HS2-The End of the line

Well the longest running saga on  wheels has come to an end.

Way back in 2009, in the dying days of the last Labour government it was decided to spend some 37bn pounds on a massive railway infrastructure that would rival the bullet trains of Japan going at 250 mile per hour linking London, Big Bad Brum, the East Midlands, Yorkshire and Manchester feeding into a East West networking linking south Lancashire towns and the city of Manchester with West Yorkshire.

That was the sort of train that they had in mind for it.

This was the original projected full network which of necessity could not call at all local stations so it would be London, Birmingham, Crewe and Manchester and to get anywhere else on it you'd need to change but if that wasn't so great, Birmingham's Station wasn't New Street, that rabbit warren we all love to hate here in the Midlands but Curzon Street to which to get into the main business district you'd need to change so you wouldn't save any time.

Over the years the costs grew and grew and measure to reduce them such as dropping the speed and axing all the spurs reduced the real gains while estimates were around 94bn pounds in 2019 and estimates for early 2021 were put at 110bn plus.

This was before the current inflationary pressures with materials and labour and a declining market for day long conferences as the Pandemic ushered in the era of Zoom and Team meetings over the internet and the shift to Work From Home (WFH).

The world has moved on even if some of us felt at the time the full business case for it wasn't there, the capacity which is an issue on the West Coast Line could of been met by restoring the additional rails taken up to save maintenance money in the last days of British Rail for a good deal less.

Wednesday's design to scrape Hs2 from Birmingham to Crewe and on to Manchester is for me well overdue and really ought to happened in 2019 when it  was obvious the cost were substantially more than anticipated for a net loss on the public investment, not being help by modelling the route on a desk with little actual site surveying before deciding on the route.

Instead the Midland Rail Hub, the East-West lines at regular speeds across the Pennines and a mixture of schemes involving local rail, bus and tram services will be happening using  some 36bn pounds that would of been spent. 

The work already done from London to Brum will be completed as much is almost ready even if one may rather it hadn't of been started.

It's a reset for this whole connectivity scheme that lost its direction.