HS2 - Birmingham to Manchester scrapped.

es1 said:
announcing this is the only outcome that will make me satisfied. the north desperately needs it - what it can't be is simply an upgrading of the existing line, that isnt good enough.

i've been in the rail engineering industry for 12 years and upgrading the transpennine line was one of the first projects i worked on and it's gone practically nowhere since! i've been on HS2 phase 1 for about 4 years now and our company has spent many thousands (and me many hours) bidding for parts of phase 2. disappointing to see it go but hardly surprised.
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The amount of money wasted because people can’t decide what they want on large infrastructure projects is unreal. They can spend a small fortune getting projects to GRIP5/ES5 only for them to be paused, rebid and then go through another detailed design phase or even the requirements completely changed going right back to concept design.

Seen it on GWEP, Midland Mainline, HS2, Crossrail etc and they never seem to learn the lessons.

Mind you, for monumental wastes of money that’s less visible to the general public you need to look no further than the MoD, those boys really know how to piss money away.
 
To go from London to Manchester via Birmingham is 'the long way around', so knocking a few minutes off the section south of Brum really will not cut it. That's quite apart from the gross lack of capacity on the existing lines leading to Manchester, Scotland and the NW. You can in theory widen the lines (most are already quadruple track either literally or in effect (different routes) but that won't be cheap. Just imagine, to give one example, adding another two tracks from Cheadle Hulme to Piccadilly. We are talking big bucks and massive engineering just for that small bit.

I don't know where we go, really. This country is fucked and this is just one symptom of it.
 
MCFC Wirral said:
Liverpool / Chester to Cardiff next Sunday looks interesting… North Walians need to go via Shrewsbury which, when I last looked, was in England.

I like to get to Swansea twice a year but the train journey is over five hours.
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Seems quite reasonable when you consider that you’re travelling 50 years back in time.
 
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