Ron Ron Ron

Eurostar are, or rather were, only a customer at Ashford International. It’s not their station. The station is under the ownership of HS1 Ltd, who have a 30 year lease to own and operate the HS1 infrastructure. That includes the HS1 line and the 4 stations along its route, this side of the English Channel. SouthEastern manage Ashford International, on behalf of HS1 Ltd. Network Rail (High Speed) manage the other 3 stations (St. Pancras Int., Stratford Int. and Ebbsfleet Int.), as well as the HS1 rail infrastructure, on behalf of HS1 Ltd. .

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. . .

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. .

The first video does indeed show the south portal. As you can see, the bored tunnels emerge in a cut and cover (green) tunnel, extending the tunnel for another couple of hundred metres, across the A425. That road has been temporarily diverted around the site. My understanding, is that bored tunnels would have been too shallow from the surface at this point, hence the switch to cut and cover for the last couple of hundred metres. The video viewpoint is overlooking the "green tunnel" construction work site. A Streetview image of the "green tunnel" portal can be found here..... https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.2520344,-1.4141908,3a,75y,265.74h,89.46t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sLEKvL5UJm7LjYgxD5VvJRQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu Once work is completed, the original course of the A425 will be restored and the "borrowed" land restored and returned to the Polo club. .

I realise the sarcasm. I was not suggesting there should be no contingency plan (there probably is and it was being applied on the day), but that any contingency plan that includes running services from closed facilities, further down the line, would be preposterously expensive and a bit of a farce set against the likely risk of needing to use them.. This event lasted for just 1 day. How long would it take from the initial report of flooding, to a temporary halt in operations while engineers were sent down to check out the situation, for the operations team to start evaluating the impact and reporting upstairs? It would surely have been a sequence of unfolding events over a period of a couple of hours. Had they been able to resolve the issue within a few more hours, it would have been pointless to consider opening up closed stations down the line, as everything would have been up and running again, before they could start up a fallback operation. There will have been far more people around the world, affected by flight cancellations due to bad weather, over the holiday period. .

HS1 all the way to London and St. Pancras International will have been operational for 17 years, this year. As far as I’m aware, this is the first time that unplanned disruption has closed the line north of Ebbsfleet. Once the cause of the flooding in the Thames tunnel has been established, we might find the likelihood of this type of event is even rarer. I’m not claiming any inside knowledge ( I’m only speculating like everyone else here), but if those facilities are closed and put in mothballs, it won’t be a trivial matter to get them up and running within a day …or even two, especially over an extended “ holiday period” like Xmas & NY, by which time it would be too late. That’s an entirely separate argument. I agree, those facilities should be properly used. Use cars? Many stranded passengers will have been visitors that have been in London or the wider UK and are trying to get to Paris, Brussels etc, or trying to get back home. Others will have made their way, or already be on their way to St Pancras International by public transport to find their train has been cancelled on arrival. They may already be a long way from home. If they have a car, it would be back there at home, which could be …..anywhere? This was not a war situation, or any sort of national emergency. All it was, was a tunnel suffering some flooding and services being disrupted and cancelled for less than 24 hours. Hardly comparable. Get a grip! Major transport disruption is a common risk worldwide. It’s a fact of life. There has been far more disruption and personal travel plans ruined by a year’s worth of never ending rail strikes, than this overblown event. . .

You have to marvel at the absurdity of suggesting that Eurostar staff at St. Pancras, could all be herded onto coaches (if you could even get hold of coaches at no notice, 2 days before NY, in the holiday period), or put on trains, rushed down to Ebbsfleet and/or Ashford, to quickly open up mothballed facilities within a few hours of the sort of disruption encountered the other day. Even if you could get them there so quickly, how many could you muster, as St. Pancras Int would still have to be manned to deal with departing passengers turning up there and needing to be dealt with. Then there’s staff training for the unfamiliar, smaller facilities; the provision of services for staff and passengers which will all be mothballed, out of use or removed; the lack of basics like toilet provision (all the toilets will have been drained down and closed for hygiene and safety reasons), no catering facilities, not even a coffee bar or stall, etc, etc. Of course, all that could be dealt with, but it would need a contingency plan that would require Ebbsfleet and Ashford to be maintained in a state of constant readiness and staff taken there for periodic training, for what? A once in 20 year occurrence? The whole notion is plain silly. .

Nobody suggested they would be "cheap". You appeared to imply that HS2 fares would be expensive... "..........and I think we can all be quietly confident that whatever else travel on HS2 will be, it WON'T be cheap. ...." As nobody knows what the fares will be, I simply asked on what basis you made that assumption? In the past and still to this day, critics and anti's have declared that HS2 fares would be "very expensive", "unaffordable", "for rich business men" and other such hyperbole. Most of their opinions are based on ignorance in assuming HS2 would be some sort of alternative 'premium" service, rather than the plain fact that HS2 services were always intended to be the same IC services that use the WCML today, but transferred onto a new, faster piece of rail infrastructure. If the DafT do end up dictating a "premium" for HS2 fares, what will it be a premium over? There will be no alternative, other than the stopping and semi-fast services currently provided by WMT to Birmingham. London - Manchester and London - Glasgow, would end up being "premium fare" only. The only thing we can be sure of, is that all rail fares will be more expensive in the 2030's than they are today. .

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North London ? HS2 goes nowhere near “North London”. Unless you mean Euston, being on the north side of Central London? OOC is on the borders of west and WNW London. .

Mace Dragados Joint Venture (MDJV) were appointed to construct HS2’s Curzon Street station in May 2021. Construction work is due to start over the next couple of months. The site is cleared and piling work will be commencing soon. .

So you think the NIMBY’s, environmentalists and other protesters wouldn’t have objected to the line passing through various parts of the countryside, just because the designed line speed was lower? .

I'm curious as to why you make that assumption? On what assumption(s) ? Just asking? .

At Warley, they wouldn’t say, other than a private aside, confirming that there was a list of developments in progress, taking the system beyond the launch offering. Kinesis already has the ability to program train sequences and shuttles. With the layout control software already there, it would be an opportunity too good to miss to add full train control, with loco detection. There was no mention of RailCom or RailCom+ however, both of which are present on the outgoing Dynamis Ultima. .

A map of the Delta Junction layout, showing the route of HS2 on it's way from London (bottom) to "the north" (top), with the branch to Birmingham going off to the left. .

The first span of the Delta Junction viaducts, at Water Orton, has been completed. .

This looks like an earlier view, looking east, towards Winslow. This is the bridge over HS2. The Calvert HS2 infrastructure depot will be built on the left of the frame. At the top right hand side, you can just make out the earth embankment being formed, to carry the the link from EW Rail towards Aylesbury.

Today's progress update from HS2 Ltd, is a little baffling. TBM "Lydia" boring the logistics tunnel at OOC, is said to have 216 metres remaining, which if I'm not mistaken, was the figure they gave several weeks ago ? I've read elsewhere, that breakout was due either just before Xmas, or early in the NY. Reported today, at the Northolt West tunnels.... Sushila = 2915m with 4925m remaining. Caroline = 2825m with 5015m remaining. Meanwhile at Bromford..... Mary Anne = 1290m with 4310m remaining. The latest Chilterns tunnels progress was reported yesterday (see a few posts above). Unfortunately, the slow and haphazard HS2 Ltd PR machine, have today issued an out of date press release, saying that Florence and Cecilia have reached the Chesham Road intervention shaft. That event must have taken place a few weeks ago, with Florence now almost halfway from that location to the north portal at South Heath, with Cecilia following on behind. .

Deliveries of tunnel segments, for the Northolt east tunnels, have just started. The segments are made in Hartlepool and are being transported to the HS2 infrastructure support depot at Willesden. .

Chilterns Tunnels.... Florence has 762 metres left to go. Cecilia has 1,158 metres left. .

A fast time video showing activity at the Curzon St. site..... Note the bridge construction 0.10 secs into the video. (Bellingham Bridge?) .

The viaduct is already blending in with the scenery.... .

Indeed, there’s a worthwhile case for the 455. NSE, Southern, SWT 1st livery, SWT red etc. Not a priority for me personally, as they don’t venture that far south, in normal service. There was a kit available, with a ready-built option. .

We’ve had SWT Class 170, 159, 158 and 450, but no 444 to match. A Southern 377 would go nicely with those, as the operational areas for these two operators, meet and overlap in numerous locations. So a RTR 444 and a 377 would top my own wish list. I’m not holding my breath. .