An increased total bill, overcrowding on the Elizabeth line, construction sites and their disruption to last several more years, and further reduction in the project’s scope. Well done Tories, you’ve done it again.
Cooking the books short term more important than building national infrastructure
So why delay the project, Mark? To stick the bill on the next government
In news that surprised no one.
They may as well publish a headline saying he admits the sun will rise tomorrow. It was blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain cell that the ‘delays save money’ argument was bollocks.
I would commit unspeakable crimes to get HS2 restored in full…
Unspeakable crimes…
Just get on with it and build the bloody thing for heaven’s sake. The benefits are known (no, it isn’t about getting to Birmingham faster it is about freeing up train paths on the west coast mainline) and it will only get more expensive with every delay or change.
Just about everybody else knew this already. What took Harper so long?
What happens to all the knocked down homes, office buildings, and construction site, including the £1bn+ spent at Euston? The area is a building site.
This seems incredibly short sighted.
Is the only central London interchange going to be with the Elizabeth Line???? It’s already the UK’s busiest railway line!
This is the new game… destroy and disrupt as much as you can and then attack the new guys when they get elected: “look at the mess you made! This has nothing to do with our incompetence”.
It’ll all be worth it, in 20 or 25 years from now, when we can get on a train 20 miles outside London and get to Birmingham 15 minutes faster that before, and it’ll only have costed 150 billion pounds. Or 200 probably by the time it’s done.
Meanwhile, local authorities continue to ransom HS2 by saddling it with paying for blatant betterment – which they should be funding themselves.
How is it that both Spain and Italy, who had to contend with mountains, rivers, and literal deserts have multiple HS lines, but the UK can’t even manage to connect two cities through mostly flat terrain?
Damn: the Japanese had to dug many miles just to get in and out of damn Tokyo! But you can’t even get out of Birmingham, which would just use the tracking bed of the WCML!
I mean: even in the Benelux they had to dig underneath Schiphol, and go through Rotterdam and Antwerpen! And they did, in under 6 years!
But for some reason, HS2 Ltd. Is so incompetent it needs 20 years to buildtje whole thing, it has people like Bill Cash and Michael Fabricant bashing it every chance they get, and the whole thing has been watered down, with cancelling NPR. Honestly, high speed is so abysmal that you ought to kick out the builders and replace them by Thalys, AVE, and NTV. You know? The companies that actually know how to run one.
Now excuse me, my 2h train from Madrid to Barcelona is coming in. I might take it twice. Will still be faster than the trip between London and Manchester. The Queen knows if Avanti is even running today.
The Elizabeth line is so good, hence so fucking packed. Should be the new standard. UK needs to spend like a Trillion on infrastructure and will set them up for the next 50 years, but ofc 50% of that would go to delays and Tory bribers
There’s something wrong when Japan can build a maglev extension 4 times longer then HS2 for 70 billion and HS2 has already cost 120 billion and nothing is finished.
I mean, did anyone honestly think the delays would save money?
Next up: “HS2 delays will cost money. We knew this all along and were quite open and honest about this”
of course… and the cheap interest money days are over as well. Screwed up by not building infrastructure while the money was cheap.
Regardless of what people think about it, just building it on time and to its full length would have been many many times better than this horseshit strategy.
This is classic Conservative Government. “We want to look good, but we don’t want to pay for it” so they find a way to cut back while still trying to spin their way to being the good guy in the situation. Short term money decisions having long term affects. The whole “this won’t be my problem in x years” strategy.
Add it to the pile of other things they’ve pulled the money plug on.
Doesn’t help we’ve had 5 different Prime Minsters, 5 different Cabinets in 7 years.
About time the government bit the bullet and bin ed this project off. It’s a failure it’s cost billions and it helps a tiny percentage of the country while most of the country is played by terrible infrastructure.
I live in the south west and work 5 miles from my home. I HAVE to drive. If I wanted to use public transport i would have to take 3 + busses and go all the way into the nearest city and then out again turning a 5 mile journey into an approximately 25 mile journey. It’s disgraceful.
Colour me surprised. Back in October, they wasted £105m in one foul swoop by declaring that the redesigned Euston Station should have 10 platforms rather than 11 so it could be built in a single stage, thus having to send the design back to the drawing board; while the time spent redesigning the station would further delay its opening, so as a result, if the tunnels were built to schedule, they’d be approaching an incomplete station (added onto which, I wouldn’t be surprised if the redesign also necessitates redesigning the approaches).
Meanwhile, there are apparently also delays to the project beyond Crewe – so what’s the betting they’ll later mothball the Crewe to Manchester leg, as they previously did with the East Midlands Hub to Leeds leg?
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ll later sabotage the line further by delaying or mothballing the Automated People Mover between Birmingham Interchange Station and BHX… at this stage, nothing would surprise me.
Tories Fuck Up Another Simple Task
FTFY
Why the Peking Crispy Fuck do people still fucking vote for them? Are they trolling!?
21 comments
An increased total bill, overcrowding on the Elizabeth line, construction sites and their disruption to last several more years, and further reduction in the project’s scope. Well done Tories, you’ve done it again.
Cooking the books short term more important than building national infrastructure
So why delay the project, Mark? To stick the bill on the next government
In news that surprised no one.
They may as well publish a headline saying he admits the sun will rise tomorrow. It was blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain cell that the ‘delays save money’ argument was bollocks.
I would commit unspeakable crimes to get HS2 restored in full…
Unspeakable crimes…
Just get on with it and build the bloody thing for heaven’s sake. The benefits are known (no, it isn’t about getting to Birmingham faster it is about freeing up train paths on the west coast mainline) and it will only get more expensive with every delay or change.
Just about everybody else knew this already. What took Harper so long?
What happens to all the knocked down homes, office buildings, and construction site, including the £1bn+ spent at Euston? The area is a building site.
This seems incredibly short sighted.
Is the only central London interchange going to be with the Elizabeth Line???? It’s already the UK’s busiest railway line!
This is the new game… destroy and disrupt as much as you can and then attack the new guys when they get elected: “look at the mess you made! This has nothing to do with our incompetence”.
It’ll all be worth it, in 20 or 25 years from now, when we can get on a train 20 miles outside London and get to Birmingham 15 minutes faster that before, and it’ll only have costed 150 billion pounds. Or 200 probably by the time it’s done.
Meanwhile, local authorities continue to ransom HS2 by saddling it with paying for blatant betterment – which they should be funding themselves.
How is it that both Spain and Italy, who had to contend with mountains, rivers, and literal deserts have multiple HS lines, but the UK can’t even manage to connect two cities through mostly flat terrain?
Damn: the Japanese had to dug many miles just to get in and out of damn Tokyo! But you can’t even get out of Birmingham, which would just use the tracking bed of the WCML!
I mean: even in the Benelux they had to dig underneath Schiphol, and go through Rotterdam and Antwerpen! And they did, in under 6 years!
But for some reason, HS2 Ltd. Is so incompetent it needs 20 years to buildtje whole thing, it has people like Bill Cash and Michael Fabricant bashing it every chance they get, and the whole thing has been watered down, with cancelling NPR. Honestly, high speed is so abysmal that you ought to kick out the builders and replace them by Thalys, AVE, and NTV. You know? The companies that actually know how to run one.
Now excuse me, my 2h train from Madrid to Barcelona is coming in. I might take it twice. Will still be faster than the trip between London and Manchester. The Queen knows if Avanti is even running today.
The Elizabeth line is so good, hence so fucking packed. Should be the new standard. UK needs to spend like a Trillion on infrastructure and will set them up for the next 50 years, but ofc 50% of that would go to delays and Tory bribers
There’s something wrong when Japan can build a maglev extension 4 times longer then HS2 for 70 billion and HS2 has already cost 120 billion and nothing is finished.
I mean, did anyone honestly think the delays would save money?
Next up: “HS2 delays will cost money. We knew this all along and were quite open and honest about this”
of course… and the cheap interest money days are over as well. Screwed up by not building infrastructure while the money was cheap.
Regardless of what people think about it, just building it on time and to its full length would have been many many times better than this horseshit strategy.
This is classic Conservative Government. “We want to look good, but we don’t want to pay for it” so they find a way to cut back while still trying to spin their way to being the good guy in the situation. Short term money decisions having long term affects. The whole “this won’t be my problem in x years” strategy.
Add it to the pile of other things they’ve pulled the money plug on.
Doesn’t help we’ve had 5 different Prime Minsters, 5 different Cabinets in 7 years.
About time the government bit the bullet and bin ed this project off. It’s a failure it’s cost billions and it helps a tiny percentage of the country while most of the country is played by terrible infrastructure.
I live in the south west and work 5 miles from my home. I HAVE to drive. If I wanted to use public transport i would have to take 3 + busses and go all the way into the nearest city and then out again turning a 5 mile journey into an approximately 25 mile journey. It’s disgraceful.
Colour me surprised. Back in October, they wasted £105m in one foul swoop by declaring that the redesigned Euston Station should have 10 platforms rather than 11 so it could be built in a single stage, thus having to send the design back to the drawing board; while the time spent redesigning the station would further delay its opening, so as a result, if the tunnels were built to schedule, they’d be approaching an incomplete station (added onto which, I wouldn’t be surprised if the redesign also necessitates redesigning the approaches).
Meanwhile, there are apparently also delays to the project beyond Crewe – so what’s the betting they’ll later mothball the Crewe to Manchester leg, as they previously did with the East Midlands Hub to Leeds leg?
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ll later sabotage the line further by delaying or mothballing the Automated People Mover between Birmingham Interchange Station and BHX… at this stage, nothing would surprise me.
Tories Fuck Up Another Simple Task
FTFY
Why the Peking Crispy Fuck do people still fucking vote for them? Are they trolling!?