HS2

[rockershovel]

11 hours ago, melmerby said:

Nothing unusual there.

Birmingham to London:

Slowest - LNWR - cheapest, as was Silverlink/London Midland etc.

Midspeed - Chiltern - mid price

Fastest - Avanti - most expensive, as was Virgin

 

It's been like that for a very long time.

Quite so. LNER and its predecessors were the exception to prove the rule; now they've followed the pack. 

 

Why anyone would argue that HS2 would be anything other than a maximum premium service, escapes me entirely. 

[corneliuslundie]

If the government is really only acting as guarantor why does it keep talking about the cost as though it is government funded? Such as talking about the money saved by the cuts to HS2.

Jonathan

[corneliuslundie]

"Why anyone would argue that HS2 would be anything other than a maximum premium service, escapes me entirely. "

But with exactly the same fares as would have been charged via the WCML. As has been shown above, many express services charge premium fares these days.

BTW what happened to the government's repeated promises of a simpler fare system? Or is the three level system described above for the WCLM it?

Anyway, Happy New Year.

Jonathan

[martin_wynne]

1 hour ago, corneliuslundie said:

BTW what happened to the government's repeated promises of a simpler fare system?

 

https://news.railbusinessdaily.com/government-scraps-plans-for-new-train-ticket-retailer/

 

private sector profits 1

customer convenience and service 0

 

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/are-you-driving-home-this-xmas-because-the-trains-are/id1384867286?i=1000638962014

 

Martin.

Edited January 2 by martin_wynne
podcast link

[billbedford]

13 hours ago, billbedford said:

 

Does Norway count as the Wild West?

 

https://twitter.com/jasoncrawford/status/1695015246833025522

 

 

In fairness, I should point out that Norwegian tunnels are in hard rock and built well away from the typical underground urban sprawl found in the UK. 

[melmerby]

I wonder what will happen to the parts of HS2 in metropolitan areas where prices are controlled?

e.g. You can use any train on the wcml services running between Coventry & Wolverhampton at the TfWM standard ticket price

Choice of 4 - TfW, XC, WM trains/Avanti between International & New St.

 

Will we be able to use a TfWM fare between Curzon Street & Birmingham Interchange on HS2 (for NEC/Airport)?

[The Stationmaster]

1 hour ago, martin_wynne said:

 

https://news.railbusinessdaily.com/government-scraps-plans-for-new-train-ticket-retailer/

 

private sector profits 1

customer convenience and service 0

 

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/are-you-driving-home-this-xmas-because-the-trains-are/id1384867286?i=1000638962014

 

Martin.

However if you look you will find that the presentation of fareson the National rail website has changed somewhat making it much easier to find a cheap alternative (trying looking at London to RYork).

 

Apart from the fact that this seems to be the latest phase of alterations on the site and that most of its former utility currently doesn't work (and hasn't for some time) it might suggest that 'someone' is trying another way of providing fare information? 

[Ron Ron Ron]

6 hours ago, rockershovel said:

……Why anyone would argue that HS2 would be anything other than a maximum premium service, escapes me entirely. 

Nobody is arguing it won’t be.
The fact is, we don’t know and no declaration of intent over fares has been publicly aired.

Various people make claims that it will be an expensive premium service based on nothing but opinion.

 

If it’s decided that HS2 is a “maximum premium service”, as you put it, then all services from Manchester, Liverpool, the NW, Cumbria and Glasgow, to London, will be limited to that “maximum premium service” !

There will be no alternatives, other than making connections between various regional, slow services, or using  the limited number of residual WCML inter-city services that’ll continue to use the WCML south of Birmingham.

 

 

.

 

[Grovenor]

 

[jjb1970]

Vietnam is now planning a North-South high speed railway to connect Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, a route that makes HS2 look rather short. I would bet money that if it goes ahead it'll be delivered in a fraction of the time of HS2 despite being much longer, for a lot less and work just fine. And not all of that is down to Vietnam being a lower labour cost economy. 

[ruggedpeak]

23 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

HS2 is just a symptom of a wider problem with building infrastructure in the UK (and it's by no means unique to the UK). The usual defence is to point to wild west countries where anything goes and government and industry pays no attention to environmental impact or safety (often with reference to China, which indicates a deep ignorance of regulatory evolution in China), which assumes there is no position between the two extremes. If government is incapable of facilitating infrastructure development in a timely and affordable manner and with robust environmental and safety standards then the problem is with government. When I worked in electricity generation one reason (though not the only one I'd add) my employer was looking elsewhere to invest was that developing new projects in the UK was a nightmare.

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12918727/footbridge-middletons-railway-station-takes-10-years-build.html

 

Another good example is the Lower Thames Crossing, which has apparently cost £800m so far despite no building work. Nearly £300m of that on planning consent.

 

HS2 is just another typically run UK infrastructure project.

[Arun Sharma]

I enjoy looking at the various videos which have been uploaded to this thread. 

What has intruiged me is how few 'Brits' seem to be the guys/gals running the various tunnelling or box filling/digging out phases. Lots of folk whose first language is not english are introducing and doing the voice-overs for these official videos. Nothing wrong with that as they are evidently doing a good job but it does suggest that we might not be keeping this expertise in-house/in-country. When we next need such expertise, will it be available? 

Does anyone know how many apprenticeships have gone to UK citizens as a result of this project?

Edited January 2 by Arun Sharma

[billbedford]

8 minutes ago, Arun Sharma said:

What has intruiged me is how few 'Brits' seem to be the guys/gals running the various tunnelling or box filling/digging out phases. Lots of folk whose first language is not english are introducing and doing the voice-overs for these official videos.

 

I put that down to the film-makers being especially woke. 

[Ron Ron Ron]

10 minutes ago, Arun Sharma said:

………Does anyone know how many apprenticeships have gone to UK citizens as a result of this project?

According to HS2 Ltd, over 1,300  HS2 apprentices are working on the project, out of 2,000 going through its apprentice training scheme.

British apprentices have featured a lot in various official HS2 videos.

 

.

 

.

[melmerby]

14 hours ago, corneliuslundie said:

"Why anyone would argue that HS2 would be anything other than a maximum premium service, escapes me entirely. "

But with exactly the same fares as would have been charged via the WCML. As has been shown above, many express services charge premium fares these days.

BTW what happened to the government's repeated promises of a simpler fare system? Or is the three level system described above for the WCLM it?

Anyway, Happy New Year.

Jonathan

Surely 3 levels is what people want?

Those who don't care how long it takes (within reason) as cost is important

Those that don't care how much it costs (within reason) as time is the essence.

Those in the middle who want a reasonably quick service but not overpriced.

[corneliuslundie]

And of course those who want to avoid changing trains en route for one reason or other (six children in tow, wheelchair user, heavy luggage - plenty of choice).

Jonathan

[jjb1970]

Britain lost a lot of skills, and rebuilding lost skills takes time and effort. In fairness to the rail industry it does seem to be making an effort to invest in training and education. Many industries had a windfall of cheap, highly skilled immigrants from East and Central Europe with rights to live and work here which allowed them to hide from the basic math of staff age profiles, establishment numbers and people entering the system and without the headache of going through the process to hire foreign staff. I do think that had a baleful effect. 

 

I  think lack of expertise a much bigger reason for various major program issues than many of the more quoted reasons. The reason the Chinese can build new high speed railways so effectively is they probably now have the world's biggest talent pool in the various technical disciplines and have it almost like a production line.

 

You learn how to do something, you practice, then you get good.

[rockershovel]

The British construction industry has gone through a multiple impact

 

- it wanted a completely casual workforce, with no employment rights or training costs. That was its price for supporting Mrs Thatcher's leadership bid. To a great extent, they got it. 

 

- the collapse of training and employment security was driven in part by the vast expansion of more-or-less bogus self-employment, in which costs of this sort are pushed onto the employee and (partially) reconciled against their personal taxation. 

 

- the same applies to costs related to attracting and retaining a mobile workforce (its important to understand that the more you move about, the higher your accomodation costs). 

 

- these taxation concessions are now being progressively withdrawn (the infamous IR35 process) which increases cost to the individual. The recent furlough scheme was a major kick in the teeth for anyone employed in that fashion, too. 

 

- add in the general innumeracy of large sectors of the British population, and the outcome is a workforce which doesn't understand its own earnings structure, particularly the relationship ship between gross and nett earnings, and remains attached to the highest gross rate. This resulted in general wage erosion, which is still ongoing.

 

- construction used to depend on a workforce living in either poor quality, cash-in-hand accomodation or caravans on a multitude of small, independent sites, pub car parks, farmyard corners or just odd corners of the site itself. A perfect storm of mass immigration, mass increase of students, increased focus on taxation, planning and HSE constraints and a simple disregard by the industry itself has largely destroyed that accomodation supply

 

- the plain fact is that there no will at government level, to make it happen. 1200 "apprentices" in the short courses now going by that name, doesn't begin to address the problem. I'm currently working on a major water infrastructure project which uses large numbers of migrant staff and labour, because the project structure makes that inevitable. I've seen schemes to reconstruct or maintain skills supplies, and if there is no will to focus on the origins and nationality of your intake, there is no functional scheme. It can't be put any simpler than that.

 

 

Edited January 4 by rockershovel

[rockershovel]

On 02/01/2024 at 13:54, Ron Ron Ron said:

Nobody is arguing it won’t be.
The fact is, we don’t know and no declaration of intent over fares has been publicly aired.

Various people make claims that it will be an expensive premium service based on nothing but opinion.

 

If it’s decided that HS2 is a “maximum premium service”, as you put it, then all services from Manchester, Liverpool, the NW, Cumbria and Glasgow, to London, will be limited to that “maximum premium service” !

There will be no alternatives, other than making connections between various regional, slow services, or using  the limited number of residual WCML inter-city services that’ll continue to use the WCML south of Birmingham.

 

 

.

 

That's pretty much the case. 

 

I travelled around a fair bit by train in 2011-12, and again in 2018-20. I found there was a three-tier system as follows

 

1) a "Hommes 40, chevaux 8" level service found in areas like the links from ECML to the coast itself. No one uses this apart from the unemployed, chavs on a night out, and OAPs. 

 

2) a desperately ovetcrowded commuter network focused on London, with local outgrowth in places like Cardiff and the Liverpool/Manchester Nexus

 

3) a long-distance service at premium rates (ECML et al) used by OAPs and some tourists. Business users drive or fly. 

[corneliuslundie]

I am afraid that you are right about industry's unwillingness to train people. Everything is about the bottom line at the end of the half year, not the long term. We even see it on the railways where it is much more common to poach drivers from other companies than to train your own (with a few notable exceptions). But it is a much wider problem. One part is the "academisation" of so many training courses, three years in college rather than most your time on site and a short time in college to do the theory bits. This is partly the fault of industry for accepting it but also because the academics have pushed in this direction. There have been several attempts to get training back "on the ground" such as NVQs but they have mostly gone the same way, And government doesn't want to pay either - such as replacement of grants by loans.

A classic example of the stupidity is training of nurses (which has also got far too college based). It was announced that grants were being abolished, and within six months the government of the day (I can't remember which party  was in power) was complaining of a lack of new trainee nurses. What a surprise!

But it is all part of a society where we know our rights but not our responsibilities. ie every man (of woman of course) for him/herself.

Rant over, sorry

Jonathan

[rockershovel]

Since you mention nurses, that's just another part of the perfect storm which has  destroyed so much of our infrastructure. A nurse typically works 5-15 years, leaves for family reasons and returns in her 50s, if at all. It makes no sense whatsoever to incur tens of thousands of pounds of debt for that. 

 

It's the same for junior doctors. Look at the language surrounding doctor appointments and funding; the phrasing is typically something like " x number of full time equivalents". Doctors MUST have ongoing structured professional development, otherwise you are deliberately driving them away. 

 

The academisation of training is a  classic example. The academic sector has every incentive to drive this ever onwards. Industry doesn't want to know (one of the more disgusting aspects of covid was the cry on all sides "we have no responsibility for these people"). 

 

You might regard this as stupid. Personally, I greatly doubt that people with exoensive private education and good degrees from exclusive Universities are, in the main, stupid , the cause lies elsewhere 

Edited January 4 by rockershovel

[C126]

19 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

Personally, I greatly doubt that people with ex[p]ensive private education and good degrees from exclusive Universities are, in the main, stupid...

 

I work with them.  Trust me, many are.  Also arrogant, self-entitled, thoughtless, and selfish.  But the nice ones out-weigh them.  As to nurse education now being degree-level, this was owing to professional rivalry with doctors.

 

British industry's investment in training for its workers has been neglected for decades.  See the several books on the nation's economic decline and short-termism.

 

 

[billbedford]

5 hours ago, corneliuslundie said:

I am afraid that you are right about industry's unwillingness to train people. Everything is about the bottom line at the end of the half year, not the long term. We even see it on the railways where it is much more common to poach drivers from other companies than to train your own (with a few notable exceptions).

 

This goes back a long way. In fact, to the time that apprenticeships were reduced from seven years to three. At the end of their time, apprentices had a habit of leaving their employers to find better-paid jobs, leaving the employers unable to recoup the cost of instruction. 

[C126]

4 minutes ago, billbedford said:

 

This goes back a long way. In fact, to the time that apprenticeships were reduced from seven years to three. At the end of their time, apprentices had a habit of leaving their employers to find better-paid jobs, leaving the employers unable to recoup the cost of instruction. 

 

But was it not also the case that the firm made a 'profit' out of that low-wage trainee during the duration of her/his training?  Also, there were not always jobs at the firm for the apprentice to move into upon qualification.

 

[adb968008]

On 02/01/2024 at 20:25, jjb1970 said:

Vietnam is now planning a North-South high speed railway to connect Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, a route that makes HS2 look rather short. I would bet money that if it goes ahead it'll be delivered in a fraction of the time of HS2 despite being much longer, for a lot less and work just fine. And not all of that is down to Vietnam being a lower labour cost economy. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51512831
China's state railway company said it could build the line in just five years and at a much lower cost

Quote

However, British officials are said to be sceptical that it could operate in the same way in a democracy with property rights, protected landscapes and powerful lobbying groups.

And herein is the achilles heel of British construction.

 

That article was 2020, it would be open next year… and fixed price.

 

The west is trying to compete with the east in business, politics and global trade, with its feet and arms self-tied… and we wonder why we are losing.

 

We were winning in Victorian times, using the same methods our global rivals now use against us.

 

Did these £11mn wagons ever enter service ?

https://www.railvolution.net/news/fate-of-chinese-built-wagons-for-lu-still-unclear

 

Quote

The order is the first for UK rolling stock that has been won by CRRC and paves the way for CRRC to tackle wider opportunities, such as bidding to take part in the UK's High Speed 2 project.“

 

Edited January 4 by adb968008