mph average. 

 

 

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19 minutes ago, Pandora said:

We should aim to travel less, commuting is a wasteful exercise, I'm surprised how few can see through the mist,  the idea that you can travel 150 miles in a hour only works if the fare is zero,  simply sit down and calculate the time at work to pay for the ticket, if the fare ticket is £100 and it takes you 4 hours of work to pay for the ticket, that high-speed  150 miles in 1 hour average  is in reality 150 miles in (4+1) hours, .... a mere 30 mph average. 

 

 

Presuming you're using HS2 only to commute; wasn't there a statistic a few pages back which pointed out that 57% of long distance journeys are for leisure purposes. Certainly all the times I've gone to London recently have been to visit the theatre, etc.

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2 hours ago, Pandora said:

We should aim to travel less, commuting is a wasteful exercise, I'm surprised how few can see through the mist,  the idea that you can travel 150 miles in a hour only works if the fare is zero,  simply sit down and calculate the time at work to pay for the ticket, if the fare ticket is £100 and it takes you 4 hours of work to pay for the ticket, that high-speed  150 miles in 1 hour average  is in reality 150 miles in (4+1) hours, .... a mere 30 mph average. 

Except that you've bought a really nice house somewhere in the Midlands for half what a terraced house costs in a London suburb and have loads of spare cash. And your commute into central London is on a nice air-conditioned intercity rather than crammed into the tube so you don't care that it takes 20 minutes longer and costs a bit more. That's why people do it. 

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17 minutes ago, pete_mcfarlane said:

Except that you've bought a really nice house somewhere in the Midlands for half what a terraced house costs in a London suburb and have loads of spare cash. And your commute into central London is on a nice air-conditioned intercity rather than crammed into the tube so you don't care that it takes 20 minutes longer and costs a bit more. That's why people do it. 

I've heard many reasons for/against commuting but deciding against it on the average speed is a new one to me.  And irrelevant.  

Re: Percentage of travellers commuting, in the latter days of Inter-City XC I believe they found that something like 50% of their passengers made one rail journey per year.  I wouldn't be surprised if the figures aren't that dissimilar now.

Edited by Northmoor
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21 hours ago, Pandora said:

We should aim to travel less, commuting is a wasteful exercise, I'm surprised how few can see through the mist,  the idea that you can travel 150 miles in a hour only works if the fare is zero,  simply sit down and calculate the time at work to pay for the ticket, if the fare ticket is £100 and it takes you 4 hours of work to pay for the ticket, that high-speed  150 miles in 1 hour average  is in reality 150 miles in (4+1) hours, .... a mere 30 mph average. 

 

That only works if your train is 4 hours late mate...

 

Also, if my job required me to make a 300mile round trip daily to London, I'd hope it wouldn't pay the "pittance" you were suggesting.

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On 12/06/2021 at 11:29, GoingUnderground said:

European Sleeper services are currently undergoing a renaissance with new services being introduced partly as a way to reduce the emissions from aviation. It will be worth watching their progress.

Which might spread to the UK over the next few years...

https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/luxury-edinburgh-paris-rail-link-20826070

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On 15/06/2021 at 20:30, Pandora said:

We should aim to travel less, commuting is a wasteful exercise, I'm surprised how few can see through the mist,  the idea that you can travel 150 miles in a hour only works if the fare is zero,  simply sit down and calculate the time at work to pay for the ticket, if the fare ticket is £100 and it takes you 4 hours of work to pay for the ticket, that high-speed  150 miles in 1 hour average  is in reality 150 miles in (4+1) hours, .... a mere 30 mph average. 

Whilst you may be right about commuting less and I do have some sympathy for it, many of us do not, or in my case did not, have that option. We lived where we, or our parents, could afford and commuted to where the jobs were or where our employers sent us to work. Much post-WW2 planning was all about splitting up homes and places of work in an effort to give folks a better quality of life and better health removed from the smoke, grime and noise of industry. I started commuting to school by bus and then changed to rail in 1960 and until I retired commuted daily every day to school or work thereafter by rail or car. Rarely was the travelling time less than an hour each way, and sometimes was well over 2 hours each way.

 

Working from home may reduce the level of commuting, but you need to reverse decades of planning to bring homes and jobs physically closer together, and that won't be a quick fix.

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The comment about having electric cars charging on a motorail may not be so far fetched. In The Register a day or so ago (an on-line IT magazine - free to read), there was an item by the inventor of the graphite anode in the Lithium battery saying how he was working on a way to extend EV batteries by not overloading the charging rate in terms of amperage but by using high voltage and that you could recharge an EV battery in 10 minutes. Would 25kV do the job?

 

(If anyone wants to read the item, here's a link: https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/14/rachid_yazami_the_future_of_ev_batteries/ )

 

Cheers,

 

Philip

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On 15/06/2021 at 20:30, Pandora said:

We should aim to travel less, commuting is a wasteful exercise, I'm surprised how few can see through the mist,  the idea that you can travel 150 miles in a hour only works if the fare is zero,  simply sit down and calculate the time at work to pay for the ticket, if the fare ticket is £100 and it takes you 4 hours of work to pay for the ticket, that high-speed  150 miles in 1 hour average  is in reality 150 miles in (4+1) hours, .... a mere 30 mph average. 

 

 

 

I suspect that many people who commute these distances earn more than the ticket cost in a few minutes at the most and they have the benefit of having a full hour in front of their screen on the train, so probably covered the cost before the train even leaves the station.

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15 hours ago, Philou said:

, there was an item by the inventor of the graphite anode in the Lithium battery saying how he was working on a way to extend EV batteries by not overloading the charging rate in terms of amperage but by using high voltage and that you could recharge an EV battery in 10 minutes. Would 25kV do the job?

 

Cheers,

 

Philip

You cannot charge a battery at anything other than it normal charging voltage per cell, raising the voltage too high would also raise the charge rate (current) too high cause overheating and destroy the battery. Especially crucial with Li-ion batteries which can explode.

 

There are special charging regimes where you can pulse a higher current in and measure the voltage increase whilst doing so, then reducing the charging rate once the voltage reaches a crucial level, then increase it again, all the time keeping the parameters within the battery's safe operating limits. This can reduce the charging time for a battery quite considerably over constant current chargers.

I've got a couple of these "smart" chargers for consumer type batteries from AA to D cell size.

Li-ion chargers for Electric drills are also typically "smart" and the battery will also have an inbuilt temperature monitor.

 

Li-ion is typically around 3.6v per cell, several of which may be in series for the usage required, so using a 25kV supply is irrelevant.

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@melmerby That would seem to be the case under current (sorry!) thinking. The part-inventor of the Li cell seems now to think otherwise _ just  indicating what was mentioned in the article.

 

Cheers,

 

Philip

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Hi Philip

I did read the article but It didn't seem to say much different to what is presently used.

 

Quote:

"Yazami’s method instead uses “nonlinear voltammetry” that controls voltage instead of controlling the current.

As explained to The Register this involves thinking of voltage like steps on a ladder. Voltage must stay constant, essentially on one rung of the ladder, until parameters are met and it can move up to the next step, eventually reaching the top of the ladder when fully charged. Yazami said this method gives batteries a rest during the charging process, changing how they respond.

“The speed a battery will charge depends on its resilience to take a charge,” said Yazami. “You have to make the battery happy.”

 

It seems to be very similar to present smart chargers which monitor the voltage whilst increasing the current.

Maybe there is some refinement of the charging algorithm to get a further reduction in time e.g. "super smart" but you are never as far as I can see going to connect a huge incremental change in voltage over the nominal value. (e.g. 50v instead of 3.6v!)

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I will confess that my remark regarding 25kV was rather tongue-in-cheek!

 

Sorry if this is leaving HS2 (again!) but I was very surprised regarding the amount of leccy required for fast charging EVs today. I'm not sure if the commentards over there were exaggerating or not, but it was seemingly in lots of kWs!!!

 

Cheers,

 

Philip

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2 hours ago, melmerby said:

You cannot charge a battery at anything other than it normal charging voltage per cell, raising the voltage too high would also raise the charge rate (current) too high cause overheating and destroy the battery. Especially crucial with Li-ion batteries which can explode.

 

There are special charging regimes where you can pulse a higher current in and measure the voltage increase whilst doing so, then reducing the charging rate once the voltage reaches a crucial level, then increase it again, all the time keeping the parameters within the battery's safe operating limits. This can reduce the charging time for a battery quite considerably over constant current chargers.

I've got a couple of these "smart" chargers for consumer type batteries from AA to D cell size.

Li-ion chargers for Electric drills are also typically "smart" and the battery will also have an inbuilt temperature monitor.

 

Li-ion is typically around 3.6v per cell, several of which may be in series for the usage required, so using a 25kV supply is irrelevant.

S’OK

Edited by boxbrownie
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On 15/06/2021 at 20:30, Pandora said:

We should aim to travel less, commuting is a wasteful exercise, I'm surprised how few can see through the mist,  the idea that you can travel 150 miles in a hour only works if the fare is zero,  simply sit down and calculate the time at work to pay for the ticket, if the fare ticket is £100 and it takes you 4 hours of work to pay for the ticket, that high-speed  150 miles in 1 hour average  is in reality 150 miles in (4+1) hours, .... a mere 30 mph average. 

 

 

 

Or from a professional services firm persceptive, if they charge £1000 per hour (as they do for senior staff), £250/hr for junior staff, creating an hour's extra billing time makes immediate sense.

 

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OK,  I think we have done the commuting cost/benefit to death.

 

HS2 is not primarily, or even mainly, for commuting (except perhaps between Leeds and Birmingham or similar). It is, however, required so as to allow better commuting to London (mainly) on the classic lines.

 

The various predictions for HS2 patronage surround leisure, visiting friends & family and business. That is pretty standard across all European High Speed lines - there is an element of "commuting" on some of the French, Italian and German HS services, but it is relatively minor, and journey times are similar to those for HS2.

 

HS2 Phase 1 and 2a is being built, so let's not go into any pro's or con's about that any more. Let's discuss the more prosaic issues surrounding Phase 2B (east and west), HS3 (NPR) and all that surrounds that (MML.ECML, Scotland and the Outer Hebrides etc) plus the issues about Euston and OOC - far more interesting and indeed, relevant. Plus of course, progress pics and reports on what is being built right now, particularly the "report" that Phase 1/2A will not be completed until 2035 - where did that come from? Well, even I know where it came from, but what justification is there?

 

That means NOT electric vehicle charging and all that - you know who you are - UNLESS it pertains to the future of Phases 2B and NPR.

 

Ta (from the Thread Owner.....)

Edited by Mike Storey
added Euston and OOC
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I am not clear how at ground level HS2 will reach the station. Will there need to be alterations to the container terminal?

And how fortunate that the Curzon Street site has never been built on. I am surprised that BR wasn't told to sell it.

Jonathan

Edited by corneliuslundie
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2 minutes ago, corneliuslundie said:

I am not clear how at ground level tHS2 will reach the station. Will there need to be alterations to the container terminal?

And how fortunate that the Curzon Street site has never been built on. I am surprised that BR wasn't told to sell it.

Jonathan

 

On Curzon Street, I believe (but stand to be corrected, as ever), that it was a designated rail corridor, designated as such by the original WMPTE, but long since adopted by HS2. WMPTE had originally intended a link across Brum, using that route, to relieve New Street, but it never 'appened.

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6 minutes ago, corneliuslundie said:

I am not clear how at ground level HS2 will reach the station. Will there need to be alterations to the container terminal?

And how fortunate that the Curzon Street site has never been built on. I am surprised that BR wasn't told to sell it.

Jonathan

The station will be mainly above the ground level except at the terminal end and approached on a viaduct. There will be a fair bit of elevated line as it travels along the Tame valley. (just like the M6)

 

Some of the land being used was occupied and the buildings CPO'd and demolished.

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This is the link to the set of plans covering Curzon Street and approaches: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hs2-plan-and-profile-maps-birmingham-spur

 

It comes out of Curzon Street on viaduct as mentioned, clips the corner of the Freightliner terminal and crosses the Derby line at the old Saltley power box to follow its south side past the depot on the site of the Metro-Cammell works.  It's then in tunnel almost to the edge of the built-up area - at one time it was proposed to run under the stilts of the M6 flyover.  

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50 minutes ago, Ian Hargrave said:

It would appear this morning that we have the first political casualty of HS2 ,given the result of the Chesham &Amersham by election..No surprise there.

Isn't it mainly in tunnel in that area.

 

Jamie

 

 

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