Reverse the short sighted decision to cancel building the northern sections of HS2 and instead extend HS2 to Glasgow and Edinburgh. Simplifying the design of viaducts, bridges, stations, cuttings and embankments and especially reducing the number of tunnels should significantly reduce costs. This infrastructure should last for over a century with upgrades and would be worth the investment.
Yet more embarrassing and enormously expensive HS2 chaos. I realise that much of it has been caused by meddling by an ever-changing and revolving door cast of inept and grandstanding politicians, culminating with Sunak hacking HS2 to bits and leaving only the Birmingham to Old Oak Common shuttle service as the only part of it assured to be completed ( and he would have destroyed that too if it wasn't already 60% built ), but different platform heights? This is just ridiculous and will cost £200 million to fix? This is as bad as the similar waste of money on the designs for the Euston terminus that were thrown in the bin and had to be re-done as it would have cost too much to construct. Is anyone in control? We supposedly have world-class engineers, project managers, designers and architects in Britain so how did all this happen? It can't all be put down to British short-termism and the constant interference, pandering to NIMBYs and gold-plating demanded by ignorant politicians.
@@adrianbaron4994 my understanding of why HS2 was so bad was actually because of all the politicians between London and Manchester trying to capitalise on the route. That plus a government willing to make silly deals in order to cling to power
The HS2 is desperately needed and need to go to Manchester and onwards to Leeds to open up the Liverpool to Leeds corridor which is desperately needed and should have been part of the original plan instead of spliting the rails in east and west.
Transpennine connection is needed, but splitting HS2 into two branches also has benefits for connecting the East Midlands and relieving the ECML. The truth is both are needed, but there is possibly a debate to be had about which should be built first.
The section of Phase 2b from Tatton to Manchester Piccadilly is still planned to go ahead as part of the first section of NPR (Liverpool to Manchester). It includes two stations (Manchester Airport and Manchester Piccadilly) plus a long tunnel from the airport to Ardwick. It is easily the most expensive part of the Western Arm of HS2 Phase 2b and all the costs will be loaded onto NPR.
@@martinsloman6905 which just makes it all the more baffling that HS2 phase 2 was cancelled! Additionally, I've heard a lot of experts theorising that the business case for the tunnel from Piccadilly to the Airport will not stack up if it's for _just_ NPR, which is why it was planned to be a shared tunnel!
@@NetworkNewsUK Deleting Phase 2a reduces capacity between London and Manchester so, sooner or later it will need to be revived. The most expensive part of Phase 2b (west) is still going ahead so does it make sense to leave out Crewe to Tatton? Only a politician can answer that one.
@@martinsloman6905 my prediction is that the Crewe - Tatton link will happen but they'll re-badge it as being part of NPR to avoid the bad press associated with HS2.
The absolute cluster fk of hs2 is astounding! Every turn and change cost’s millions. And it’s a huge example of why large scale projects fail to get off the ground here Italy France and Spain did it at a considerably cheaper cost, on massive scales. We have trouble going 1 stop 😂 without it becoming a money pit We have more bureaucracy than the Germans, and that’s saying something. Unfortunately this applies in health and education sectors also, Britain has the skills but pays 2-4 times more than European neighbours for the same outcomes
Low-floor train builders Stadler have low-slung vestibule floors on Greater Anglia trains to achieve flush boarding. The internal floors then are gently ramped to give clearances over the wheels and bogies. Underfloor equipment displaced by lowering the floor is moved to a dedicated windowless “Power pack carriage” in the middle of the set.
Some smartalec politician decided to cut short term costs. This is an example of a long term, and unforeseen, blow out in costs quickly obvious because a bean counter couldn't see past the next election or maybe the one after, certainly not the lifetime of the project. 😢
Easier to do on the Island line because the 484s are the only trains running on the island. It's a lot harder on the mainland network because there's different types of trains using it, all of which have different profiles. In particular, freight trains prevent platform heights being raised above the current national standard of 915mm
Not sure why it's so expensive, I guess you'd need to ask a rolling stock expert for the exact answer! The only thing I'd say is that the total contract for the trains is about £2bn, which means this is an increase of ~10%, which for a fairly major alteration at quite an advanced design stage, could definitely be worse!
This country in a nutshell, grand plans cut back to something pathetic. Build the northern leg, all the way to Scotland, and connect it to HS1, Edinburgh to Paris, city to city in just a few hours.
If the trains have two doors per carriage can one door allow passengers to alight at one platform height, and the other door allow passengers to alight at the other platform height?
It's a possibility but would be technically challenging as the doors are at the ends of the carriage above the wheels which can't really be made smaller, and therefore the floors can't be lowered accordingly. Therefore I think the only way you could do it would be to have one door at the end of the carriage, and the other in the middle of the carriage, with ramps to and from it like this: 🚪___ ___🚪 🛞 \__🚪__/ 🛞 (Massive simplification and obviously not to scale as the difference in height would only be a few centimetres so the ramp could be quite gentle) The other danger is people getting confused because they could have boarded from a door with level boarding, but then end up alighting from a door with a step which they don't expect which causes them to trip and fall.
This is Britain, so let's ignore standards and make something completely different. The clowns who designed Crossrail (renamed Elizabeth Line with the intention of getting knighthoods) with high level platforms in the central section forgot that either side of London, the platforms are lower. Now we have the wonderful "World Leading" prestige project HS2 which has again ignored facts. The French designed their high speed networks so that trains would initially enter existing stations. With leisure travel now exceeding commuter travel, who wants a high speed run from a west London suburb through a load of tunnels to a poorly connected district of Birmingham. It should be further appreciated that contractors make big profits when there are variations.
No confirmation of anything at the moment, but the general concensus from industry professionals seems to be that Euston - Crewe is the bare minimum that's required to get any meaningful value out of the line! I guess we'll see what Labour come up with over the following months, and I'll provide an update here when they do!
Its only public money. Just raise taxes again. As no actual vehicles have been built, where do they get a price of £188 million when most plans will exist as computer drawings.
Not sure why it costs so much, but these things are often more complicated than a lot of people realise. I guess you'd need to ask Alstom/Hitachi for the exact details!
Because they've signed a contract to build the trains and the manufacturer will exploit every opportunity to raise the price quoted. This is standard practice for government procurement as companies know fine well that the British government (of either party) couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery. The fact that Alstom and Hitachi who are building the trains are both desperate for work at the moment and begging for contracts to keep their factories open has apparently not been used to negotiate this amount down by a sensible amount.
Not sure where all this has come from as in all information on HS2 nothing has been said about platform heights, plus the Eurostars have a similiar problem that when travelling in the UK they use our high level platforms yet when stopping in European platforms that are lower than our they use a retractable step. Funy all this comes out now.
According to a quick google, HS2 platform heights will be 1115mm, which is similar to what crossrail uses in the core section, and also higher than the national standard of 915mm, which is why these concerns have been raised. Apparently the Eurostar platforms on HS1 are set to a height of 760mm, which is still higher than the 550mm used in France. In short: the whole thing's a complete mess, but you're right that it's curious the issue hasn't been raised on HS2 until now! As touched upon in the video, I think this is as a result of the phase 2 cancellation meaning increased exposure to the existing network, causing them to re-evaluate the situation, but as I also highlighted in the video, even the original plans would still have seen plenty of running on existing lines, so one could argue that this redesign was inevitable either way!
@@NetworkNewsUK Still curiouse why all of a sudden this isue has come forward as even if Phase two to Manchester had not been cancelled, these HS2 trains were still going to operate on the existing network to Liverpool and Scotland over Beatock and Shap
@@peterwilliamallen1063 yeah it definitely is strange. As I say I'd assume it's because they've re-evaluated the situation in the light of the phase 2 cancellation, but it is still possible (if not likely) that they would have decided this change needed to be made even if phase 2 were still being built!
Worth scrapping the whole thing at this stage. Then hopefully in 20 years a new HS2 will be fully built without the ridiculously expensive and unrealistic 400kph design speed. I'm sure 250kph would be fine for the short distances involved.
Hard disagree. The 400km/h design speed was chosen after consultation with other European countries about their HSR systems, where they all said they wished they'd been built to a higher speed initially, as it makes any future speed increases impractically expensive. Additionally, the HS2 designers have confirmed that a lower top speed would make little to no difference to the alignment (and therefore the costs) as it has to take a very precise route to avoid demolitions. Phase 1 civils are already mostly completed so that isn't getting cancelled any time soon, and we can't afford to wait another 20 years to build phase 2. The network is simply too overcrowded as it is, and that's before we get into the fact that rail is going to have to grow its ridership in the face of the climate crisis. The best time to build HS2 was 20 years ago, the second best time is now!
The chickens are coming home to roost. HS2 was ill-conceived on faulty principles, some of which have been abandoned. One was that it would have continental size "fat" trains that wouldn't fit UK platforms, bridges and tunnels, so it had to be a segregated railway, thereby denying connections to various paces along the way. It would also have some UK size trains that would be "eye-wateringly expensive". Later, HS2 decided that UK size trains would be only 5% more expensive than off-the-shelf continental size trains, and that all HS2 trains would be UK size. So there was no need to design it as a segregated railway! We are spending millions on making access to stations step-free. But we fail at the last hurdle: the difference in level between the train floor and the platform. Easily solved by making the train door into a ramp.
To be fair, having trains with the larger co continental loading gauge did make sense when looking at the full network, but started to fall apart as soon as the eastern leg was cancelled. The strangest thing is that the platform height HS2 opted for (1115mm) is neither compatible with the British standard platform height (915mm) nor the European standard (which I think is 760mm) so it really is the worst of all worlds! Whilst I'm very much supportive of HS2 overall, this choice does seem quite baffling!
They should connect HS2 with HS1, that way people can travel directly from Glasgow/Edinburough to Lyon and Paris
The cutback HS2 is a complete disaster at every turn
Reverse the short sighted decision to cancel building the northern sections of HS2 and instead extend HS2 to Glasgow and Edinburgh. Simplifying the design of viaducts, bridges, stations, cuttings and embankments and especially reducing the number of tunnels should significantly reduce costs. This infrastructure should last for over a century with upgrades and would be worth the investment.
Will be very useful when Scotland joins the EU.
Yet more embarrassing and enormously expensive HS2 chaos.
I realise that much of it has been caused by meddling by an ever-changing and revolving door cast of inept and grandstanding politicians, culminating with Sunak hacking HS2 to bits and leaving only the Birmingham to Old Oak Common shuttle service as the only part of it assured to be completed ( and he would have destroyed that too if it wasn't already 60% built ), but different platform heights? This is just ridiculous and will cost £200 million to fix?
This is as bad as the similar waste of money on the designs for the Euston terminus that were thrown in the bin and had to be re-done as it would have cost too much to construct.
Is anyone in control?
We supposedly have world-class engineers, project managers, designers and architects in Britain so how did all this happen? It can't all be put down to British short-termism and the constant interference, pandering to NIMBYs and gold-plating demanded by ignorant politicians.
@@adrianbaron4994 my understanding of why HS2 was so bad was actually because of all the politicians between London and Manchester trying to capitalise on the route. That plus a government willing to make silly deals in order to cling to power
The HS2 is desperately needed and need to go to Manchester and onwards to Leeds to open up the Liverpool to Leeds corridor which is desperately needed and should have been part of the original plan instead of spliting the rails in east and west.
Transpennine connection is needed, but splitting HS2 into two branches also has benefits for connecting the East Midlands and relieving the ECML. The truth is both are needed, but there is possibly a debate to be had about which should be built first.
The section of Phase 2b from Tatton to Manchester Piccadilly is still planned to go ahead as part of the first section of NPR (Liverpool to Manchester). It includes two stations (Manchester Airport and Manchester Piccadilly) plus a long tunnel from the airport to Ardwick. It is easily the most expensive part of the Western Arm of HS2 Phase 2b and all the costs will be loaded onto NPR.
@@martinsloman6905 which just makes it all the more baffling that HS2 phase 2 was cancelled!
Additionally, I've heard a lot of experts theorising that the business case for the tunnel from Piccadilly to the Airport will not stack up if it's for _just_ NPR, which is why it was planned to be a shared tunnel!
@@NetworkNewsUK Deleting Phase 2a reduces capacity between London and Manchester so, sooner or later it will need to be revived. The most expensive part of Phase 2b (west) is still going ahead so does it make sense to leave out Crewe to Tatton? Only a politician can answer that one.
@@martinsloman6905 my prediction is that the Crewe - Tatton link will happen but they'll re-badge it as being part of NPR to avoid the bad press associated with HS2.
The absolute cluster fk of hs2 is astounding! Every turn and change cost’s millions. And it’s a huge example of why large scale projects fail to get off the ground here
Italy France and Spain did it at a considerably cheaper cost, on massive scales.
We have trouble going 1 stop 😂 without it becoming a money pit
We have more bureaucracy than the Germans, and that’s saying something. Unfortunately this applies in health and education sectors also, Britain has the skills but pays 2-4 times more than European neighbours for the same outcomes
This issue has also come to light following injuries to passengers boarding on the “Crossrail West” legacy platforms.
Low-floor train builders Stadler have low-slung vestibule floors on Greater Anglia trains to achieve flush boarding. The internal floors then are gently ramped to give clearances over the wheels and bogies. Underfloor equipment displaced by lowering the floor is moved to a dedicated windowless “Power pack carriage” in the middle of the set.
Hello from America where OUR "High Speed" trains sometimes break 60KpH😂
Some smartalec politician decided to cut short term costs. This is an example of a long term, and unforeseen, blow out in costs quickly obvious because a bean counter couldn't see past the next election or maybe the one after, certainly not the lifetime of the project. 😢
Platforms on the Isle of wight were heightened without much trouble by the time the new trains were delivered.
Easier to do on the Island line because the 484s are the only trains running on the island. It's a lot harder on the mainland network because there's different types of trains using it, all of which have different profiles. In particular, freight trains prevent platform heights being raised above the current national standard of 915mm
Critical thinking is not strong with this one.
Quater of billion dollars to redesigned non built trains , what are they using cocaine???
Not sure why it's so expensive, I guess you'd need to ask a rolling stock expert for the exact answer!
The only thing I'd say is that the total contract for the trains is about £2bn, which means this is an increase of ~10%, which for a fairly major alteration at quite an advanced design stage, could definitely be worse!
Good Idea...👍👍👍👍👍
Especially new std national networks and ht banking.
Old will diminish in period of decade.....✴️☸️
This country in a nutshell, grand plans cut back to something pathetic. Build the northern leg, all the way to Scotland, and connect it to HS1, Edinburgh to Paris, city to city in just a few hours.
If the trains have two doors per carriage can one door allow passengers to alight at one platform height, and the other door allow passengers to alight at the other platform height?
It's a possibility but would be technically challenging as the doors are at the ends of the carriage above the wheels which can't really be made smaller, and therefore the floors can't be lowered accordingly.
Therefore I think the only way you could do it would be to have one door at the end of the carriage, and the other in the middle of the carriage, with ramps to and from it like this:
🚪___ ___🚪
🛞 \__🚪__/ 🛞
(Massive simplification and obviously not to scale as the difference in height would only be a few centimetres so the ramp could be quite gentle)
The other danger is people getting confused because they could have boarded from a door with level boarding, but then end up alighting from a door with a step which they don't expect which causes them to trip and fall.
This is Britain, so let's ignore standards and make something completely different. The clowns who designed Crossrail (renamed Elizabeth Line with the intention of getting knighthoods) with high level platforms in the central section forgot that either side of London, the platforms are lower. Now we have the wonderful "World Leading" prestige project HS2 which has again ignored facts.
The French designed their high speed networks so that trains would initially enter existing stations.
With leisure travel now exceeding commuter travel, who wants a high speed run from a west London suburb through a load of tunnels to a poorly connected district of Birmingham.
It should be further appreciated that contractors make big profits when there are variations.
They're going extension HS2 from Euston to crew?
No confirmation of anything at the moment, but the general concensus from industry professionals seems to be that Euston - Crewe is the bare minimum that's required to get any meaningful value out of the line!
I guess we'll see what Labour come up with over the following months, and I'll provide an update here when they do!
Its only public money. Just raise taxes again. As no actual vehicles have been built, where do they get a price of £188 million when most plans will exist as computer drawings.
Not sure why it costs so much, but these things are often more complicated than a lot of people realise. I guess you'd need to ask Alstom/Hitachi for the exact details!
Because they've signed a contract to build the trains and the manufacturer will exploit every opportunity to raise the price quoted. This is standard practice for government procurement as companies know fine well that the British government (of either party) couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery.
The fact that Alstom and Hitachi who are building the trains are both desperate for work at the moment and begging for contracts to keep their factories open has apparently not been used to negotiate this amount down by a sensible amount.
Not sure where all this has come from as in all information on HS2 nothing has been said about platform heights, plus the Eurostars have a similiar problem that when travelling in the UK they use our high level platforms yet when stopping in European platforms that are lower than our they use a retractable step. Funy all this comes out now.
According to a quick google, HS2 platform heights will be 1115mm, which is similar to what crossrail uses in the core section, and also higher than the national standard of 915mm, which is why these concerns have been raised.
Apparently the Eurostar platforms on HS1 are set to a height of 760mm, which is still higher than the 550mm used in France.
In short: the whole thing's a complete mess, but you're right that it's curious the issue hasn't been raised on HS2 until now! As touched upon in the video, I think this is as a result of the phase 2 cancellation meaning increased exposure to the existing network, causing them to re-evaluate the situation, but as I also highlighted in the video, even the original plans would still have seen plenty of running on existing lines, so one could argue that this redesign was inevitable either way!
@@NetworkNewsUK Still curiouse why all of a sudden this isue has come forward as even if Phase two to Manchester had not been cancelled, these HS2 trains were still going to operate on the existing network to Liverpool and Scotland over Beatock and Shap
@@peterwilliamallen1063 yeah it definitely is strange. As I say I'd assume it's because they've re-evaluated the situation in the light of the phase 2 cancellation, but it is still possible (if not likely) that they would have decided this change needed to be made even if phase 2 were still being built!
Just another boring clown using AI to script up a load of nonsense.
We need to rebuild the British locomotive and rolling stock Industry rather than relying on foreign companies.
Worth scrapping the whole thing at this stage. Then hopefully in 20 years a new HS2 will be fully built without the ridiculously expensive and unrealistic 400kph design speed. I'm sure 250kph would be fine for the short distances involved.
Hard disagree. The 400km/h design speed was chosen after consultation with other European countries about their HSR systems, where they all said they wished they'd been built to a higher speed initially, as it makes any future speed increases impractically expensive. Additionally, the HS2 designers have confirmed that a lower top speed would make little to no difference to the alignment (and therefore the costs) as it has to take a very precise route to avoid demolitions.
Phase 1 civils are already mostly completed so that isn't getting cancelled any time soon, and we can't afford to wait another 20 years to build phase 2. The network is simply too overcrowded as it is, and that's before we get into the fact that rail is going to have to grow its ridership in the face of the climate crisis.
The best time to build HS2 was 20 years ago, the second best time is now!
The chickens are coming home to roost. HS2 was ill-conceived on faulty principles, some of which have been abandoned. One was that it would have continental size "fat" trains that wouldn't fit UK platforms, bridges and tunnels, so it had to be a segregated railway, thereby denying connections to various paces along the way. It would also have some UK size trains that would be "eye-wateringly expensive". Later, HS2 decided that UK size trains would be only 5% more expensive than off-the-shelf continental size trains, and that all HS2 trains would be UK size. So there was no need to design it as a segregated railway!
We are spending millions on making access to stations step-free. But we fail at the last hurdle: the difference in level between the train floor and the platform. Easily solved by making the train door into a ramp.
To be fair, having trains with the larger co continental loading gauge did make sense when looking at the full network, but started to fall apart as soon as the eastern leg was cancelled.
The strangest thing is that the platform height HS2 opted for (1115mm) is neither compatible with the British standard platform height (915mm) nor the European standard (which I think is 760mm) so it really is the worst of all worlds! Whilst I'm very much supportive of HS2 overall, this choice does seem quite baffling!