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Could HS2 represent an opportunity to recapture the pioneering spirirt of our Victorian forebears?
Last week I had the pleasure of visiting York’s celebrated National Railway museum for the first time. At least, I’d expected it to be a pleasure. But much as I enjoyed my romp through rail’s golden age, I came away feeling slightly glum.
Inspiring and impressive though much of the museum’s collection is, it’s also a sobering reminder of the startling 20th century decline of Britain’s train manufacturing industry: the names on its engines a roll-call of long gone engineering giants, the hulking curves of trains likes Nigel Gresley’s Mallard hinting at an exhilarating future that never quite came to pass. The journey back down south — aboard a cramped, delayed intercity train with a malfunctioning toilet — did little to lighten my mood. No wonder the beady-eyed enthusiast I got chatting to in the queue for the museum insisted on getting the coach everywhere.
Now I’m not advocating a return to the steam age, and it would be ridiculous to claim that UK rail travel hasn’t evolved in the past century. In many ways there has been astonishing technical progress, and the industry’s ability to run around 24,000 trains a day on a network that’s been in place for over a hundred years points to engineering know-how every bit as impressive as that displayed by the Victorians. But the gulf between the bold, pioneering spirit of the UK’s early rail industry, and a sector which these days tends to focus on improvements got me thinking again about HS2.
As we’ve written before, there are major question marks over the potential cost of the project and the degree to which its become a political football. There are legitimate arguments over whether the money would be better spent on improvements to the existing network, and industry hasn’t done a particularly good job of putting forward the case for the network.
But despite all of these misgivings HS2 is, at the very least, a project consistent in spirit with the ambition and innovation the drove forward the golden age of rail. It’s big, it’s bold, it’s new, and its a vote of confidence in the future.
It’s also arguably far less risky than the great developments of the past. For whilst the enterprising Victorian pioneers of British rail travel had little idea of the eventual impact of what they were building, and would have snorted with disdain at the prospect of a cost benefit analysis, HS2 has been relatively carefully thought through.
We hear a lot – from readers, the general media, and the wider public – that UK industry has lost something, that it needs to recapture the pioneering spirit of our Victorian ancestors – Perhaps HS2 is an opportunity to do just that.
If HS2 goes ahead we’ll give all the big contracts to the Germans and Japanese. UK industry will pick up the scraps. Look at the German boring machine on cross-link, or all the European components on the Type 45 destroyers, or the French input into the new nuclear power plants.
In a world that is now well and truly connected (electronically), in the context of intermediate communities, the HS2 project is definitely not. As the article states, ‘HS2 has been RELATIVELY carefully through through. Only relatively? If those who only thought it through relatively carefully were big enough to admit its many flaws, they would start again and revive the Great Central Line, and cut the cost from £50 billion and rising to an estimated £7 billion — and get the line in service perhaps a decade or more sooner that HS2 (for which the Manchester-London first class return fare is reported by be circa £550). Have they not hear of Skype?
Agree with Martin, we no longer have the manufactruing capability to produce the hardware, just look at the London Eye for goodness sake – built in Italy !
Dear me – all this talk of boring german machinery is depressing, and no reason not to move forward with HS2. If we spent less time debating / listening to the nimbies and anti-everything brigade, we would have had HS2 and more 20 years ago like the rest of Europe did. And we would still have had the UK industry to take the lion’s share of the work. Stop debating, get building.
I agree with Steve! The anti-everything brigade were against nuclear plants until they woke up to global warming. They are against GM food (it doesn’t seem to be doing the Americans any harm) Heathrow is at saturation point and know they are looking to abandon HS2. All this standing still and maintaining the status quo just means as a country we will be left behind. How long will it be before India and China are sending us international aid and food parcels? Luddites just about sums them up.
As long as we as a society
deal with our disputes in an adversarial as opposed to an inquisitorial manner (we are now alone in Europe in doing so, and only those nations (in the rest of the world with the misfortune to have been initially ’empired’ by us) retain our apparently outstanding and fair and just and untainted shall I go on? adversarial system…
all we do is provide highly (that is not enough -indecently) paid work? for five sets of sham-professionals…who’s livelihoods depend on the conflict, not its outcome. They have cleverly insulated themselves completely from both capitalism (including market forces) and democracy and can increase their earnings the longer they take and the more complicated they make any and every matter.
Change that and who knows, our economy might start to recover. Leave it in place (turkeys (like lawyers) have never voted for an early Christmas ( anything that might represent a reduction in their earnings) and nothing will alter. Why should it? It suits far too many to keep it that way.
I read this week that nearly 10% of the entire NHS budget is now given over to dealing with litigation and the millions of sham insurance claims for ‘injury’ in minor accidents cost us each £200 pa in increased praemiums! I wonder who benefits from that?
Yes, we should be thinking of the future. To my mind this means the next step beyond HS2. If we develop the next generation mass transit system then we stand a chance of selling it to the world, rather than be consumers of other countries products.
Will it solve the problem of youth unemployment? It sounds like it has the potential to do so but I suspect that isn’t even on the agenda.
If there is so much money to invest I think we should straighten the twisty roads incorporating cycle tracks/pavements.
The comparison with the pioneers of the Victorian age is simply ridiculous. In those times we were pioneering, and pushing the frontiers of engineering and construction. HS2 is hardly that.
With this project, we will be following, not leading in a desperate attempt to catch up. As has already been pointed out, the rest of Europe is already there.
“Galathumpian” wrote:-“The comparison with the pioneers of the Victorian age is simply ridiculous.”
Far from it. At the beginning of the railway age there were many protests about new projects. The Liverpool and Manchester railway suffered demonstrations. There were major objections from the turnpike and canal operators to many other projects. Railways had actually existed in diffferent forms since at least the 16th century (the word “tramway” actually refers to trams, being wooden planks which formed early rails. German mines were some of the first users). Early railways would have been seen as a small, incremental step from industrial plateways (Guess where the word “Platelayer” comes from?).
The trouble with frontiers is that they are only evident to those not directly involved via the application of hindsight.
HS2 is actually a pretty significant railway development at least as significant as many 19th century railway projects so I am with Ken and Steve. Get on with it!
Three words – vacuum tube train, look it up starting with et3.com this is within our engineering means – let’s do something ground breaking!
Too much of what has been said on BOTH sides of the argument concentrates on MINOR, NON-ISSUES.
The real impact of HS2 isn’t the Speed, that just grabs the Headlines. the Real issue is the increase in CAPACITY.
There is NO viable alternative. You cannot build a VAST Motorway network to carry anywhere near as many people and Air Travel is a NON-Starter !! So it HAS to be Rail and the existing Infra- Structure is NOT UP TO IT !!
As for Cost if we worried about THAT all the time NOTHING would ever get done !!
OK SOME people would LIKE THAT !!
But if you want your Grandchildren to have JOBS wake up NOW !!
HS2 is far less useful than a resurrected GCR would be. HS2 is for more expensive too.
The difference could fund a lot of other rail and road improvements.
It seems to me to be ridiculous building something that is going to serve no useful purpose. An expensive train line with no stations, only to be of benefit for the very few. We should not compare ourselves to France, Spain and Germany, their geography is very different and their high speed rails have stations.
If this were characteristic of the Victorian Age then the UK would be designing and making machinery for its construction and use.
In addition if it was talking note of the greats, sych as Paxton and Mr Stephenson it would be cheaper and faster to build to boot!!
(whatever one might think of the merits of HS2 itself).
Similar things could be said, also, about nuclear reactors too.
In fact it was the build of Crystal Palace (by Paxton) that made it a star attraction and fired the appreciation of the public. Sad to say I do not think this will be the case.
HS2 is a nightmare – a disaster greater even than Crossrail. What the UK desperately needs, in this order of priority, is a new Blackwall road tunnel, four tracking of the line north of Kings Cross, and south of Birmingham, and a two track new surface line linking Waterloo International with Kings Cross-St Pancras, via Russell Square, above the road, and a third runway at Heathrow.. Then let’s think about the real benefits of getting to Birmingham 20 minutes quicker, or rather the outskirts, and then trek to the centre.
HS2 is a ghastly, delusional project devised by the ugly mafia of Big Construction, and mega project-loving politicians.
HS1 had 40 per cent fewer passengers than predicted and will not makeva profit for 40 years..
Why even contemplate HS2??
The state of the British railway manufacturing (and other) industry is another example of permitting control by the money counters who know not what they do. The majority know nothing about industry and persist with short term thinking their control and that by procrastinating, lily livered politicians scared of their own shadow. Is it too late to fix? Yes unless there is a complete change of management and political will. We must also not forget the problems created by the unions.
I note the increasingly disperate (& desperate?) reasons being given by proponents of HS2 to go ahead. These alone make me deeply suspicious that infrastructure improvement is not the primary driver behind this deeply flawed proposal.
It has all the similarities of the Channel Tunnel, which has been and always will be, a financial disaster. £billions overspent, and years late.
If we are looking at HS2 as a significant development of engineering, why are we still looking at a wheeled system on rails? That may have been good enough for the Stockton-Darlington, but time and our capabilities have moved on. All of the technical problems raised by fast wheel friction on I-beam rails can be removed. Eric Postlethwaite showed us the future many years ago with linear motors, particularly where we are looking at a simple A to B solution such as HS2. Japan has showed that it can implement our engineering ideas, it’s time to take them back!
“Japan has showed that it can implement our engineering ideas, it’s time to take them back”.
There’s a lot to take back. And they don’t just copy them, They improve on them. But they turn out about 5 times more graduate engineers, proper ones, each year than we do. And they know how to use and pay them.
Stop messing about revive the Great Central Line.
It would be great to keep the contract values in the UK, building on our on capabilities.
The project should not start in London. It should give the rest of the UK a leg up.
Make the connection to London the last leg to get completed. That way, it will get funded to the end if people are serious.
The vast network of Indian Rail is an indicator of the glorious past of UK rail engineers and the big dream of the then politicians
Dare to Dream, yeah OK but keep it a dream because no ones listening or even looking anymore, vision is lost to the collecting of undeserved pensions now.
I ask but one simple question. Compare HS2 to the likes of Japan’s high speed rail, both in terms of technology and cost… is HS2 value for money? Given the cost and predicted performance I am confident there are better alternatives.
I’m not against HS2, what I am against is an end product that doesn’t perform any where near the best in the world, yet is more expensive than the best in a country renowned for its engineering expertise… that is what doesn’t make any sense.