Will HS2 Fail or Succeed?

These kinds of projects are always sold to the government based on wildly optimistic costs and timescales, which will never be met.  If the people planning the project had submitted realistic figures, HS2 would never have started, and the people planning it would have been out of a job.


While HS2 may be popular and successful once it's finished, we may never know the lost opportunity of what else could have been done with the money instead.

How odd that no report has been published on the cost of a day return by anyone using it ,?

Day returns?  Weekend returns?  Mid-week returns?  Remember them?


Time was when ticket prices were published and stable. One knew in advance just how much a train journey would cost.


Nowadays it is a case of pick the time and find the price offered. It makes no difference whether you buy your ticket on-line or go to the ticket office and buy it from a real person. You can't even be sure of the route you will take for your journey. Example: Hampshire to Cambridgeshire. Via Waterloo and King's Cross? Or via Paddington and King's Cross? The system seems to find the less-busy routes and offer cheaper fares to suite. Maybe not a bad thing!


But if one can't predict the price of a rail ticket, one can hardly expect the predict the price of a massive project like HS2.

£106bn (and will rise) for a few hundred Km of slightly updated 20th century mode of travel with massive negative environmental and social impact along its construction route for a few minutes faster travel (in theory) between a few cities. Logically it should never have been started, logically it should have been killed off last year, but this white elephant vanity project now has a 'get it done at any cost plus price', political pet project life of its own.

It's not really being built to shave a few minutes off intercity journeys.  The real problem is that (until very recently), more and more people have been using rail travel.

Running commuter trains that stop at every station, and high speed intercity trains, on the same line gets unworkable once the traffic gets too dense.  The real point of HS2 is to provide a new line for the fast trains, leaving the commuter trains to rattle and creep along the existing line.

But we already have direct mobility routes between the cities we want to connect with HS2 - they are called motorways.


If we are only doing city to city stops and connections, why not put high speed raised rail or maglev lines along the central reservation over the motorways instead of carving up the countryside and forcing people to move for more ground-based railway lines - use and leverage the £bns of investment in our extant mobility infrastructure we already have? These 'sky rail' routes could have intermediate stops at strategic points if necessary too. Why not use individual carriages or strings of carriages sized for traffic at different times of day or 'demand driven' train sizes, instead of running big trains no matter the number of passengers. Add and remove carriages along the way the match demand - like a cable car system at ski resorts. Similar concept to the hyperloop picture in the attached - https://www.alphr.com/the-future/1008177/hyperloop-overhyped-underlooped 


Are we not supposedly an innovating technology and world leading nation that invented passenger and cargo railways, iron bridges, metal passenger ships, aircraft and jet engine and jet airliners, hovercraft, cats eyes, maglev trains (not forgetting telephony, TV, radar, et al). We're now a nation of sustainable mobility technology followers and late-comers, no longer innovators, first movers and leaders in sustainable mobility, very sad.

Hi Maurice I don't know about the UK being poor at major innovation , the problem is I think not so much that  we arnt innovative , more a case we don't have the sorts of engineers and mind set that can make up its mind what works , and so all the bad ideas and speculators get the funding and favour. I am sympathetic to where no one could think beyond a certain horizon , I mean some people cant quite grasp some ideas and we have a whole new frontier in getting environmental thinking right and at the moment places like the IET don't do biology and earths natural life systems. I think with HS2 it was marginal from the start and well over a billion has gone on it already. To go really fast on 120km of line , is a pretty unusual thing to start from , I mean going really fast between 500km nodes really could produce some economic uplift , but then you need to think about what other aspects you can get from your railway, and HS2 has been pretty clear on how it will work , with heritage stock or adaptability , it is a high speed rail adventure in all its design aspects .

Ticketing is as you say , if you look around you can see good offers , to fill the spaces around higher usage volumes , so what is being said about HS2 is that it will have revenues other than regular commuting , which is where the case gets really shaky. your right also on the effect it could have on the rest of the rail network in terms of investment , and that old infrastructure will need replacing . It just saddens me that the correct arguments are not being heard and were all going to paying our taxes to something that could fail very badly in revenue terms and people transported , I mean were all ready at the levels where it will need subsidy when operational , and at least the big spend of the channel tunnel managed to keep revenues. which even the plump expenses of the Birmingham to London business user isn't really there and it only gets more expensive from Birmingham onwards . despite the excellent and confident maps of the routes. It will be a tragedy in my view how it works out and big bill for future tax payers and given its a shareholder venture they get any profits first .

The reason why we don't have all the innovation is that it makes things more complex, more expensive and less reliable.  An electric train sitting on two rails in nice and simple, and it works.  People have tries monorails, maglev trains and the like.  They have either been abandoned or kept as curiosities running along short lines.


Running a train system is difficult and complex.  Adding and subtracting carriages throughout the day adds complexity and slows things down.  Running the same length train back and forth along the same line all day is simpler and quicker.  I have been on trains that split in half at some point along the journey.  Apart from the risk that passengers will end up in the wrong half of the train, there is always a delay as the two halves of the train are uncoupled.  And then you need to organise a driver for each half, because you can't just abandon carriages in the middle of the track.


Running trains in motorway central reservations isn't going to work.  Most aren't wide enough for two trains to pass, and nobody wants a single-track line these days.  Motorways don't go through towns, they go around them.  So the train will have to peel away from the motorways to visit towns.  And every time a vehicle hits teh central reservation, you're going to have to cancel every train until a structural engineer has attended to assess the damage.  It's so much easier to run the line parallel to teh motorway.


Never forget the KISS principle.

perhaps you want the opposite - trains you can park your car on while it moves much faster than 70mph, and perhaps gets charged at the same time too.

So the government has approved a £106bn ++++ cost plus 'whatever it costs' historical railway project that hasn't yet set its ticket rates, does know its engineering costs, therefore, has no idea if it will ever be cost effective, whilst delivering 20 year out of date railway technology whilst the world moves today to future mass mobility technology such as mono-rail, hyper loop, maglev and the UK gets burned with unreliable trains that will still be delayed by the wrong leaves, snow, rain, sunshine on the lines. Completely bonkers.