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What I don't know is what money was already committed/ spent on the Northern link. Have they already purchased the land / impacted properties? If so, they should keep hold of that- by all means rent / lease it back but surely someone will need to finish the project at some point in next 30 years and the price of land is only going one way.
I gather in the real world companies are rewarded probably for beating deadlines but should they fail to meet them there will be penalties .
It was about taking fast trains off the WCML so you could cram on more freight and more commuter trains.
Plus taking the strain off victorian infrastructure built when trains topped off at about 75mph now struggling with trains doing 125mph.
Now with the Northern section cancelled, it sadly won't achieve any of those things for the North.
I mean stone the flamin' crows, there has been plenty of time to copy it and get it right. It's not as if it hasn't been more than 100 years since railways were invented by the Germans, French, Austrians Swedes, Americans, Africans, Dutch ... oh I dunno. Someone once told me that the British invented railways, which was obviously a lie. Maybe it was the Japanese.
I wonder if it was like that for them too.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson
"The social care provision of Europe with the tax rates of the US" .... errrm, that's really not going to work, and the sooner we wake up from the something-for-nothing level of expectation and get through the painful readjustment, the better for future generations.
It doesn't matter which colour of politician is in power, they all have the same problem to solve, which is (together with their general incompetence and self-interest-first approach) why none of them have.
The question is, would you buy now, knowing that a future government may revive the project and force you to sell at the then current market price?
(Speaking as someone who lives on a former railway station site!)
Exactly, although it doesn’t quite explain why other countries can apparently build similar infrastructure more competently and for much lower prices.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson
I'll bet you London to a brick it's sweet f-all.
That is what has happened to many countries over the last few decades: the wealthy have carved themselves out a massive tax exemption (via a hundred sneaky routes) and no longer pay their way. Gigantic (mostly American) companies like Google, Amazon and Uber laugh their way around local laws and national sovereignty, extracting the profits that used to be generated on-shore and taxed. Result: the shrinking middle classes are expected to pay for every damn thing and there is not enough money to go round.
In fact there is plenty of money. There are just too many loopholes in the tax system.
The railway industry in this country has a really bad age profile among its staff, and very little succession planning in my experience. Where I work, two people retired earlier in the year, and now the track geometry recording train is broken and nobody in their team knows how to fix it. In my office, all the key people are in their 50's or older. We have one 69 year old, and a couple of others who are 60ish.
There has been also been a brain drain of good engineers. We had a really good young guy who got a job in Australia. That was self-inflicted stupidity as the company's corporate bean counter pay structure wouldn't pay him anywhere near market rates. There have been others who have gone to build railways in the middle East for tax free pay. A lot of the time, the ones who stick around are the ones who aren't any good and can't get a job elsewhere. The older guys stick around because they are settled and have families, and years in the pension scheme - which the government wants to kill off.
Places like Dubai and Saudi Arabia poaching staff do mean that pay for good civil engineers and railway engineers is high, which is part of the reason why things are expensive to build. We will probably never be able to compete with that pay, but we could help by making the railways a good place to work. The problem now is the fragmented, privatised culture and idiot political bosses mean that they aren't that good place to work any more. For example, most of the good pension schemes that kept people around have gone.
Cameron = Caligula
May = Claudius
Johnson = Nero
Truss = Galba
Sunak = Otho
^ Overly kind to Theresa May, but a fairly reasonable fit.
Next up, we have Vitellius for about 5 minutes, followed by the highly competent Vespasian for a decade of recovery and progress.
Don't ask what happened to Vitellius. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Vitellius*.html
why has phase 1 costs gone up? Significant costs have been added due changes from increased levels of tunnelling and cutting to take the visual impact down as a result of so much pressure to avoid this wood, don’t spoil that view, and avoid the political implications of the train running though someone’s garden in the Chilterns. Building a straight flat line at ground level is a shit load cheaper than an up and down curvy route around protected trees and newts. Also there is a lot of bs flying around as to who was pricing what.
Costs have also gone up from consultants costs. The genius (sic) in government decided to set up HS2 as a lean organisation. One which has no inherent capacity or capability and therefore needed to outsource its work to consulting organisations who are making a profit.
Arguably they are not to blame for construction inflation which has soared post Covid- it’s higher than CPI. I say arguably.
As many have said, the original case was all about capacity and miss sold to the public under the high speed moniker. I do wonder how the post Covid working from home culture we now have had influenced the underlying business case but it’s probably way too early for any empirical data.
in conclusion- nothing but politics from all parties as iirc it previously enjoyed cross party support?
We cannot replace each car one-for-one with an EV, too expensive, not enough lithium etc etc.
We therefore must increase availability of public transport for journeys over five miles, or fundamentally restrict people's freedom to move with capacity issues.
We therefore need more fucking trains.
The cross-party consensus was based on this simple logic, like all of Rishi's recent nonsense, he's just desperate to try and get some idiot somewhere to vote for the worst government in living memory.
Also...
Yup.
Also of course, as Private Eye has reported, HS2 was never properly costed before it was announced as Gordon Brown was desperate to announce something positive in a context of nothing but bad economic news.
That he could have probably just avoided calling an old woman a bigot and kept a tiny majority and avoided austerity altogether... ah fuck it.