Without wishing to derail (sorry) the thread, these weren’t excuses but genuine reasons for issues. Fine snow got sucked into the traction motors of old EMU stock and caused them to fail, and leaves create a slippery film on railheads preventing adhesion.
Both now largely negated due to...
The southern leg of HS2 is the whole reason it’s being built in the first place, a new line between Birmingham and Manchester doesn’t do a thing about the capacity crunch between Willesden and Rugby
And a large part of that is private contractors deliberately under-bidding to get the gig, then jacking the price up. Easy to say you can do a job for a tenner, then once everything's signed saying "actually this one's going to cost a grand mate, sorry guv". I believe for SNCF the French...
Alright, if you insist on playing with fantasy numbers, obviously it shouldn't go ahead if it cost multiple trillions. But it's also not going to, it's a railway line and not a space programme. I would flag it through at the current cost, and at considerably more than the current cost (I'm not...
Because it wouldn't have been a fraction of the cost, delivered at best a tenth of the benefits of HS2 and caused enormous disruption while doing so.
Your journey to York was up the ECML, that is less congested than the WCML but increasingly less so, mostly because freight which can no longer...
Something that is vital to the way the nation functions is worth it at basically any cost. How much did the Covid vaccine cost to roll out, or do we not care because it was so badly needed?
The argument that it was about saving 20 minutes on a journey from London to Birmingham was a spurious one put forward either by those with a vested interest against the project or people who didn't understand it in the first place, and never the actual argument in favour of the project. It's...
Take a look at what happened with the WCML upgrade of the mid-2000s. Billions spent and the increases in capacity were taken up within five years, putting them right back where they started.
HS2 is vital national infrastructure and once built nobody would mention the cost again (exhibit A - the Channel Tunnel). It’s shameful they’ve already cut it back and indefensible they want to cut it back more.