Flittersnoop

One of these big coal-burning power stations should be preserved for future generations - they are impressive structures and in years to come I suspect they will appear as alien to future generations as Stonehenge appears to us!

These Cargowaggons seem very hard to get hold of - any idea why only Hattons, Rails of Sheffield and Kernow have received them? I'd like one of the pristine ones (#5016) but they're all sold out.

Has anyone else had problems with these models making a whining noise like a low-budget UFO from a 1950s sci-fi film, please? My green Class 117 runs fine, but very definitely not silently. Given the price tag I suspect I will be returning it to the shop to try to swap it for a quieter one.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-51852821 I believe The Doctor was responsible for this closure.

If there's no more room for trains at King's Cross, why are they restoring the extra pair of tracks through Gasworks Tunnel? And you regard a new viaduct at Welwyn as "improbably expensive", yet apparently regard £100 billion for HS2 as good value for money? A large measure of inconsistency there, I fear!

There's no debate on here, Phil. Just a bunch of people who "know" they're right. Enjoy your virtue-signalling (in-cab, of course, to maximise capacity).

You haven't even read what I wrote properly. A NEW RAILWAY from the Rugby area to London, not extra tracks adjacent to the WCML. So you haven't even got "a clue" what I actually wrote a few hours ago! Extra tracks from Coventry to Brum is doable with some demolition (& if demolition is acceptable on the way into Eustion, why not in the West Midlands?) - just look out of the window when you're next on that route. I'm out of here. Life's too short for any more of this nonsense.

Then you believe wrong. But why let facts get in the way of your ill-informed comments?

Please show me the "half-baked" solutions I have proposed. By the way, the use of the phrase "half-baked" is just the kind of derogatory comment that I was referring to. So thanks for making my point for me. Also, in order to point out a flaw in an argument it is not necessary to propose an alternative. If the flaw exists, it exists. And it's "peddle", not pedal. Bikes have pedals. I shan't comment any further. But if HS2 does get built, rest assured that every time a train failure or OHLE problem brings the whole show grinding to a halt, heaping further public derision on our rail industry, I shall be quietly laughing to myself and feeling very fortunate that I don't have to use it.

If the problem is congestion on the southern part of the WCML, so I would have built a new railway from the Rugby area to London, as well as four-tracking the section from Coventry to Birmingham and building a link to Leicester to link up with the MML, and also four-track the Welwyn bottleneck on the ECML. The new railway would have been four tracks in places to enable a local service south of Rugby, an area due for big housing developments that currently and after HS2 has no train service to London. The new railway would not have had a signalling system and loading gauge that means ordinary trains can't use it. Brunel tried that kind of "future-proofing" on the GWR. It didn't "end well" to use a phrase popular on here. But that isn't the point. The point is that one group of people on here shout down and belittle anyone who doesn't conform to their thinking. I meet plenty of railway enthusiasts who think HS2 is wrong, but they're not on here because they don't want to be the target of derisive comments.

If you re-read what you have written you are saying, despite your protestations to the contrary, that only one opinion regarding HS2 is acceptable on this forum, because your assertion is that only one conclusion is possible from the "evidence" that is graciously posted on here, and anyone who stubbornly fails to comply leaves themselves open to scorn and ridicule and being labelled as a troll. I suggest that you and the others (including, extraordinarily, the moderators) who share your mindset listen to 'The Purity Spiral' on BBC Radio 4, to help you understand the group-think lynch-mob mentality that takes hold on social media. It may shock you to learn that it is possible to be a life-long, well-informed railway enthusiast and modeller, and yet still reach the conclusion that HS2 is an ill-conceived, poorly-designed waste of money and a massive missed opportunity for the future of rail in the UK.

So only one (pro-HS2) viewpoint is acceptable on RMWeb, and anyone who "battles" (i.e. disagrees) and sticks their head above the parapet is fair game, despite many pro-HS2 voices admitting that the project has serious design flaws? When a forum administrator ignores personal comments made only against people who are on one side of an argument and then weighs in with their own personal attack (& there's no other word for your comment above), it's easy to see why others feel entitled to do likewise, even though all that does is create a pro-HS2 social media echo chamber, where people can spend their time preaching to the converted. Welcome to public discourse in the 21st century!

Politicians are involved because they are the representatives of UK taxpayers, without whose financial input there wouldn't be a UK rail system, despite the fact that the vast majority of journeys made in the UK don't involve a train. So blaming them is rather like biting the hand that feeds you. Blaming passengers for problems on the railways is similarly "interesting". I'm sure all those people crammed onto overcrowded trains don't feel like a good news story. As for me showing disrespect, I have been the target of very personal comments in my short time on here. I haven't responded in kind. Are you sure you're not conflating disagreement with disrespect?

Very little respect is shown on here towards anyone who dares to criticise HS2! Quite the contrary, in fact. Getting a thread closed down is a symptom of intolerance and insecurity. Are we to believe that everyone who works on or manages railways in the UK (including the Dept for Transport) is competent? If that is true, the relentless series of bad news stories that our railways currently generates is very hard to explain. I'm sure that the highly skilled, dedicated and very professional railway workers on here can all think of colleagues and managers who are not quite such a boon to the industry. A little bit of realism on here would be useful.

The media and the general population is quite aware that trains in the UK are simultaneously very expensive to use and also very overcrowded. It's called "Rip-off Britain". I love the way people on here believe that our rail industry is the victim of some media conspiracy, rather than it being badly run, inept and prone to self-inflicted damage!

Yes, HS2 is of a different order, but so is the price tag and scope for delay and cost overrun. All the supposed benefits are pure speculation, so the "we can't afford not to build it" argument is very weak, and since the construction period will stretch way beyond the next general election, tying HS2's future to the political fortunes of Boris Johnson is a very high-risk strategy indeed. Northern MPs will get very little benefit from construction work in Buckinghamshire etc if their constituents still have a chronically overcrowded and inreliable rail commute into Manchester or Leeds.

So when HS2 inevitably starts (! We're already there, aren't we?) to suffer from massive overruns on time and cost (which is the main achievement of the 21st century rail industry, after all) we can, by your own logic, watch while the government loses patience and trims back HS2 or cancels it altogether! In cliche terms, that's why people who think "it's all over bar the shouting" are actually counting their chickens before they're hatched!

A contender for 2020 Optimist of The Year award? British history is littered with projects that got a lot further than the current state of HS2 before they were cancelled.

As an opponent of HS2 in its current guise I welcome yesterday's announcement: having Boris as a proponent and with a minister directly overseeing it, what more effective kiss of death for the whole enterprise could there be?!

If there was a devolved English parliament the trains would have reached Portishead and Ashington years ago.

Still no danger of any actual practical work starting to get the trains back to Ashington or Fleetwood - just more consultants writing reports - how depressingly predictable.

I wonder what "the project" will look like: whether the maximum speed will be reduced, and whether both the Manchester and Leeds phases will be included?

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.

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.

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".