Professor John Robertson OBA
Thanks to Dottie for alerting me to this.
From BBC England today:
HS2 has confirmed that its aim to get trains running between Birmingham and London between 2029 and 2033 “cannot be achieved”. Birmingham’s Curzon Street Station is currently taking shape in the heart of the city but the divisive high-speed railway project has been plagued by serious challenges. Earlier this year, HS2 CEO Mark Wild acknowledged that construction had been “harder than thought” and “needed a reset” involving a review of the project’s cost and schedule.
The high speed track, including the branch to Birmingham, is 225 kilometres (140 miles) long and work began in 2019. The 14 year target is now unachievable. There is no mention of any government blame for this in BBC media reports. Imagine it happened in Scotland?
How long have other countries taken to build comparable systems?
Japan (Shinkansen)
- First line (Tōkaidō Shinkansen, Tokyo to Osaka, 515 km, initial operating speed 210 km/h, later increased): Construction started in 1959 and opened in 1964 → about 5-5.5 years for the initial segment.
France (TGV)
- First line (Paris to Lyon, ~400 km, 260-270 km/h initially): Planning in the 1970s; construction began late 1970s; opened in 1981 → roughly 5-10 years from major construction start to first service.
Was Scotland ever in the plans? See this from BBC Scotland in December 2009
Birmingham: 45mins, down from 1h 22mins
Liverpool: 1hr 23mins, down from 2hrs 8mins
Manchester: 1hr 6mins, down from 2hrs 7mins
Edinburgh: 2hrs 9mins, down from 4hrs 23mins
Glasgow: 2hrs 16mins, down from 4hrs 10 mins
Source: Network Rail http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8432051.stm
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
We were surely entitled to look at that 2009 plan on BBC Scotland and exercise a bit of cynicism as to whether and how long it would take to reach us here.
Five years later, I almost had to admire the statement of Baroness Kramer [when she was UK MInister of State for Transport] to the Lords, in Oct2014 “We have studies under way to look at taking the benefits of high speed rail to Scotland, including what we now call HS Scotland, and we are obviously looking at HS3 and at many more programmes to provide connectivity beyond that”. Someone must have realsised that they didn’t want to say we might be in HS11 or to have to keep telling us we’ve been bumped from HS3h to HS4x, or whatever. Maybe the thinking has been updated since then, I don’t seem to see anything beyond HS2 getting beyond Birmingham, and uthmuch other than H], to the Lords, in Oct2014 “We have studies under way to look at taking the benefits of high speed rail to Scotland, including what we now call HS Scotland, and we are obviously looking at HS3 and at many more programmes to provide connectivity beyond that”. Someone must have realised that they didn’t want to say we might be in HS11 or to have to keep telling us we’ve been bumped from HS3h to HS4x, or whatever.
Meantime HM Treasury assesses it as having “National Project” Status benefiting the whole country (i.e. UK). So everyone in Scotland gets to pay the same share of the cost of the UK’s “biggest infrastructure project in decades” while any benefits lie south of Birminham (or maybe Manchester if you are very patient and optimistic).
LikeLiked by 1 person