We are already living through a “life sentence of inadequate train service”
Fuck building new lines designed for speed, invest that money in making the existing network better. Trains are already disgustingly over priced in exchange for a disrespectfully shit service. How about investing in making what is already there affordable and actually reliable, fucking privatisation bullshit.
I don’t care if the train takes 8 or 10 hours to go from one end of the country to the other what I care about is the fact that you are raped by the 200 plus charge.
Public transport in this country is a fucking joke and what with this prick rolling back and taking some car positive outlook towards the future for this country it doesn’t look like it is gonna improve anytime soon. Fuck I hate this place.
HS2 is the investment in making the existing network better. From the article:
That is because the current 125mph expresses devour capacity on the network the Victorians bequeathed us. Local, regional and freight services are all constricted so that passengers can travel between Sheffield and London in two hours. Get them off the tracks, and connectivity is transformed.
It is, but they also keep reinventing and scrapping their long awaited, promised, guaranteed upgrades to the East-West routes across the North, which is frustrating a lot of people. We’re still waiting to upgrade to the Victorian Network :)
That’s a slight exaggeration, but round Selby/Doncaster/Hull/York/Leeds etc, we’re still waiting for track electrification, and we only got rid of Pacers (1984) two years ago, and have now upgraded to “new, cool and futuristic” Sprinters (1984).
“Dad, what was commuting to work in the 80s like?”
“Exactly the same as this, but the chairs were a different colour and there was no disabled toilet”
I suppose it’s easy to feel like “Get our 50mph trains up to 80mph (or better?) before you start worrying about making a fast train faster”.
Fuck building new lines designed for speed, invest that money in making the existing network better.
Building new, modern railway lines is one way to improve the network. I don’t really understand why anyone who advocates for investment in the railways has a problem with building new lines. I agree that they shouldn’t be private anymore and that we should massively increase funding, but building new rail and replacing old rail with new rail seems like a great way to improve the network
The rail industry was asked nearly 20 years ago what would best increase capacity in our existing infrastructure and this is what they cam up with. Faster, more frequent services on a high speed line that frees up paths on old mainlines for more local services and more rail freight, as these are at capacity right now
Sure, you can argue that it wasn’t a perfect plan, but it’s what we have. Framing it as “high speed travel to London” is what the press have been doing for 15 years and is disingenuous.
Of course it doesn’t matter because even before this latest idiocy the plan had been gutted down enough that a lot of that extra capacity wouldn’t have appeared, and we instead have spent billions extra tunnelling under fields near rich people’s homes so they wouldn’t have to hear trains every now and then
I don’t care if the train takes 8 or 10 hours to go from one end of the country to the other what I care about is the fact that you are raped by the 200 plus charge.
goes to look
It looks like a rail ticket a week from now (October 10) is about £220 from London to Inverness. A bus ticket (megabus) can be had for £27. On the other hand, rail is about 8 hours and the bus 13 hours.
So if you would like to optimize for price, I suppose that the bus probably is a lot more appealing, though the trip will take longer.
EDIT: Just to check what you could theoretically get the bus time down to, Google Maps says that it’s about 10 hours to go from London to Inverness in a car. So that’s about the floor on what a bus service could do (no changes, no intermediate stops), short of introducing new or faster highways.
EDIT2: For completeness, air (easyJet) appears to be available for that route for £51 and take 1 hour and 40 minutes. More expensive than the bus, but also much less so than rail, and considerably faster than either.
And this is why anyone would be insane to do anything but fly there.
Heh, I checked the air price and updated my comment after you commented but before I read your comment, but yeah, good point.
Like, yeah, if you’re someone super environmentally conscious then you may be begrudged to fly, and while I understand the big picture is more complicated than what I’m about to say, but that flight, train or coach was going to depart with or without you regardless, so I’m going to be picking the best combination of easiest, fastest and cheapest choice.
They should have started building in the north. Starting building in the south now seems like a deliberate move to get extra lines around London under the guise of something that would benefit the whole country
California HSR did this technique and honestly it isn’t going a whole ton better. Hopefully they connect Los Angeles and San Francisco with the central valley high speed line eventually, but it would have served a lot of people better to start in the cities and connect them through the valley later. Those lines in the cities could have been used for regional rail services while the valley line was completed. Specifically it would have been great to see a new SF to Sacramento line via San Jose and the LA to Lancaster line via Burbank.
I have no idea what you’re talking about
Sorry I’m too used to transit communities where everyone is in the know about big international projects.
In California they are building the first phase of the high speed rail project through the middle of the state where there is relatively little demand for rail. So we will end up with a high speed line that won’t get nearly as much use if they end up canceling the project. In California San Francisco and Los Angeles both are nearly equally as large and ridership will probably be dominated by trips to or between one of those cities.
I guess the difference in UK is the North has quite a few large cities that are each much smaller than London, so it doesn’t have that same “bi-pole” setup. Building starting in the north would improve connectivity between those cities. But I guess my question is, would there be much demand for travel between the northern cities as compared to demand between the north and London?
If you only ever invest in the southeast, then of course there will be more people and productivity there. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea
That demand is already there - hundreds of thousands of people already attempt to commute by rail between cities in the North every day - but we’re cramming 400 people onto a train with capacity for 200, and it’s taking an hour to travel 50 miles, and most days there’ll be random cancellations scattered about, so it… umm… could do with a bit of work :)
What is ‘the north?’
- Average Tory
To roughly paraphrase one famous, self-described softy southerner espousing a tale where they soon learned a very valuable lesson: “Manchester’s in the north and so’s Scotland. Shouldn’t take that long to get from one to the other.”
Nice chap. Robert Llewellyn. Does electric car stuff and the like now. Occasionally plays Kryten in Red Dwarf, but this isn’t strictly relevant.
The point is that, by default, no-one from south of Watford understands that there’s quite a lot of land and people here between London and Edinburgh (and quite a lot north of that as well for that matter).
And even if you manage to get over the geography (conceptually or literally), there’s a lot more lefty* voters in this ignored bit, so it tends to suit the largely centrist and right-leaning south to maintain their ignorance. And distance.
* Although the leftyness often doesn’t extend to “foreign” folk, which is a disappointment.
Hertfordshire
- Another Tory, presumably
Why is there never investment for low carbon public transport?
Tories: “No, it frees money to further reduce the taxation on the rich!”
