O/T HS 2.

Just to let you know TT....nothing that the StopHs2 Campaign has ever printed has turned out to be incorrect.
As to the South Yorkshire stop, the stuff your reading is now out of date, the idea of it died completely in 2016 when Sheffield City Council decided to campaign against Hs2's preferred option of Meadowhall, Hs2 Ltd knew then that the costs were spiralling out of control and cutting a SY 'Parkway ' station option would save a third of a billion pounds.
The options they floated ( purely to keep it's pretence of benefits to SY alive ) Bramley, Mexborough and Hemsworth were little more than red herrings...Bramley is too close to the previous stop...Hemsworth is too close to Leeds and the line through Mexborough stands on 20 metre high viaduct....I can tell you little that Hs2 Ltd say is true...as an example, the then Chair of Hs2, Sir David Higgins told Parliament that they had chosen the 'New' route because it incurred fewer demolitions ( 16 in Mexborough) than the Meadowhall route they compared it to. What he didn't say was that 16 was only the number directly under a rail and actually did their calculation on the basis that if that cut through a block of houses on a 60 foot viaduct, only those under the line would count as demolitions...the true figure as Hs2 engineers told us privately would be 200 plus...the second part to this deception is that 'our' route wasnt compared to the actual Meadowhall route they had proposed...Higgins compared it to a 'revised Meadowhall route'....one that they refused to give details on, effectively a phantom route that we could not scrutinise.

 

These things are supposed to be factored in....it's called The Cost/Benefit ratio.
At the admitted figures of 2016(£39 billion) it met the test, at the £56 billion admitted to by HS2's new Chairman a year later, the test was neutral, the next Chairman admitted to £88 billion and it failed the test...the latest figure, that they haven't yet admitted to is north of £106 billion and the Cost/Benefit ratio is seriously in the negative.
The truth is that so far they have just made it up as they've gone along.

 

Agree with posts about opening up closed railways. The Peak District national park has an excellent railway route that could be opened back up. however, they won't upset the ramblers and cyclists. The old line to Leeds via Methley could have been opened back up. Agree about the Woodhead route and the track beds in a lot of these lines still exist. Even in Pontefract there used to be a line linking Baghill (nearer the town centre) with Monkhill. I'd much rather commute to Leeds from Baghill than Monkhill.

There are spurs at South Kirkby, Mexborough and Meadowhall that could readily be re-opened that would link Barnsley with Doncaster and Hull again without having to change trains.

 

Now this would be a good idea. Barnsley to Doncaster hosts a whole lot of possibilities. It takes nearly an hour to get to Doncaster now by bus, and look at the other options to get to London too.

 

The track bed is still there behind Meadowhall. The railway bridge is still there next to the Travelodge.

 

Wrongly or rightly, the Excel maths stop projects like this. I just wish someone would run with it on "gut instinct" - same for the Woodhead line.
Also, surely an hour from Sheffield to Manchester isn't right. That must be possible in half that time (on the current line) on less crowded trains.

 

What's worse is it's an hourly service along that route. It's only the Cleethorpes to Manchester train that stops at Sheffield. All the other Trans-pennine routes go via Leeds.

 

The simple truth is that any other project (or series of projects) for comparably increasing capacity on Britain's railways would cost more, take longer and involve a lot more disruption for everybody than HS2. And that capacity is desperately needed, and has been for years. The best time to build HS2 would have been 25 years ago, before the catastrophic West Coast Mainline upgrade, but seeing as we missed that boat it's vitally important that it gets done as soon as possible.

I agree that local transport needs investment as well. But that shouldn't be at the expense of HS2 - for one thing, it's the first step to delivering a lot of these new and improved services on classic lines. Because it's all about capacity.

 

Now that is a dead cat. Depths of over 300m in the Beaufort Dyke, along with 1.5 *million* tons of WW2 munitions, nerve gas, and a couple of tons of radioactive waste thrown in for good measure - and even then the weather would cause major problems for six months of the year.

 

I don't get why loop lines can't be installed. Between Barnsley and Meadowhall the fast train to Lincoln regularly gets stuck behind the Huddersfield/Sheffield stopper or Leeds/Sheffield stopper.

 

Incorrect. TPE runs Cleethorpes to Manchester Airport, Northern run Sheffield -> Manchester, and East Midland run Liverpool -> Nottingham along that route. Unfortunately two of them leave Piccadilly within about 2-3 minutes of each other.

 

Cheers.

 

I can see this ending up going from Birmingham to Leeds via Manchester - cutting out the entire eastern arm.

 

A waste of money for a country/ nation as small as ours, dont see the sense in it whatsoever,how much time will it save people, 10 mins ?

 

It's not so much about the time it saves, but allowing further capacity for more local/stopper trains on the existing lines.

 

Someone sent me this which has some good points ....

 

To balance that view ... Mr Pie

 

Seems a waste of money to me, but then it's cheaper than Brexit so who knows.

 

Indeed. HS2 isn't really about new services at all. It might be best seen as a way of getting the fast intercities out of the way and onto their own lines, freeing up capacity on the current network.

 

1, I'm still convinced it will get no further than Birmingham.
2, The distances involved are too short to make significant time savings.
3, Most people will only want to go to London occasionally (if ever) but want infrastructure to travel more locally between cities east to west, local airports (try to get from Barnsley to Manchester airport by train for an early morning flight!).
4, The estimated cost has tripled before it's even started.
5, The cost of tickets to travel on it will be far more expensive than the normal intercity service (already too expensive for most) so people will still use the normal service while the better off and expense accounts will be using HS2.
6, By the time it is built it will be obsolete....should have been built in the 80's. Land was obviously cheaper but while all the industries were being closed down, there would have been a plentiful supply of labour and it would have boosted the economy when it was most needed in the North.

That's before considering environmental side of it.

Oh, and 7, I'm still convinced it will get no further than Birmingham (see point 4 )