Britain to get worlds fastest rail service
 

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle5955710.ece

Discuss :rolleyes: ;)

no idscussion needed...total crap:rolleyes:

Yeah, they cut and paste this stuff every few months or so to keep people.....

....actually, why do they keep saying stuff like this?

Meh.

Its a way of spending tax payers money and keeping so called logistics boffins busy! Why do they want to build a superfast railway so far from HS1 anyway. That is typically French - have a station on one side and give them a cobweb of metros to negotiate for your onward connection on the other side. Why not extend north direct from St. Pancras right up the centre of this land (sorry about using common sense here, but academics are not blessed with much common sense are they?).

Do not write this off as total crap. There are some real railway men involved not just academics. The end product may not be quite as advanced but ............

No offence John there are plenty of professionals involved in the end product; its just all this early bable. It feeds journalists and the like who interpret pretty much what they like from just about anything really.HS2 needs connecting into HS1 otherwise how on earth can it compete with air travel. Topographically it would be easier to follow the Great Central route into the Midlands instead of following the old route through the Chilterns, its the cheaper, easier build.

Having said that has anyone read the Wikipedia page on high speed 2 ? It kind of reads like someone really in the know is keeping it up to date, indeed the language reads like its been written by a civil servant :eek:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_2#DftHS2Jan09

I suspect though that most of it comes from this pdf from the Dept of Transport that put the case for it in Jan 2009.

http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/rail/pi/hi...ghspeedtwo.pdf

We apparently should know for sure what is intended by the end of the year.

However, the speculated potential for four tracks running double decker rolling stock sounds to me like there might even be something of an over capacity situation :eek: Obviously they haven't got to build it all at once

its the article thats crap...half an hour to Birmingham? please......:rolleyes:

i guess if started far enough out of London and finished somewhere nearer Coventry than Brum you might do it, but you'd need Warp Speed acceleration and ship-hot brakes.....

Nice idea, but who's going to pay for it ?

Didn't someone mutter something about a recession ? By the time we've sorted the current financial mess out we'll be lucky if there's enough funding for routine maintenance on the Network.

At least the funding for the Thameslink Programme was approved and found before the soft stuff hit the fan.

That will be Maglev then; 30 mins London - Birmingham. This deflation we are getting will mean that the cost of these projects will keep going down!!
The government pulled a nice stroke with freight improvements up the ECML - they made it part of the planning consent to expand Felixstowe port so that people using the port end up paying.