To ask who benefits from HS2?

[Rosehip345]

And if you do benefit, how?

My husband works in the rail industry and my understanding is that one of the benefits is that the HS2 line will take passengers, and that the old lines will then be able to accommodate a lot more freight, taking a great deal of traffic off the roads. So that would presumably be a (long term) positive environmental impact. He probably has told me a lot more about why it’s a good thing, but I tend to zone out when he talks about trains.

He did say that what this country lacks is a joined up overall plan covering all forms of transport, so government can consider how developments can be of most benefit.

Nobody in the South West because we don't exist as far as Government is concerned.

HS2 will be going right through my town. A few streets are going to be demolished to make way for it. The owners of the houses have been offered less money than what their homes are actually worth.

The traffic is going to be bloody awful while it's being built, as is the noise from the construction.

There is already a train service here that gets to St Pancras in 90 minutes (east midlands).

I'm dreading the whole thing.

The speed isn't the real benefit. Capacity is. I routinely travel from the north to London. The trains are rammed with people regularly standing. They are also fairly full at many off peak times as well and I have noticed this over the last few years.

Clearly a factor is the London pull but the demand isn't decreasing and this line needs building in MHO.

And I'm a person who is often cynical about government spending. My worry was and is being proved is that the gov is rubbish at procurement and large projects so they nearly always overrun in cost and time

It's making a mess of the roads where I live.

People have had to sell their homes.

Wildlife and trees have been destroyed.

For the sake of 7 minutes saved.

It is a stupid vanity project.Firstly,privatisation is madness because railways succeed by concentration not dispersal (Gerry Fiennes).
They should never have closed the Marylebone to Sheffield line (Great Central) or the Woodhead route.All this was done by Marples who had to flee the country to avoid prison.HS2 virtually parallels the GC,indeed uses part of the old trackbed.
The money (far less would be spent) on reinstating the GC to Leicester and deciding on the route northwards.Reopen the Woodhead route and rebuild the inland route to Cornwall avoiding Dawlish where a train was recently damaged by waves.
Upgrade the Midland Main Line and further upgrade the Marylebone to Birmingham route via Ayhno Junction.
I am a retired railwayman,having worked in operation,traffic control and finally as a driver so I think I know what I am talking about !

Capacity is the big benefit. Rail passenger numbers have gone up and up without any matching capacity increase in the train system.

HS2 would put high-speed trains on the their own track, which then frees up space on the existing lines.

This means that smaller stations benefit, because there’d be more capacity for more trains to actually stop and to serve other local/regional stations

It means environmental benefits by getting more people and more freight onto the rail lines and off the roads.

It means more reliable services because of fewer congested bottlenecks

It means we COULD, potentially, reopen more closed lines (like the Borders railway), which at the moment we can’t even if everyone wanted to because there’s not enough capacity on the lines that those closed lines join.

The alternative to HS2 would be upgrading three existing lines - more track, extend stations, rebuild junctions and so on, all the way up. This would be more expensive (yes even more expensive than HS2), more disruptive, and more environmentally destructive because you can’t plan the line route like we can with HS2.

I was against HS2 when I thought it was just about getting to London faster but the capacity argument has definitely won me over.

Do you think anyone was worrying about the cost when they built the railways we use today? We're still getting benefit out of those over 100 years after they were built - do you really think that was included in the business case at the time?

Yes, of course they would have been. They were entrepreneurs, they would only have done it if they thought it would make money for them.
It would have been easier to make money from it though as land was cheaper and labour was much cheaper and the technology much more simple.

It’s a Chinese money laundering project.
(At the expense of our countryside )

No benefits whatsoever where I am. The line is cutting straight through behind our house (but about a metre out of any financial compensation), straight through woods with protected species' traight through the grounds of a listed building and then through green belt farm land. It also cuts through the two main roads of our village which are already completely congested as they're used as a cut through to the East Lancs road. (I wont even go into the 100s of new houses being thrown up around here despite there being NO local places at school, doctors, dentists.)

These threads are always emotional and devoid of fact. The journey time between Leeds and Manchester is going from 2 to 1 hours. The journey time between Manchester and Birmingham is also being halved. It will also free up space on nearby lines. It's created many construction jobs and will have created 100,000 jobs by the time it's finished. It will arguably encourage more rail travel over air and car which will be good for the environment. Overcrowding on the railway is increasing (8% increase per year) so we need to invest in rail in one way or another so without HS2 we'd be spending billion on an alternative project.

Whether this particular project is the best investment as compared to alternative projects is debatable and a subtle argument. However a lot of the points made here are ridiculous and ill informed - we absolutely have to invest hugely in rail and naturally it has to involve London as it's our economic capital and funding the rest of the country.

Tatty a lot of people lost a lot of money investing in railways back in the 19th century. And different companies built competing lines, resulting in eg Guilford havibg 3 stations, and the spaghetti that is the railways in south London.

@CripsSandwiches HS2 will have no positive impact on the abysmal Preston - Manchester line. There are no plans to improve rails services in Lancashire, so how can we benefit from HS2

@CurbsideProphet

Obviously not every single person will personally benefit from HS2 but given that there will be less pressure on local lines many people who won't travel on HS2 will benefit (aside from the economic boost to the area). It's unclear whether HS2 is the best investment for that money but the claims from lots of posters that there are no benefits to anyone, it's just to give a few commuters a few extra minutes in bed etc are ridiculous.Expert opinion is divided on whether the money could have been used more efficiently and it's fairly clear that the Government have been optimistic to say the least in projecting the benefits. However we do need to update our rail service, we need a faster service between major cities and we need a huge investment in general. Yes you can argue about how exactly we do this and HS2 may not be optimal but the criticisms levelled here are naive to the point of being infantile.

I wouldn't have thought concerns about ancient woodland were infantile

On which local lines will pressure be relieved? I do not have children,so I am not as concerned as those who do,but if we keep on destroying the natural environment then one day we will have destroyed ourselves.Brazil and Indonesia are doing that very well at the moment,we should not add our two pennorth.The Great Central was built as a high speed line with very gentle curves.Virtually all the trackbed and formation is still extant to Leicester so all that needs doing is clearing the vegetation,putting up the signals and overhead wires,laying the track and running the trains.Similarly the Woodhead route,a major East-West artery for the "Northern powerhouse".BR was as bad as it was because it was starved of investment.I am not familiar with how much extra traffic the MML and Marylebone to Brum can take but I am sure there are many paths available.MML is 4 track for a long distance and bi directional where it is 2 track.( I have driven trains on it).The M to B route was 4 track at the northern end (watch the video "Lets go to Birmingham" on youtube.

There are few spare paths out of Marylebone, the Woodhead tunnels now contain part of the National Grid, the southern MML is very busy now thanks to Thameslink. Bits of the GCR have been built on. Then there's Stockport which has no spare paths, New Street which is just plain dire and the WCML south of Rugby which is also full. The GCR is of little use for Birmingham traffic and even Manchester is the long way around. As for Scotland, forget it.

Please can someone clarify if London DOES subsidise the rest of the country? What? Really?
No it doesn’t. It is trotted out as a feeble attempt to excuse the fact that London receives a vastly disproportionate amount of public spending, even allowing for its wealth.

@CripsSandwiches the journey time between Leeds and Manchester was 57 minutes when I got it last week.

Move the power cables to the original tunnels.As I said before ,the original GC route is good to just south of Leicester,after that,new route to Birmingham,not impossible.Leicester to Burton on Trent has been looked at for reopening.