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HS2 General Thread (all phases/discussion)

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#1 ·
Just thought I'd see if anybody thinks about this subject as much as I do and if anyone had ideas as to what they'd like to see under this name.

I think the best place for it's London terminus will be St Pancras but how I wonder.

Can see two options possible:

1) an annex on the west side of the existing station

Advantages being more platforms but high speed trains would be blocked from easy interchange with the Eurostars by the Midland Mianline tracks acting as a kind of barrier.

2) an annex on the east side

Infinitley more difficult but with the advantage being Eurostars and domestic HST's would be in the same area of the station.

As for the line itself, the seemingly obvious place to start is using the North London line for relatively low speed running (say about 160-220km/h) through urban London. Although I'm not sure if that single track connection from HS1 would end up being a problem capacity wise.

There would need to be another line going under the current St Pancras-NLL chord and onto the NLL. Think of it like the soon to be opened St Pancras-HS1 layout with the two running tracks going over/under each other.

A station at Willesden Junciton (see my other thread) would be good I reckon and from here the line continues at classic line speeds to Denham before the new High Speed formation breaks away.

Then to get a bit more basic from here the line should go to Coventry Parkway-Birmingham International-Lichfield Trent Valley-Stoke-Stockport-Manchester Eastlands-Preston-Carlisle.......then up to a triangle junction in the Scottish Central belt with links to Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Obviously there would be branches to Liverpool (from Stoke), Leeds (from Manchester) and Derby, Sheffield, Doncaster, York, Teeside & Newcastle (from Birminghm International).

Sorry to go on but it would be good to hear what others think, it might be an irrelevant discussion knowing this Government but it's always interesting to talk about it.
 
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#41 · (Edited)
Bob: that's exactly what I mean -- some road schemes have cost:benefit ratios of 1:10 or more. 1:1.9 is really pissing in the wind.
And yet Crossrail has a benefit:cost of 3:1. So therefore we shouldn't build that? Oh hang on, despite Eddington not wanting any big projects somehow he says Crossrail would be worthwhile pursuing? His report is full of contradictions.

It just irks me that so many people have been jumping on the Eddington band wagon which to me appears to be a bit of Gordon Brown showmanship.

IMO, HSR =
-more capacity for freight on rail (on current WCML)
-ease on capacity problems in the air, (15% take offs in UK national)
-ease on road space demand (removal of freight to WCML and some cars)
-deals with passenger rail overcrowding while being much quicker to boot.

I think the cost of this offsets the cost of the equivalent road, air schemes that would be needed.

All this talk of Britain being the wrong size for HSR is utter rubbish. 3 hrs between Scotland (and it's densely populated border area) and the South East is about as ideal as you can get. And smack bang in the middle is the countless millions of Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Shefield, Notingham etc. Ideal. Linked with HS1 and Birmingham-Brussels is just over 3 hours, cha ching! France, Germany, Italy, Spain, S.Korea, China........ have all done analysis too and have decided it's worth pursuing, often without an already overcrowded network of roads, rail, sky to deal with on top.

MrMojo - I don't know why you keep bandying about this £100, £200 more figure. The money would come from increased usage (current predictions plus 8% by 2012 even without any improvements) not the same number of passengers paying more.

I couldn't find where I read about the cost of the Luton M1 widening, but the M1 schemes together are outlined below. Looks expensive to me.
The Department of Transport has widening planned for the M1 between junctions 21 – 42 (Leicester to Leeds) to 4 lanes in both directions. There is also widening planned for junctions 10 to 13 (Luton to Milton Keynes). The M1 between junctions 6a and 10 (M25 - Luton) is being widened at the moment. The entire widening programme for the M1 amounts to £3.7 billion. During the 2002 East Midlands Multi-Modal Study the M1 section from junction 21-30 was costed at £700 million. It then entered the roads programme at £1.9 billion in 2004. It is expected the M1 widening costs will rise further as rising energy, oil and materials costs are causing massive cost escalation in the entire road programme.
 
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#42 ·
lol what on earth is 'european standard gauge'. The UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, etc etc all use 1435mm standard gauge.
The clearances above and either side of the train, dictates what size trains we can fit onto our network (like elfabyanos said). Whilst it would be expensive rebuilding bridges, tunnels, lowering track beds and cutting platforms back I think it would be worth it.

Not least because we would then be able to take standard European trains in the UK.

Agreed. This government has no balls on this issue unfortunately and is *continually* opening/planning new roads as non-motorways due to political pressure. It's absurd that many new upgraded roads are opening with full hard shoulders, grade separated junctions and 3 lanes yet are A roads meaning tractors can come on them and cause havoc because the govt doesn't have the balls to risk winding up the eco-warriors over motorway status.
Sigh, letting environmentalists dictate transport policy is a bit like alcoholics setting the drink drive limit. They'd have us all on horse drawn carriage if they had their way.

??? Completely incorrect. The WCML was originally going to have moving block signalling which would of allowed the trains to get a lot closer to each other, but this didn't work out whatsoever.
Apparantley it was an unproven system.

HSR Trains are a lot worse than standard trains for energy efficiency since they tend to have less seats in and they go a lot faster.
Depends which train you're specifically talking about, TGV's tend to be quite generous in their seating:space ratio but typical Japanese HST's are a lot more efficient.

Of course motorways are needed. Thousands of city routes are never going to have direct rail links and more still won't have HSR links. And this doesn't even begin to account for the fact most people don't travel to places within walking distance to a train station - I'm a good 10km from the nearest station, so I need my car whatever.
Agreed, Motorways should be embraced - if anything they are better for the environment as they free up congested local roads (traffic jams creating more fumes of course).

All this anti-car stuff is totally unrealistic. 85% of journeys are by private car. I notice that Japan and France, countries with large HSR systems, still have massive use and demand for motorway networks. Also don't forget the vast revenues from road users. After you've paid your insurance, road tax, MOT etc, you've paid £1000 per year just to keep your car on the road. And when we fill up with petrol we pay some of the highest taxes in the world. And all this is taxing the way that most of us need to get around most of the time! Railways don't serve most of the places that we need to go and yet our current network is still over-extensive. Our railways should be made more efficient by pruning all the rural branch lines where train operating companies are forced to transport fresh air from station to station merely to keep their franchises.
High Speed Rail and Motorways should go hand in hand in developing the UK's transport network.

But regarding your point about pruning the railway network, could have a point there. But you musn't forget the other benefits that even an hourly rural train service can bring to otherwise isolated communities.

My suggestion would be to hand over non-national strategic railway lines (i.e. those which don't offer any sort of link for inter-regional and inter city trains) to local authorities.

A good example of this is the proposed Teeside Metro network......basically a tram service taking over the Darlington-Middlesbrough line.

And please people stop reiterating the simple lie that Britain doesn't have high speed rail. We have had 300km/h rail services since 2003. Here is a a Eurostar blasting along at 300km/h (186mph) through Kent:
Britian does have high speed rail because the term is applied to anything over 200km/h I think. But to be fair the CTRL is really an extension to the SNCF TGV network.

As Eddington said we basically have the lines that go where we need.
There are still places which need linking by rail.
 
#43 ·
And yet Crossrail has a benefit:cost of 3:1. So therefore we shouldn't build that? Oh hang on, despite Eddington not wanting any big projects somehow he says Crossrail would be worthwhile pursuing? His report is full of contradictions.
I don't know. London is an exception (most people use public transport). London is extremely important to the future of the UK economy, much more so than any other city. But anyway, HSR cost:benefit is much worse than crossrail.

IMO, HSR =
-more capacity for freight on rail (on current WCML)
-ease on capacity problems in the air, (15% take offs in UK national)
-ease on road space demand (removal of freight to WCML and some cars)
-deals with passenger rail overcrowding while being much quicker to boot.

I think the cost of this offsets the cost of the equivalent road, air schemes that would be needed.
lol what capacity problems in the air are there. There is capacity problems at heathrow but domestic flights are going to other airports, London City and the budget airlines at Standsted and Gatwick, not heathrow.
All this talk of Britain being the wrong size for HSR is utter rubbish. 3 hrs between Scotland (and it's densely populated border area) and the South East is about as ideal as you can get. And smack bang in the middle is the countless millions of Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Shefield, Notingham etc. Ideal. Linked with HS1 and Birmingham-Brussels is just over 3 hours, cha ching! France, Germany, Italy, Spain, S.Korea, China........ have all done analysis too and have decided it's worth pursuing, often without an already overcrowded network of roads, rail, sky to deal with on top.
Sorry where is this massive market for Birmingham-Brussels travel. Eurostar couldn't justify running trains which would of done Birmingham-Brussels in 4 or 5 hours, will there suddenly be a huge rush of demand when it goes below this magic 3 hour mark? No of course it won't.

And what sort of line takes in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield and Nottingham -- you're going to have connections there and connections kill the speed advantage HSR has over normal rail.

MrMojo - I don't know why you keep bandying about this £100, £200 more figure. The money would come from increased usage (current predictions plus 8% by 2012 even without any improvements) not the same number of passengers paying more.
I keep getting told in this thread that HSR has worse train density than normal trains and the WCML is close to breaking point at the current 18million. I therefore assumed 15million passengers a year on a Manchester to London line (which is much much shorter than the WCML and takes in far fewer destiations) would be a reasonable model.

If you do that maths on that with no subsidy the cost of building the line works out to be £100/passenger each way (I may of got them wrong, do them for yourself if you'd like). That is over a 20 year period. A 30 year period would be less but interest would be more. Considering Network Rail is not a governmental department and cannot just burn through money with no business consequence a scheme like this would have to be properly costed. It is unlike roads in that regard since each road does not have a direct obligation to produce a decent return on it.

I couldn't find where I read about the cost of the Luton M1 widening, but the M1 schemes together are outlined below. Looks expensive to me.
The Department of Transport has widening planned for the M1 between junctions 21 – 42 (Leicester to Leeds) to 4 lanes in both directions. There is also widening planned for junctions 10 to 13 (Luton to Milton Keynes). The M1 between junctions 6a and 10 (M25 - Luton) is being widened at the moment. The entire widening programme for the M1 amounts to £3.7 billion. During the 2002 East Midlands Multi-Modal Study the M1 section from junction 21-30 was costed at £700 million. It then entered the roads programme at £1.9 billion in 2004. It is expected the M1 widening costs will rise further as rising energy, oil and materials costs are causing massive cost escalation in the entire road programme.
Fair enough. It's expensive but ~ 1/4 of the cost of the WCML upgrade and is in similar scope in the distance it will involve being upgraded. And don't forget roads pay for themselves many times over, whereas rail doesn't.
 
#44 ·
here's an example of a productivity gain thanks to me taking the train. say i have to meet a client in london. i bill for a grand a day (plus expenses), i can work on the train, i have full net access on the train and so on.by working on the train i free up about four hours of my time, so £500 quid worth of time for a £70 quid first class ticket isn't bad. many other people do the same thing, you can see on a weekday on the ECML maybe half the people using it are working on it. the cost benefit of this alone is enormous and it only takes say a dozen well paid professionals out of the hundreds on the train doing a return trip that day for that service to yield say an extra 5k in productivity on each train. if they are running 40 each way then thats 200k a day, £70 million a year! assuming 400 return services a day nationwide and you get £700 million of hidden benefits if they all had the same business support as the ecml does. building a road does not have these benefits unless you have your own personal chaffeur which costs rather more than a train journey.
the best argument for an HSR network is simple. they make huge amounts of money. simply spin off intercity from the rest of the railways, and then pump the money that intercity makes back into intercity which is how the ECML upgrade was being paid for in the 80s until it was merged into british rail. when you consider that sea containers in ten years made approx £800 million pounds profit from the ECML (and god knows how much the train leasing companies made) then you can see the vast amounts of money that parts of the railway are generating. has anyone ever built an HSR network that after 20 years hasnt made lots of money? the problem with eurostar/eurotunnel was the financing, being privately financed it paid higher interest than if it were publicy financed which we have thatch to thank for.
wanna know where some more of the money goes? well about 30% of the total railway budget goes to the two TLCs. these guys then make profits of about 30% on this money, meaning approaching 10% of the total railway spending is profit to the owners of the train leasing companies. the wastage is enormous thanks to the way the system is split up into bits that make profit on the parts making profit so everything is inflated. it's completely insane, a total failure of capitalism that almost no-one supports anymore.
where is the market for birmingham to brussels or paris? anyone want to tell me how many planes leave a day for belgium holland and france from birmingham airport. i bet its quite a few :) eurostar can easily justify the cost of the network is there for them to run on. it only needs a couple of thousand passengers each day to run a couple of services each way. how many is that? a dozen small planes. so where is this market? oh thatll be why they have airports running services to other places in northern europe and airlines worth billions on the back of this business.
finally, your costs on the WCML are wrong, £4.5 billion has been paid to virgin trains as compensation. this is NOT construction costs at all and as a large chunk of it went straight into virgins coffers as a private company it was taken out of the rail system. if the train network was unified it would not be an issue as british rail would then be paying the money to itself and the cost of the line would have been much less despite the overruns.
 
#45 · (Edited)
lol what capacity problems in the air are there. There is capacity problems at heathrow but domestic flights are going to other airports, London City and the budget airlines at Standsted and Gatwick, not heathrow.
Have you been asleep? Heathrow is full on the ground and in the circling stacks above too. As is Gatwick. Am I the only one who has passed over London two or three times before landing at this one runway traffic jam? Expansion at any airport is a problem as the public inquiries, court battles and dig ins testify. HSR gives the country as a whole more capacity.
 
#46 ·
I don't know. London is an exception (most people use public transport). London is extremely important to the future of the UK economy, much more so than any other city. But anyway, HSR cost:benefit is much worse than crossrail.
Cost:Benefit should only ever be a guide. Cost and Benefits are decided by the author of the report and how they weight issues, take into account the holistic debate etc.. I'm sure a green analyst could put your 1:10 cost:benefit road scheme at 10:1 with a bit of thought. Likewise, with a bit of thought I'm sure I could up the HSR figure to at least 1:5.
 
#47 ·
Sorry where is this massive market for Birmingham-Brussels travel. Eurostar couldn't justify running trains which would of done Birmingham-Brussels in 4 or 5 hours, will there suddenly be a huge rush of demand when it goes below this magic 3 hour mark? No of course it won't.
I was pointing out that the line is longer than Scotland-London. There are multi million inhabitant cities all along it at good intervals. Birmingham - Brussels trains would probably stop at Stratford international (actually one of the major reasons it was built, for future destinations north) thereby serving a variety of passenger journeys.
 
#48 ·
Have you been asleep? Heathrow is full on the ground and in the circling stacks above too. As is Gatwick. Am I the only one who has passed over London two or three times before landing at this one runway traffic jam? Expansion at any airport is a problem as the public inquiries, court battles and dig ins testify. HSR gives the country as a whole more capacity.
I can't find anything about Gatwick capacity problems at the moment. Got any links?

And HSR would have massive NIMBY and eco-warrior campaigns against it, just like airport runways.
 
#49 ·
here's an example of a productivity gain thanks to me taking the train. say i have to meet a client in london. i bill for a grand a day (plus expenses), i can work on the train, i have full net access on the train and so on.by working on the train i free up about four hours of my time, so £500 quid worth of time for a £70 quid first class ticket isn't bad. many other people do the same thing, you can see on a weekday on the ECML maybe half the people using it are working on it. the cost benefit of this alone is enormous and it only takes say a dozen well paid professionals out of the hundreds on the train doing a return trip that day for that service to yield say an extra 5k in productivity on each train. if they are running 40 each way then thats 200k a day, £70 million a year! assuming 400 return services a day nationwide and you get £700 million of hidden benefits if they all had the same business support as the ecml does. building a road does not have these benefits unless you have your own personal chaffeur which costs rather more than a train journey.
Well that's very nice for you, planes have similar benefits. However, I don't know which trains are offering £70 first class rtn for a 4 hour journey. A first class open rtn from leeds (which is ~4hr return) is £273.

The last 5 times I have been on a train I have had to stand for part or all of the journey because I was in standard and you don't get much work done standing up.
the best argument for an HSR network is simple. they make huge amounts of money. simply spin off intercity from the rest of the railways, and then pump the money that intercity makes back into intercity which is how the ECML upgrade was being paid for in the 80s until it was merged into british rail. when you consider that sea containers in ten years made approx £800 million pounds profit from the ECML (and god knows how much the train leasing companies made) then you can see the vast amounts of money that parts of the railway are generating. has anyone ever built an HSR network that after 20 years hasnt made lots of money? the problem with eurostar/eurotunnel was the financing, being privately financed it paid higher interest than if it were publicy financed which we have thatch to thank for.
Please give me some statistics for this. The WCML which is close to being high speed and close to capacity makes a massive loss year in year out and that's purely intercity.

The reason Eurotunnel doesn't make money isn't the financing though that didn't help. It's the fact they only got 25% of the projected passengers.
 
#52 ·
OK, i'm an economist and so i guess i should dig all this cost benefit crap and i do... to an extent. But we should take a step back from it all every now and then and think about what might make our lives a bit happier. I'm sorry but the car is a miserable creation, it makes us stressed, hurried and anti-social. So what if roads have a better cost benefit on paper, might it not be nice to have a fast, cheap, subsidised high speed rail service??? personal opinion I guess but i think HSR would improve the quality of life in the UK much more than bloody roads which will only wind us all up again.
 
#54 · (Edited)
you dont know which trains are? here's an idea. log on to the gner website, buy your tickets in advance. its about 35 quid each way from where i live :)
eurotunnel only got 25% of the passengers for one reason - it took them 10 years to do CTRL
Again, using Leeds --> London (4hr journey). Booking for 10 weeks in advance, the cheapest first journey works at about £200. If you want an open first return then it's £273, which I assume you would since it's hard to get client meetings to end at a specific time.

Where are these magic £70 first returns that you speak of?

And as for your retort to Eurotunnel, don't make me laugh. The eurotunnel car shuttle is performing dismally and that doesn't require one iota of the ctrl.
 
#55 ·
OK, i'm an economist and so i guess i should dig all this cost benefit crap and i do... to an extent. But we should take a step back from it all every now and then and think about what might make our lives a bit happier. I'm sorry but the car is a miserable creation, it makes us stressed, hurried and anti-social. So what if roads have a better cost benefit on paper, might it not be nice to have a fast, cheap, subsidised high speed rail service??? personal opinion I guess but i think HSR would improve the quality of life in the UK much more than bloody roads which will only wind us all up again.
Tax winds me up much more than roads do.
 
#56 ·
Again, using Leeds --> London (4hr journey). Booking for 10 weeks in advance, the cheapest first journey works at about £200. If you want an open first return then it's £273, which I assume you would since it's hard to get client meetings to end at a specific time.

Where are these magic £70 first returns that you speak of?

And as for your retort to Eurotunnel, don't make me laugh. The eurotunnel car shuttle is performing dismally and that doesn't require one iota of the ctrl.
Leeds to London and back in two months is 21.30 if you book it now. Go to http://www.virgintrainsfares.co.uk and look it up. Once you get your results, click on "singles from 10.65" and you'll see the cheap options you get if you book specific trains.

A normal saver return that you can buy on the day is 73.70.
 
#57 ·
Sweek: I'm talking about first class. Standard class is no good for those that want to do proper work while on the train...

I also had a look into these Eurostar routes. How come Eurostar holds the rights to 5 trains/day on the ECML yet they are not running trains on it? Even more laughable they are making profit by reselling these routes to other train operators.
 
#58 ·
Sweek: I'm talking about first class. Standard class is no good for those that want to do proper work while on the train...

I also had a look into these Eurostar routes. How come Eurostar holds the rights to 5 trains/day on the ECML yet they are not running trains on it? Even more laughable they are making profit by reselling these routes to other train operators.
I think you get a reserved seat if you book your seat, but I'm not completely sure now.
But singles in first class start at 32.50 on the same website.
 
#59 ·
yeah, buy them online. im not travelling from leeds but thats about what i pay, im a bit further south and book about a week in advance. you do get a reserved seat too. also free newspapers, drinks, wireless and so on. standard class is fine for proper work though mostly, just reserve a seat with a proper table and pay extra for your wireless. the trains are about two thirds full during off peak times on the ECML i find (theyd be completely full if they priced them better, that is sell more cheap tickets). GNER currently has first class tickets for all services 7 days from now at £21.35 each way where i travel from which is newark.

anyway, i just pointed out extra tens of millions per year in cost benefits that arent even included in the formula. if you dont like that thats' your problem, but £70 million a year, over 20 years without taking into account inflation is £1.4 billion and is exceptionally conservative.

eurotunnel car shuttle should be scrapped. thats something else to blame thatch for. the only way she would support the original scheme was if they had it and they are contracted to provide it. thatch actually wanted a road bridge across the channel, NOT a train route, and the only way the british govt would sign up for it is if they used that huge waste of space.

debt servicing of eurotunnel absorbs ALL its profits. the debt is serviced at private rates rather than through govt bonds. get a calculator out and you will see that the rate of debt is greater than its profits because of the compounding difference between private and public finance. eurotunnel is now bankrupt and in debt to such a level specifically because of this, if it wasnt it would have substantially less debt and be paying it off - that is, it would be paying off money it had borrowed from the british and french governments. a win win situation. the french tgv network was funded by govt issued bonds, it makes profit on the older lines now to such an extent that they actually pay for the expansion of the network without further borrowing, in another 10 years time the tgv lines will be entirely debt free in terms of their combined balance and generating more than enough to continue network expansion.

how come eurostar holds the rights to 5 trains a day on the ECML and they dont use them? well there's the small matter of the platforms not being long enough for their trains so it requires station rebuilding and also the lack of sufficient power on the northern parts of the line for them to even run their trains at all and then there's the journey time which from edinburgh is amazingly slow - its quicker to fly. they aquired the rights with the impression the line would be upgraded, it hasnt been despite promises in 1997 it would be completed. given these restrictions its not surprising is it.

i also see that the ECML from london to york is now 5 mins slower than in 1997, and that only one service even runs that fast. gner did have a couple of eurostars they ran themselves but they are giving them back such is the demand now and instead running old slam door trains as replacements. a long way from the promises in 97 of intercity 250s.

i found this gem which should put anyone off privatised railways -
Go-Ahead, the group that runs Southern Railways out of Victoria, has been using its train earnings to increase dividend payments to City shareholders and its leading directors by 58%. Southern last year received subsidies of �69m - more than when Go-Ahead took over the running of the network after French group Connex was sacked from the franchise.

The GNER service in to King's Cross made so much money the company returned �70m of its earnings to the Treasury. National Express, whose rail-operation profits rose 70% last year, had to return �45m to the Treasury from its first year of running the One franchise out of Liverpool Street.
profits made plus money returned to the treasury for some lines actually exceeds their total subsidy. in otherwords, rail commuters are subsidising everyone else (unlike say car drivers who have massive negative costs involved they pass on to others). as a user of the ecml im one of the people subsidising everything else, its nice to know that being environmentally sound and socially aware is recieved in such a way - by being ripped off!

if you want to pick on railway targets pick on something other than HSR, because even in the limited intercity form we have today its profitable in absolute terms. how much money does the m25 return to the treasury? i think we should shut it down, shit cost benefit ratio. in the case of gner, sea containers promised to pay the treasury £1.3 billion over ten years (which without being ring-fenced gets absorbed in general spending and only a penny in the pound going back into trains) without a penny subsidy and still make a profit. i think its only fair that mojo demands we shut down motorways, afterall in absolute monetary terms they make less.

simply by having no subsidy and no profit imagine how much cheaper the 1.5 million people who travelled on gner on offpeak fares last year could travel. by my reckoning they could all be given £40 quid and free travel :) alternatively, there were 15.1 million journeys in total on gner, which means the subsidy each passenger is paying to the treasury is £8.51 (plus vat) and using gners projections of profit thats £4.66 more profit they are making so £13.17 per passenger each way or £26.34 per passenger return being taken out of the network in payments and profit alone. that is SHOCKING.

mrmojo, youll find the reason most people here are pro HSR is simple - it makes financial sense. people dont join these forums thinking the way they do but thanks to all the arguments like these about profit/loss/subsidy/hidden benefits/hidden costs etc they become that way. there's a good argument for shutting down some rural lines (something i dont agree with either) but there's no good argument against HSR except the govt doesnt want the original borrowing on their balance sheet.

right now the rail system is broken, no one can deny otherwise. some of it requires subsidy, but the intercity part does not, can be spun off, the funds can be ring fenced and year on year network improvements can be made. doing this could *probably* pay for an HSR network over time without govt intervention by building the most profitable route first and funding at say £500 million a year from its profits, more than doable for this part of the network. as i type this, the ecml could have been finished running at 140mph throughout and 160mph on the southern part plus larger passenger capacity and lower ticket costs - there are only 28 points of the ecml that require an upgrade plus some simple infrastructure like new power subsstations unlike the whole of the wcml did. the biggest flaw in privatisation was lumping intercity back in with british rail and this really needs to be sorted. until it does, every trip i take to london will be wasting £26.34 and things will not get better.
 
#60 ·
I think you get a reserved seat if you book your seat, but I'm not completely sure now.
But singles in first class start at 32.50 on the same website.
The only way you get these 32.50 first class tickets is by travelling at 05:00 and that's only one way unless you stay over in London/whereever and come back the next day on a similar very early train. At sane times the tickets shoot up to £100+ each way. Unless you'd like to prove me wrong with a screenshot ;).

Basically, what I'm saying is that it's impossible to get a return journey in first class on the same day for £70. It's more like £200 and few people are paid enough to justify that for the productivity benefits, so they are blatantly overstated.

The problem with standard is that even if you have a seat and it's a full train, it's an absolute nightmare to get to it, and if you do you've got to cope with people standing up and pushing into you for the entire journey.

Especially when you can get a seat for sure on an easyjet flight for about £20 rtn and have all the same benefits.
 
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