HS2, whats the current status ?
Discussion
StanleyT said:
Need to keep even more back for the nukes we will need to power the electric HS2 trains and for the batteries to store the energy from the windfarms when the wind dothen't blow.
Isn't Network Rail the UKs single biggest user of electricity about 20% I thought I heard? I'll be loving the day when I come home and park my Priusotoris and find a bloody Virgin Pendelinodedildo using my flats high output charging point.
1% or less - pesky facts eh?Isn't Network Rail the UKs single biggest user of electricity about 20% I thought I heard? I'll be loving the day when I come home and park my Priusotoris and find a bloody Virgin Pendelinodedildo using my flats high output charging point.
Your lights won’t be going out any time soon due to HS2....
alfaman said:
Must be having a negative effect on property market within say 1/2 mile to mile or so away ... with noise risk.
I’d consider buying in the Chilterns if / when I return to the UK ..... BUT .... not easy to figure out exactly how bad the noise and other impacts will be .... and maybe even the project gets derailed . Not conducive to punting a chunky sum into a nice house
Mate of mine bought a large house about a mile from the route and paid £700K for what he reckons would have been nudging a million in normal circumstances. He's in very small village - a hamlet really - and reckons prices have largely recovered from the earlier nervousness.I’d consider buying in the Chilterns if / when I return to the UK ..... BUT .... not easy to figure out exactly how bad the noise and other impacts will be .... and maybe even the project gets derailed . Not conducive to punting a chunky sum into a nice house
As another poster said, it's the construction he's most concerned about as it'll go on for years.
Rovinghawk said:
Earthdweller said:
it seems a huge waste of money to be able to reduce the speed at which we can move people
One would hope you mean increaseEarthdweller said:
into a massively overcrowded area ( London )
It is also possible to actually leave London- unthinkable to many but it is possible
Earthdweller said:
when we should be looking at ways to reduce people travelling unnecessarily
Some people do have to actually do something- we can't all just tippy-tap on laptops all day.lets say 4m people work in the city in such jobs, they all work remotely then the othrr support jobs i.e. retail, security, cleaning, maintaince, on site IT, etc are no longer needed. So perhaps superfast broadband would actually be better
Gecko1978 said:
Rovinghawk said:
Earthdweller said:
it seems a huge waste of money to be able to reduce the speed at which we can move people
One would hope you mean increaseEarthdweller said:
into a massively overcrowded area ( London )
It is also possible to actually leave London- unthinkable to many but it is possible
Earthdweller said:
when we should be looking at ways to reduce people travelling unnecessarily
Some people do have to actually do something- we can't all just tippy-tap on laptops all day.lets say 4m people work in the city in such jobs, they all work remotely then the othrr support jobs i.e. retail, security, cleaning, maintaince, on site IT, etc are no longer needed. So perhaps superfast broadband would actually be better
I have a client in Manchester. It's a 4-5 hour round trip by car. Nearly all of our comms is done by webex, saving us all loads of time and money.
Would also be cheaper just to move the politicians and civil servants away from London. I reckon Coventry is the ideal place
Digga said:
I think people live in blissful, cretinous ignorance of just how many actual man/vehicle trips their lives require to keep them in the style they are accustomed. Not spending on new roads now is utter madness.
I wonder how that might change as people buy more and more online. I guess a few hubs, so ore limited trunk routes, but more local deliveries?Sheepshanks said:
alfaman said:
Must be having a negative effect on property market within say 1/2 mile to mile or so away ... with noise risk.
I’d consider buying in the Chilterns if / when I return to the UK ..... BUT .... not easy to figure out exactly how bad the noise and other impacts will be .... and maybe even the project gets derailed . Not conducive to punting a chunky sum into a nice house
Mate of mine bought a large house about a mile from the route and paid £700K for what he reckons would have been nudging a million in normal circumstances. He's in very small village - a hamlet really - and reckons prices have largely recovered from the earlier nervousness.I’d consider buying in the Chilterns if / when I return to the UK ..... BUT .... not easy to figure out exactly how bad the noise and other impacts will be .... and maybe even the project gets derailed . Not conducive to punting a chunky sum into a nice house
As another poster said, it's the construction he's most concerned about as it'll go on for years.
I had a quick trawl on right move for houses near Wendover .. seems to have been some softening in the market .. but hard to tell exactly how much extra noise individual properties will get
Earthdweller said:
We are in the process of relocating from the U.K. to the west coast of Ireland, my wife works in the south east of the U.K. and will continue to do her job from home in Ireland .. which has super fast broadband .. she will fly back to the U.K. as/when necessary
Her sister, an accountant, works in New York, yet lives in the same area of Ireland
The point of the two above examples is that in this day and age it seems a huge waste of money to be able to reduce the speed at which we can move people into a massively overcrowded area ( London ) when we should be looking at ways to reduce people travelling unnecessarily
If we are going to be spending money on trains then perhaps upgrading the connectivity in the regions would be much better and relieve the demand on people needing to be in London
Same here. My company HQ is in The Hague but I work remotely from the North East. Same would be for any new role which included London. I can see commuting at a huge costs declining pretty quickly, or becoming occasional. Her sister, an accountant, works in New York, yet lives in the same area of Ireland
The point of the two above examples is that in this day and age it seems a huge waste of money to be able to reduce the speed at which we can move people into a massively overcrowded area ( London ) when we should be looking at ways to reduce people travelling unnecessarily
If we are going to be spending money on trains then perhaps upgrading the connectivity in the regions would be much better and relieve the demand on people needing to be in London
Sheepshanks said:
Digga said:
I think people live in blissful, cretinous ignorance of just how many actual man/vehicle trips their lives require to keep them in the style they are accustomed. Not spending on new roads now is utter madness.
I wonder how that might change as people buy more and more online. I guess a few hubs, so ore limited trunk routes, but more local deliveries?by one company.
The huge number of artics required every day/week to deliver them throughout the UK was staggering.
That’s just one manufacturer of one product. The mind boggles as to how many are needed to keep us all satisfied.
abzmike said:
The government are so consumed by other issues (well one issue) that there will be no appetite to revisit HS2, and the festival of finger pointing and blame that would result. Maybe in about 5 years time, when a single foot of rail has still not been laid there will be a quiet modification to the plan, but that will be after most of the current budget and more have been committed. However, someone in the project needs to come out and explain why cost per mile is 10 times that in other parts of the world - There has to be an explanation for that, and if they can't think of any, they should be told to revise their costings, because it looks like a lot of money is simply vanishing, and money never really vanishes - It all goes somewhere.
I give you the Garden Bridge project...edh said:
If you think a £100bn economic stimulus is a good idea, there are much better ways of doing it rather than wasting it on new trains to funnel more people into London.
UK-wide fibre to every house would be a good start.
Why?UK-wide fibre to every house would be a good start.
I have what I suppose is an average internet connection - about 28 Mbit down, 6 Mbit up. I can skype, videoconference, access code repositories, and watch pr0n in 4K if I really want to. Actually the whole family could watch pr0n in 4K, with different streams according to er, taste. About the only thing I can’t do is performance testing of database heavy applications, but that has more to do with latency than bandwidth.
Why do I need fibre? Most people’s WiFi can’t do a lot more than 50 Mbit anyway. I haven’t thought “gosh I need more internet bandwidth” since about 2004. Note that’s just the house connection, I have 2 phones that aren’t far off in terms of speed.
Yes, there are a small number of locations where this is not true .... but “fibre to every home” is an expensive solution looking for a problem.
rxe said:
edh said:
If you think a £100bn economic stimulus is a good idea, there are much better ways of doing it rather than wasting it on new trains to funnel more people into London.
UK-wide fibre to every house would be a good start.
Why?UK-wide fibre to every house would be a good start.
I have what I suppose is an average internet connection - about 28 Mbit down, 6 Mbit up. I can skype, videoconference, access code repositories, and watch pr0n in 4K if I really want to. Actually the whole family could watch pr0n in 4K, with different streams according to er, taste. About the only thing I can’t do is performance testing of database heavy applications, but that has more to do with latency than bandwidth.
Why do I need fibre? Most people’s WiFi can’t do a lot more than 50 Mbit anyway. I haven’t thought “gosh I need more internet bandwidth” since about 2004. Note that’s just the house connection, I have 2 phones that aren’t far off in terms of speed.
Yes, there are a small number of locations where this is not true .... but “fibre to every home” is an expensive solution looking for a problem.
garyhun said:
rxe said:
edh said:
If you think a £100bn economic stimulus is a good idea, there are much better ways of doing it rather than wasting it on new trains to funnel more people into London.
UK-wide fibre to every house would be a good start.
Why?UK-wide fibre to every house would be a good start.
I have what I suppose is an average internet connection - about 28 Mbit down, 6 Mbit up. I can skype, videoconference, access code repositories, and watch pr0n in 4K if I really want to. Actually the whole family could watch pr0n in 4K, with different streams according to er, taste. About the only thing I can’t do is performance testing of database heavy applications, but that has more to do with latency than bandwidth.
Why do I need fibre? Most people’s WiFi can’t do a lot more than 50 Mbit anyway. I haven’t thought “gosh I need more internet bandwidth” since about 2004. Note that’s just the house connection, I have 2 phones that aren’t far off in terms of speed.
Yes, there are a small number of locations where this is not true .... but “fibre to every home” is an expensive solution looking for a problem.
I'm not sure how giving everyone faster internet would be an economic stimulus? Most of the cash on hardware would be spent overseas and the holes needing digging are relatively small. Once finished everyone can then spend money in China more easily.
On the other hand a train set could be built in this country (if we have any steel mills left by then) with bigger holes etc providing much more employment here. Once finished everyone can then go somewhere (not necessarily for work/communting) and spend money in this country more easily.
garyhun said:
Sheepshanks said:
Digga said:
I think people live in blissful, cretinous ignorance of just how many actual man/vehicle trips their lives require to keep them in the style they are accustomed. Not spending on new roads now is utter madness.
I wonder how that might change as people buy more and more online. I guess a few hubs, so ore limited trunk routes, but more local deliveries?by one company.
The huge number of artics required every day/week to deliver them throughout the UK was staggering.
That’s just one manufacturer of one product. The mind boggles as to how many are needed to keep us all satisfied.
alfaman said:
where abouts is that - in the Chilterns ?( between Amersham and Wendover ) - or further out ?
I had a quick trawl on right move for houses near Wendover .. seems to have been some softening in the market .. but hard to tell exactly how much extra noise individual properties will get
He's further up - in a line between Bicester and Buckingham, nearer to Buckingham. IIRC he's to the east of the line, which I think is a bad thing.I had a quick trawl on right move for houses near Wendover .. seems to have been some softening in the market .. but hard to tell exactly how much extra noise individual properties will get
Sheepshanks said:
Digga said:
If you talk to people involved in logistics, the UK's manufacturing and retail is but a couple of major road incidents away from falling over completely. It is frightening.
There were near riots when DHL couldn't deliver chicken recently.anonymous said:
[redacted]
Passenger railways are just yesterday's technology/thinking.Dieter Helm made a good point on radio 4's analysis programme regarding the timetable shambles on the railway. National Express could change their timetable on a weekly basis because each bus is independant it can stop and go to virtually any other point on the road network.
Now obviously the high speed network will be much simpler to timetable on but still you are stuck with whatever route the original planners decided was best. It's all so very last century.
Trains are so slow in terms of technical development and effectively operate as a monopoly with few incentives to make things better. As an example:
The phone signal in post 2000 trains is actually worse because even in 2003 it wasn't on the radar of train designers to not fit trains with metallic coatings in the windows that block mobile phone signals!
It took till 2013 for them to even start thinking about installing signal booster and Siemens only recently invented a window transparent to mobile phone signals.
Tesla rolled out a creep function for their car less than a week after they started working on it!
Passenger railways outside the most densely populated areas are going to be killed by the combination of exponential tech in batteries, electric vehicles, sensors and automation.
It would be perfectly possible today to design an electric bus that could go from London to Birmingham at 150mph on a single charge, in 10 years that bus could be flying either literally or figuratively.
But rather than invest the odd billion in transformative technology we are going to spend tens of billions on a railway which will open just as it starts looking really obsolete. Maybe we can use it for freight.
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